The significantly increased presence of shopping ads in the last 12 months has also led to a more auction-driven functioning of the AdWords system, which ultimately can only make Google happy due to rising click costs. For most of our e-commerce customers, we have seen a shift in click costs and conversions away from classic search text ads and towards shopping ads of well over 50%. However, the adjustment screws for shopping campaigns in terms of optimization are manageable. A lot of it initially takes place in the product feed itself. However, the ad positions are largely controlled by the bids. This means that AdWords optimization is losing relevance. In addition, according to RKG, Google is testing a new type of shopping ad based on search queries for its own brand in order to roll out the shopping ads, which have more clicks than classic text ads, even further.
Google's main focus is on profit optimization
In recent years in particular, it has become increasingly clear that Google is under extreme pressure to satisfy shareholders with ever better company figures. At some point, this will be difficult to achieve if you look at the profit development of the last few years:
statista google profit
The AdWords system is Google's cash cow and Google's profits are largely due to AdWords revenue. In my opinion, the jump from 2012 to 2013 is also due to the ad space within the SERPs becoming much more uganda phone number data visible thanks to ad extensions and shopping ads (formerly PLA) . Organic search results have been almost pushed out of the above-the-fold area for some search queries . In short, I think you can say that many of the changes that Google has introduced in AdWords, especially in the last three years, were implemented primarily to improve the company's figures. And that is legitimate.
Nevertheless, I view the development away from AdWords optimization towards a keyword-independent pure auction process as critical, especially for smaller e-commerce companies. You can read more about this development in this article at SearchEngineWatch :
In summary, there are many changes happening in the performance marketing world that point to the decline in importance of the keyword buy. While keyword search is still a multi-billion dollar industry, its influence is beginning to erode at the hands of a number of new channels and techniques. For all of us in the search community, this should serve as both a wake-up call and an opportunity to broaden our skills. Search marketers have always been at the forefront of data-driven performance marketing …there's no reason that can't continue in this new and exciting world.
If you want to continue to pursue an ROI-based approach, you should distribute the PPC budget across different channels. In the short tail, the leverage through AdWords optimization alone is already very small and if you want to continue to target such competitive keywords, you should focus more on landing page optimization in order to improve conversion rates. A long tail strategy still makes sense via AdWords.