What’s next for PPC?
Next year, Google Ads, formally known as AdWords, will reach its 20th birthday marking 2 decades of a platform that has changed the face of advertising online. Meanwhile, despite an overall slow down in its growth, Facebook Ads has continued to increase its reach by adding 9% to its user base in 2018. These figures now, of course, include ads served on Instagram, which was acquired by Facebook in April 2012.
Emarketer.com has predicted that by 2021 with this growth these two platforms combined will account for a massive 65% of all online advertising, making them key channels across the board for any business with aspirations in this space. With recent estimates putting advertiser numbers at around 4 million for Google Ads and 2 million on the Facebook self-serve platform, competition has never been fiercer, as brands compete for space whilst trying to maintain a healthy margin.
This growth presents an ever-increasing challenge for both independent professionals in the field and those who are charged internally with the day to day running of their company’s online marketing activities. Both advertising ecosystems are in a rapidly increasing state of evolution and as such the days of the “set up and sit back” approach to campaigns are long dead.
For marketers looking to keep up and keep their edge, there’s a vast amount of information online going into every detail and announcement about both platforms. The Google ads product blog and the Facebook business page have all of the latest announcements and activity, but it can be hard to unpick information around which updates you really need to know.
It can also be difficult given the sheer amount of information to go back and catch up on what you’ve missed.
Enter, our interactive Ad updates timeline…
There have been a few attempts to create an advertising timeline that illustrates ad updates effectively over the past few years, but we’ve felt that these were often incomplete, weren’t kept up to date and that they seemed to only cover the Google Ads platform.
We thought we could take this a step further so have created our own interactive Ad updates timeline, which contains all the main updates and changes going back to 2015. We’ve also equipped the timelines with filters, so if anyone is interested in, for example, looking at changes to Googles Display Network only, they can easily find this.
The timeline should be a great resource for anyone getting back into Ads on either platform after some time out or someone looking to reactivate legacy campaigns after some time on pause. We hope it will also be an easy-to-use resource for those PPC marketers who are new to the systems, who may be looking to get certified.
We’d love to know what you think, so head on over and view our Google Ads timeline and Facebook Ads timeline!
