6 Trends Shaping the Paid Search Landscape in 2024
Contributors
Sarah DeBruyckere, Ross Collins, Alex White, Simone Dargavell, Chasen Martinsen, Carrie Rosendahl
July 19th, 2024
Here are the six key trends driving today’s Paid Search landscape. Understanding and accounting for these trends and market factors can empower brands to maximize their Paid Search investment and secure healthy, scalable results in the long term.
1. 2024’s make-or-break moment? Get with Performance Max, or get left behind.
As Google continues to double down on Performance Max, putting all of its engineering resources and development efforts toward a total PMAX takeover, advertisers are being given an ultimatum: adopt, or lose market share.
2. Biggest change to watch for this year? Data signal & bidding.
Historically, advertisers used to be able to get away with bidding to clicks, or more top of funnel traffic as proxies for lower funnel conversion events. However, as Google faces signal loss due to privacy changes, and auction pressure increases in competition, advertisers that feed data for their entire funnel of conversion, or optimize on more than conversions alone, will see incremental benefit to the effectiveness of their campaigns.
3. Since we can’t get very far down this list without mentioning PMAX again, here’s another thing we’re keeping tabs on: further consolidation as DSA gets incorporated into PMAX.
Deprecating Phrase Match and DSA is the natural next step in the move toward a total PMAX takeover.
4. Don’t sleep on Bing PMAX.
Microsoft may have been late to the PMAX party, but we’re so glad they finally joined. Bing PMAX has offered our clients a smooth and consistent user experience and reliable spend distribution.
While Bing doesn’t currently provide reporting insights for search terms on its PMAX campaigns, we expect Bing to introduce this functionality sometime in the near future.
5. Hot take 🔥 Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) will have minimal impacts on Paid Brand Search.
Until Google figures how to monetize generative AI in a way that outpaces ad revenue from paid ads we anticipate impact on branded search queries to be minimal; and because the AI generative landscape is purposefully built to exclude paid interreference it’s unlikely they will crack the code on revenue from SGE soon.
That being said, nonbrand campaigns will likely see impact sooner if it’s not being felt already, more specifically for long-tail queries or customers researching product categories vs individual brands.
6. Although Google’s SGE may not impact search volume, increased use of AI chat programs like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Meta AI could be capturing searches that would otherwise drive to traditional SERP.
The true impact of AI on search volume remains to be seen, but users, particularly Gen Z, continue to explore new channels like social media for search and discovery - and AI is yet another tool for consumers to use in place of traditional search engines.
Comparing AI-Generated Search Results
We asked Perplexity, Meta, and Google about the top electric bike brands in 2024. This example is somewhat anecdotal, but it does illustrate some of the high-level similarities and differences between the three programs.
Similarities 🤝 Each AI-generated response includes a list of 5+ electric bike brands with a short 1-2 sentence description of each. There's strong brand overlap across each program, albeit with brands listed in different orders
Differences 🙅 In this example, Perplexity and Google display preview tiles for sources used to generate their results. Meta, on the other hand, simply offers a “View Results” button that opens into a pop-up window when selected. Also notable is that Meta’s response only references one source compared to the 3+ from Perplexity and Google.
Google Callouts 🚩 There are two important caveats to generating Google results in this format. First, you must enable AI Experiments, which can be done within Chrome settings or by clicking on the Search Labs icon in the top right-hand corner of the SERP. Second, the verbiage of a given search will influence how Google serves up results. For example, when we searched “Top electric bike brands in 2024” (the same language used in our Perplexity and Meta searches), Google served up a standard SERP. It wasn’t until we added “and why” that AI results were served.
Stay tuned for more Paid Search insights, best practices, and, occasionally, hot takes. In the meantime, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn.