2016 is right around the corner. Can you believe it? There were so many changes this past year that it’s hard to keep track. But we’ll give it a shot. Here are some of the highlights:
Know Your Audience
This year, Google gave us more control on developing our audiences in the display network with audience insights. However, Googles most exciting release was customer match. Now you can target existing customers using their email addresses. Also, Google gave us tools to make it easier to share our remarketing lists and analytics data within a manager account. Google wasn’t the only one dishing out new goodies this year. Bing stepped up their game when they joined forces with adMarketplace. Shortly after, Bing announced the release of remarketing ads on their platform. Yahoo Gemini also released their new feature of custom audience targeting. This feature uses first party data to target native ads across devices. Now you can follow your customers pretty much everywhere on the web.
Let’s Go Shopping
Do people even go shopping anymore? These days you can order pretty much everything from the convenience of you couch, even groceries. More than ever its important for retailers to understand consumers. 2015 started with Google releasing their new trusted stores to help consumers find legit places to shop. Google was all about micro-moments this year and bring value to brick and mortar stores by driving traffic to the stores. This fall, Google released new shopping ad features including automated bidding, automated extensions, and click share. Additionally, Google released shopping insights tool and shopping assortment report to help understand what products are in demand now. Bing released shopping campaigns this year and in October they released new features such as expanding into mobile. Yahoo just released product ads in November to get in on the action.
App Advertising
There is no doubt that phones have basically become an extension of us. We take them everywhere and use them all the time. With more companies developing more and more apps, advertising for apps is becoming a bigger market. In fact, this year Adwords and Bing Ads released their own apps to help you manage accounts on the go. This year Google released search ads on Google Play, expanded their app promotions to the Display network, and universal app campaigns. Google also made app ads interactive and brought full screen ads to our phones this year. Bing added app extensions and Yahoo released Video ads for app marketers.
There’s no doubt 2015 was full of innovations in the PPC industry, but 2016 could potentially be even better. What do you think 2016 will bring to the table? Share with us in the comments!
