With approximately 8.5 billion searches per day, it’s no secret that Google dominates the search engine space. With such a large volume of users and search queries, it makes sense for your business to advertise on Google Ads to capitalise on this, right? The reality is that this isn’t such a clear-cut answer in 2024, with many factors emphasising the importance of diversifying your advertising portfolio and avoiding the over-reliance of a single platform, whilst continuing to maintain some level of presence on Google Ads where possible.
As Google continues to dominate the search engine space and make Google Ads more accessible/automated, more businesses will begin running ads on the platform – this increase in competition results in rising bid costs, meaning you will be paying more money to get your ads clicked on. LocaliQ’s 2024 Search Advertising Benchmarks Report suggests that the average CPC (cost-per-click) has increased by 10% on average across all industries compared to last year, to $4.66, whilst the average CPL (cost-per-lead) has increased by 25%, to $66.69.
YoY Changes in Search Ads Metrics from 2023 to 2024. Source: WordStream
Many specific industries and sectors are impacted to a greater extent than others, for example the Finance & Insurance industry saw conversion rates decrease by 32.40% - this means that not only are you spending more on Google Ads to remain competitive, but you are getting less results for your money.
Machine learning algorithms have been a part of Google’s automated bidding strategies for a while now, and whilst it offers many benefits, it also feels like a partial reduction in control. This shift in control has continued into 2024 with the introduction of Performance Max campaigns. Whilst these uses of algorithms and AI can be fruitful for some businesses, it requires a reasonable level of volume (and therefore data) in order to be well-informed in the optimisations of your ads – this means that some smaller or more niche businesses with lower budgets or volume may struggle to out-perform competitors with much deeper pockets.
All of these factors can have a large impact on your business’s paid advertising performance, whilst Alphabet (Google’s parent company) continue to report record profits. In fact, Google were recently ruled to be violating antitrust laws, leading them to become an illegal monopoly – a ruling which could further impact advertisers.
The landmark monopoly ruling for Google highlights many potential concerns for advertisers on Google Ads. During the trial, it was revealed that Google paid companies, including Apple, more than $26bn in 2021 alone to remain the default option for search in Safari, which the judge deemed to be unfairly suppressing competition. With competing search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, proposing the banning of such agreements, Google’s monthly search volumes and general usage across mobile devices could drop significantly as a result.
Many valid questions of uncertainty are raised by these recent rulings – are advertisers going to continue paying these higher costs, despite Google’s userbase potentially dropping? Is my Google Ads account going to see further unexpected changes if Google are forced to sell/re-division their Ads platform? Although we cannot provide insights on these questions at this time, the truth is that businesses can no longer afford to rely solely on Google Ads.
With AI currently being such a hot topic in the digital world, it’s important to stay on top of how it may affect your business. Google have begun including AI Overviews to their search results pages, which provides an AI generated summary of your search:
Research conducted by seranking.com showed that more ads appeared below the AI Overview than above it, and that no ads appeared alongside the AI Overview 27% of the time. This is another factor of uncertainty for Google Ads as advertisers begin to wonder if AI Overviews are prioritised over ad placements and therefore ads show less, or perhaps if we will see costs increase as ad placements besides these overviews become more sought after.
The inclusion of AI Overviews directly within the search engine results page may see a shift towards more long-tail queries as users take a more conversational approach to their searches. This could see volume shifts away from shorter keywords.
User behaviour within Google search queries is already shifting, with an increase in zero-click searches – when someone performs a search on Google but doesn’t click on any of the results provided. Sparktoro’s recent study indicates that 58.5% of American’s searches end with zero clicks and it goes up to 59.7% for Europeans. Google’s introduction of AI Overviews may further increase this number as users have less need to go elsewhere for answers to their queries.
Source: SparkToro
With costs likely set to continue to rise, whilst simultaneously dealing with more competition yet less control than ever before, both the near and distant future of Google Ads remain very hard to predict and the recent antitrust ruling should serve as a wake-up call for advertisers to rethink their dependencies on Google for advertising. Diversifying your paid advertising strategy across to other platforms can not only help you reach new untapped users, but it also helps prevent your business from having all of its eggs in one basket, should any uncontrollable events occur which could lead to worsened Google Ads performance.
This level of unpredictability and the upwards trend of increasing costs is why diversifying ad spend across multiple platforms is crucial for sustainable growth. Usage and experimentation of alternative advertising platforms can offer your business access to different audiences, new ideas fostered from different creative styles, more cost-effective performance and more.
Google Search results have long evolved beyond the point of just providing 10 blue links per page and, most importantly, so has technology and user behaviour. Services such as Google Lens allows users to use their smartphone camera to essentially bypass the traditional keyword-based search experience. Social media platforms such as TikTok are now becoming pivotal in how users search for information, with 41% of American users using TikTok as a search engine. How and where users perform their search queries is changing and Google Search is no longer the de facto choice for everyone.
Source: Adobe
These changing user behaviours present a great opportunity for businesses to attempt to diversify their advertising portfolio in order to maintain sustainable growth. By adopting a land-and-expand strategy, you can begin advertising on a new platform and increase your presence until you see results. If it doesn’t look sustainable or suitable for your marketing needs then you can simply try out another platform – diversification means that you aren’t tied to or over reliant on one specific platform!
There is a plethora of advertising platforms in existence, each claiming a unique offering when compared to the next. Identifying new platforms to trial may seem overwhelming, but it’s an exciting opportunity to reach new users and remove your reliance on one specific platform. You should consider your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and where they are likely to be, what they interact with, how they consume and search for content. Think about your current advertising platforms/strategies, where is it working, where isn’t it working?
Platforms such as Microsoft Advertising provide extremely similar offerings to Google Ads, yet due to its primary focus on its Bing search engine (which has much lower volume and therefore competition compared to Google), it may allow your business to reach similar users at a cheaper cost.
Social media ads on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook etc allow you to get creative with your targeting by creating interest-based audiences, whilst platforms such as LinkedIn Ads allow you to specify criteria to target specific professionals or companies by industry, job titles, etc.
Source: Sprinklr
These are just a small handful of alternative platforms you can trial, but many more options exist such as Amazon Ads, eBay Ads, Pinterest, etc. You should experiment with platforms to gauge what works best for your business and resonates best with your audience. The important factor is that you are expanding beyond just Google Ads, and this diversification could result in lowering your cost per lead and reducing your risk of having a revenue stream impacted by unforeseen circumstances.
Your paid advertising efforts may be in vain if your website is not setup in a way that aligns with your marketing objectives. The basics should be covered, such as ensuring that the landing page a user clicks on is relevant to the ad copy they would have seen – if you’re advertising a specific product range but then send users to your contact page, then you’re creating unnecessary friction which is potentially reducing your conversions and wasting budget. Alongside this, you should consider other factors such as your mobile site experience, page load times etc. You are typically charged whenever a user clicks on your ad, so providing a poor user experience which results in high bounce rates will eat into your budget.
The technologies you use on your site can also play a large role in user journeys and conversion rate optimisation. AI driven chatbots, for example, provide an interactive method for your users to specify what they are looking for and to then be pointed in the correct direction. Take a look at our award-winning case study to see how we used HubSpot chatbots to increase conversion rate by 155% whilst gathering additional information on existing contacts to personalise their future nurture flows.
To be clear, Google is (and will likely remain) the largest search engine in the world. The platform is well-established and many businesses see a large share of their revenue come from it. We are not suggesting you completely drop Google Ads, instead we are encouraging you to supplement it with other platforms and to experiment to see if you can reduce your risks as a business whilst potentially reducing your costs.
Google Ads regularly sees new products and updates, with one of the most recent being Performance Max campaigns. You should consider trialling the implementation of this campaign type to enhance your account, as it can place your ads across many of Google’s products (YouTube, Gmail, Search, etc) at a typically lower cost than with Search campaigns.
Whether it be within Google Ads or a new platform, continuous testing and refinement is crucial. What works for one business may not work for another. And what used to work might stop working as the landscape and competition evolve. Run tests, make comparisons and draw conclusions to find what is most successful and meets your marketing objectives.
Your advertising budget doesn’t have to be locked into one specific platform. If you have extra budget which can be allocated to your advertising efforts, then great, but try allocating a portion of your budget into trialling alternative platforms to gauge performance. Start small and scale this based upon your results and observations – if you have an overall advertising budget of £2k/month, try allocating £600 of this monthly budget to a new platform. The caveat to this is that you don’t want to spread your budgets too thin or you won’t be able to generate enough volume or pacing to get results.
The cost effectiveness of your ads decides upon their viability and profitability. One important area of optimisation, as we’ve already touched upon, is your landing pages. On top of optimising the user experience, you should ensure that your landing page maintains relevance to your ad copy. On keyword-based platforms such as Microsoft and Google Ads, including your keywords within the landing page will contribute towards your ad rank, as it shows relevancy to the user's search query, and can result in reduced bid costs.
Varying campaign types, ad formats and setup choices can contribute to your paid advertising performance and should be experimented with. For example, video-based advertising typically offers cheaper costs compared to standard keyword-based campaigns, and LinkedIn campaigns' chargeable actions can vary based upon objective/goals/bidding strategy.
You should regularly review your campaigns to ensure the audience and intent is correct. Many platforms such as LinkedIn Ads offer the tools to analyse users who engaged with your ads, allowing you to granularly analyse their demographics by job title, industry etc. This level of insight can inform you on where optimisations can be made to avoid wasted budget.
Where possible, look to incorporate any form of personalisation into your ads. For example, both Microsoft and Google Ads allow for personalisation such as dynamically inserting the user’s town/city in the ad copy. In-depth user information found within your CRM (such as HubSpot) can be used to create re-targeting lists, allowing you to advertise to specific segments based upon their previous actions.
Data from US-based LocaliQ campaigns showing the difference in costs per click between Google and Microsoft from 2022-2024. Source: WordStream
Paid advertising should not be seen as a quick endeavour and one-size certainly does not fit all. Working with an expert team who can tailor your paid activity to your marketing objectives and help to diversify your portfolio of advertising platforms can be pivotal to your success.
Continuous monitoring and optimisations are a necessity and often an overlooked piece of the puzzle, and working with paid advertising experts can bring your campaigns to the next level by implementing cross-platform strategies to help you avoid an over-reliance on one single platform.
Spending your budget within a single platform to generate the revenue your business needs is not recommended, especially in a world where the digital landscape can change overnight. Whilst we still believe Google Ads will remain a valuable platform for many years to come, diversification will provide a safety net and facilitate sustainable growth, a gameplan to combat rising costs, and open new avenues for customer engagement and lead generation – when done right.
Innovation Visual are experts in multi-platform campaigns, helping businesses manage and optimise successful and profitable campaigns across various platforms including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and more.
As Google Ads costs increase for many industries, combined with the uncertainty brought upon Google by their recent legal headlines, working with an experienced team can help you get the most out of each advertising platform you operate on as well as discovering new opportunities for your business.
To find out more about how we can work with you to build a customised paid advertising strategy for sustainable growth, contact our team today.