We started off 2017 with some expert predictions about what the new year will have in store for PPC. But all the buzz about trends and innovations can be pretty overwhelming without actionable steps to not just prepare for 2017, but stay ahead of the PPC curve.

In their webinar on PPC predictions for 2017 , our very own Mike McEuen teamed up with JD Prater and Matt Umbro of Hanapin Marketing to talk about what’s coming down the pipeline for Search, Social, and Ad Tech and what you can do to stay ahead. We pulled out their most actionable tips, so you can get to work (after all, 2017 is already rolling right along…):

2017 Search Predictions

1. Take full advantage of ad extensions for more real estate and organic-looking results. The more opportunities you can find to get users to interact with your ad, the better! Check out this example of a ski boot search to see what we’re talking about:

2. Explore creating dynamic Google Display Network ads and native ads. The tools available to create responsive ads continue to reduce the barrier to entry for marketers. All you need is a short headline, description, and some images to upload and you’re off to the races. Google will take care of resizing your ad to fit the page on which it will be served.

3. Test audience targeting in Search , for instance bidding higher for a specific age range or gender that might be best served by your product. Matt Umbro encourages PPC professionals to think past keywords and to really think holistically about audiences to stay ahead of the game.

2017 Social Predictions

1. Social community managers need to learn how to sponsor their best content against the right audience . This means getting a really good handle on the paid side of their networks, which not all community managers have necessarily needed to do until now. There are lots of great training resources out there, so if you’re not a paid social expert, take some time this year to get up to speed.

2. Invest in social listening, monitoring, and analytics tools to increase and prove social ROI . 61% of social marketers see measuring ROI as a challenge, and if you can’t measure how your social investments are doing, you’ll be stuck in that challenging spot for another long year.

3. Experiment with new mediums such as bots and live video . Doing so now will allow you to take advantage of the lower competition costs, greater reach, and higher engagement rates than standard ad units.

2017 AdTech Predictions

1. Think of organizing your campaign and ad sets into campaigns by objective, across networks , as opposed to taking a network-centric approach to optimization. Find a true multi-channel tool that will allow you to create this kind of management structure, and valuable, high-level view of your PPC activity.

2. Align your re-marketing campaigns into sequences with different ad creative triggered by last visit, conversion step, or lead status. Check out this handy graphic for some examples:

3. Either through scripts or 3rd party solutions, PPC marketers should automate their most mundane tasks -- such as budget pacing, pausing underperforming keywords/ads/ad groups/sets -- instead focusing their time on budget allocation, campaign strategy, audience targeting, and copy testing.

We’re biased here, but with Automate , our 2700+ users saved over 144 weeks of full-time man hours in 2016! Think of what you and your team could do with that kind of freed up time.

4. For B2B organizations, standing up an attribution model is key to determining if ad performance at the network, campaign, and ad level are having an impact on actual revenue . It’s time to optimize past cost per conversions (lead) and instead make optimization decisions based on return on ad spend (ROAS). Platforms like Bizible , and ad tech companies who are opening their APIs are great places to turn to get this going.

Want to go even deeper? View the full webinar recording or click through the SlideShare below to get the full presentation!

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