In 2021, PPC professionals navigated changes in keyword match types and automated bidding, scratched their heads at the prospect of a future without third-party cookies and navigated their role in an increasingly automated industry.

Prompted by the vision that platforms, like Google, have for their services as well as increased concern over user privacy, these changes underscored adaptability as one of the traits that define successful marketers. Below, we’ve summarized the most impactful changes, announcements and developments that shaped PPC this past year and, in all likelihood, will continue to influence the years ahead as well.

Farewell, broad match modified keywords

In Q1 2021, Google announced a significant change to how it treats phrase match keywords by expanding it to include broad match modifier traffic (BMM).

“Broad match now looks at additional signals in your account to deliver more relevant searches,” Google also announced. These signals include landing pages and keywords in your ad group.

The PPC community’s reaction to this news was mixed: “With the recent changes that Google has made, it seems like a bit of a (very) thinly veiled attempt to take back control from advertisers,” said Amy Bishop, owner of Cultivative, “You can’t optimize against what you can’t see, and you certainly can’t optimize against controls that have been taken away.”

Kirk Williams, owner of ZATO Marketing, had a different opinion: “This is simply a logical progression in [Google’s] ever-changing match type behavior that mirrors changes in other areas, pointing towards a world in which Google uses the millions of signals under its control to make auction time decisions for which the limited, human advertiser is unable to make as technology and machine learning bidding solutions progress.” 

In Q2 2021, the final nail in BMM’s coffin was hammered in when the platform announced a deprecation date for BMM keywords. To put an end to the saga (for now), Google also made it so that phrase match or broad match keywords that are identical to a query are now always preferred as long as they are eligible to match.

And, a few months after Google’s initial announcement, Microsoft Advertising said it would also expand phrase match to include BMM traffic.

Bundled bid strategies replaced standalone options

Google updated its Smart Bidding in April 2021, bundling the Target CPA (tCPA) and Target ROAS (tROAS) strategies with the Maximize Conversions and Maximize Conversion Value bid strategies.

Three months later, the company removed standalone Maximize conversions and Maximize conversion value bid strategies for search campaigns. Shortly after that, Google removed the old tCPA and tROAS options from standard campaigns, effectively completing the bundling of these bid strategies.

Microsoft Advertising made an important change in this area as well: Beginning in March 2021, it migrated all search, shopping and Dynamic Search Ads campaigns without an automated bidding strategy in place over to Enhanced CPC.

FLoC was heavily debated, but not rolled out

With the deprecation of third-party cookies slated for 2022 (which Google later pushed back to the latter half of 2023), it wasn’t much of a surprise when Google first announced that it was testing an alternative targeting technology in October 2020. Known as Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), the proposal was opened for advertiser testing in Q2 2021.

Related: FLoC is coming — Here’s what we know so far

Despite being billed as more privacy-friendly for users, there were widespread concerns about techniques such as fingerprinting, which could be used to reverse engineer individuals from the cohort. The Electronic Frontier Foundation even published an article opposing the proposal. Marketers also shared concerns that Google was being opportunistic and using the deprecation of third-party cookies to create a “walled garden” for itself.

Chrome’s competitors have no plans to adopt FLoC, which will limit its functionality. There was even a proposal by WordPress to block FLoC by default. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority also engaged Google about the proposal and the search company agreed not to favor its own products or access personal user data.

To keep the industry updated about its progress with FLoC, Google published a Privacy Sandbox timeline. As of December 2021, FLoC is scheduled to undergo testing from Q1 to Q3 2022, with adoption slated for Q4 of that year.

Related: FLoC and the future of audiences: Understanding the limits and capabilities of FLoC, FLEDGE and TURTLEDOVE

Google Ads gave PPC professionals a lot to adapt to

In addition to the updates mentioned above (and below), Google Ads made a number of other impactful announcements in 2021.

One of the most noteworthy changes was that responsive search ads (RSAs) became the default ad type for Search campaigns. Google later followed that news with a sunset date for expanded text ads (ETAs), which will become unavailable beginning in July 2022. As it did with the phrase match change, Microsoft Advertising also announced that it would be deprecating ETAs starting on June 30, 2022.

This was also the year that Performance Max campaigns, an automated campaign type that runs across all Google ad inventory, became available to all advertisers. Google bundled that news (as it seems to have done quite frequently in 2021) with another announcement: Smart Shopping and Local campaigns would be “upgraded” to Performance Max in 2022.

Performance Max campaigns are also part of the Google Ads Insights Page, which shows currently trending searches, auction insights and interest predictions tailored to the account. In November 2021, the company expanded on the Insights page by adding four features: consumer interest insights, audience insights, change history insights and auction insights, and demand forecasts.

In April 2021, instant match rates became available for Customer Match, which allows advertisers to use their first-party data to remarket to customers on Google Search, Shopping, Gmail and YouTube. Then, in November 2021, the platform rolled out some of Customer Match’s features to all policy-compliant advertisers, enabling them to observe their lists to see how well they perform against the general audience, among other capabilities.

Advertisers gained access to some new data when Google announced that it would show historical data for queries that received impressions but no clicks in the search terms report for Search and Dynamic Search Ads campaigns. This didn’t reverse the September 2020 change that initially limited search terms reporting, as the data is still only for “terms that were searched by a significant number of users,” but the data could reveal what’s failing to attract the right audience. If you haven’t exported your historical query data, make sure to do so before February 1, 2022 — that’s when Google plans to remove historical query data collected prior to September 1, 2020, from the search terms report.

In terms of other fresh capabilities and updates, Google Ads ditched campaign drafts in an updated experiments page, which eliminated a clunky part of the workflow for testing. There was also a new budget report, which shows a monthly spend forecast that advertisers can use to understand how editing their budget can affect the campaign’s spending limit.

The Google Partner Program changes that were initially slated to go into effect in June 2020 were pushed back to February 2022 due to the ongoing effects of the pandemic. In addition to the postponement, Google revisited some of the changes, namely enabling Partners to either dismiss or apply recommendations to achieve a 70% optimization score and keeping the 90-day spend threshold at $10,000 (instead of the proposed $20,000 every 90 days). After the delay announcement, Partners that already met the 2022 requirements before the deadline requested to receive their new badges — Google consented.

The company also began testing a new three-strikes program for accounts that repeatedly violate ad policies. The system starts with a warning and no penalties for an initial violation. From there, each violation has an increasingly stringent penalty until the account is finally suspended. PPC professionals were largely in agreement with the program, though they were very skeptical about policy application due to the frequency of incorrectly flagged ads.

Microsoft Advertising made waves of its own

One prominent pattern we observed this year was Microsoft’s investment in industry-specific ad products: it released features specifically for automotive, tour and leisure, credit card and health insurance businesses.

The company also integrated Microsoft Clarity, its free tool to help site owners better understand visitor behavior, with Microsoft Advertising, which may help marketers analyze post-click behavior to identify roadblocks on the path to conversion.

Advertisers in the U.S. might also be happy to know that Microsoft rolled out support for Spanish language ads this year as well.

Vertical-specific ad updates

Shopping. Since Google and Bing launched organic Shopping results, many of their commerce-related product offerings have been designed to serve both advertisers and non-advertisers. One running theme in 2021 was the proliferation of shopping integrations, which are typically plugin-type solutions that enable retailers to get their product listings into organic results or run paid ads directly from their CMS, making it easier for SMBs that don’t work with an agency.

Google rolled out Shopping integrations for Shopify, PrestaShop, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, GoDaddy and Square. Microsoft Bing also launched an integration for retailers on Shopify.

Related: How to identify your products for Google

Local. At its annual Marketing Livestream event, Google announced a number of new local campaign ad formats, including:

• Auto Suggest ads, which show ads based on the searcher’s location. The example Google gave for this was that if you search for “oil change” in Maps, Google might show an ad for an auto garage that is near your current location.
• Navigational ads, which are shown when a person is en route to a destination using Maps driving directions.
• Similar Places ads (shown below), which can show when a user searches for a specific business that is closed at the time of the search.

In addition, the company also launched an open beta for US-based advertisers to expand store pickup options by adding a “pickup later” label to their local inventory ads.

Yelp also broke new ground by launching Yelp Audiences, its first offering that enables both location-based and non-location-based advertisers to reach Yelp users across the web, based on their Yelp search activity.

Video and image. YouTube ad creation became simpler for SMBs this year — in June, the company announced a new workflow, enabling advertisers to launch a campaign by adding a video, selecting the audiences they want to reach and designating a budget.

Google also added the ability for brands to show browsable product images below their video ads for campaigns that have “Product and brand consideration” or “Brand awareness and reach” set as the goal. Prior to this update, Video action campaigns were the only campaign type that could be linked to product feeds from Google Merchant Center.

In Q3 2021, YouTube ads were the breakout star of Google’s earnings report, bringing in $7.2 billion in revenue, an increase of 43% quarter-over-quarter. With that kind of success, the company may decide to release more video-oriented features and products for advertisers in 2022.

In other video advertising news, Google transitioned to parallel tracking for Video ads on April 30. The company also announced that TrueView for action campaigns is set to be transitioned into Video action campaigns beginning in early 2022.

And, Microsoft Advertising rolled out Video Extensions, which can be used to highlight a video right in the search results. Google rolled out image extensions for desktop devices as well.

Safety for advertisers and users

With privacy constantly making headlines over the last year, Instagram disabled interest and activity-based targeting of underage users in August 2021. At about the same, Google made a similar move, blocking targeting based on age, gender or interests of users under 18 years old.

Brand safety continued to be a concern for advertisers and platforms responded by introducing exclusion controls: Facebook expanded its test of topic exclusion controls, claiming that advertisers were able to avoid appearing next to excluded categories 94-99% of the time. And, Google began rolling out dynamic exclusion lists around April 2021.

Advertising and law

Google was at the center of a number of accusations and regulatory predicaments this year, which is typical in just about any given year. However, this year started out with an event unlike any other — the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A week after the attack, Google paused all political ads through to the inauguration. Interestingly, five months later, researchers from the University of Michigan School of Information published a study that found that Google serves 48% of all ad traffic on “fake” news sites.

Related: Halting campaigns shouldn’t be your only brand safety precaution

For ads served in India and Italy, Google passed on digital service taxes (levied on it by regulatory entities) to advertisers. It was already doing this to advertisers for ads served in Austria, Turkey, the UK, France and Spain. In March, Maryland became the first state to impose a tax on digital advertising — legislatures in other states, like New York, Connecticut, Washington, West Virginia, Montana, Nebraska and the District of Columbia are also considering imposing their own taxes on digitals ads or the sale of data. It’s not clear how this will pan out domestically, but advertisers should look to their European counterparts to learn how to deal with it (if the time comes).

In June, Google agreed to adjust its ad technology to provide more flexibility and transparency as well as improve the way its Ad Manager services works with rival ad servers and sales platforms, in addition to paying a $268 million fine to French regulators — the French Competition Authority claimed that Google Ad Manager provided AdX (where publishers sell space to advertisers in real-time) with exclusive data to improve its own chances.

And, details from “Jedi Blue,” an alleged arrangement between Facebook and Google in which the latter would charge the former lower fees and give Facebook other advantages in header bidding auctions in exchange for the social media platform’s support on Google’s header bidding alternative, were made public throughout the year.

The collusion aspect may carry heavy consequences for both entities, but it will be a long time before there’s a conclusion to this story. When asked about Jedi Blue, the marketers that spoke to us seemed indifferent, citing the lack of viable Google alternatives for advertising.

Looking ahead to 2022

We’re certain to hear more about FLoC and the deprecation of third-party cookies as we make our way through 2022 — timelines may shift as they have in years passed. While third-party cookies aren’t going away until 2023, ETAs will be sunsetted in July 2022, so advertisers should test out RSAs before they have no choice but to use them.

On February 1, 2022, Google will remove historical query data collected prior to September 1, 2020, so advertisers should export that data to reference later before that deadline. Smart Shopping and Local campaigns are also changing sometime in 2022 — they’ll be rolled into Performance Max campaigns.

And, agencies participating in the Google Partner Program should also mark their calendars for February 2022, when the program’s requirements are set to change.

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Google, over the past few months, has been rolling out new icons within the Google Ads console. Those who spend their days inside the ad console are taking notice of the new icons.

Screenshot. Here is a screenshot of the new Google Ads navigational icons from Brett Bodofsky on Twitter:

Some saw these earlier. Some have said they saw these icons begin to show up months ago, so we assume Google is now more widely rolling the new icons out now.

Reaction. The reaction to the change of icons is not all positive but you’d expect that when Google makes any sort of change to any of its interfaces. ere are some of the responses to the new icons:

Why we care. This is not a huge change from the Google Ads team but it is a change that some PPC experts are taking notice of. Don’t be distracted by the change, the core functionality has not changed in Google Ads, this is just a user interface change that you might take some time to get use to.

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Google Ads is rolling out a new user interface for custom columns as well as new metrics, a Google spokesperson has confirmed to Search Engine Land. “The update will be rolling out to all advertisers in the next few weeks,” a Google spokesperson said.

Tip of the hat to PPCGreg on Twitter for first bringing this to our attention.

Why we care. Custom columns add flexibility by enabling advertisers to compare the metrics that are most important for their particular needs. The new metrics make this feature even more useful by, for example, enabling advertisers to monitor their Search impression share alongside other campaign metrics.

The new metrics coming to custom columns. With this update, the following metrics will be available for custom columns:

• Spreadsheet functions.
• Calculate/compare metrics across date ranges (example).
• Non-metric columns (like Campaign name or Budget).
• Reference other custom columns.
• Search, Click and Display impression share.
• Three phone call metrics, and others.

What Google said. “We’ve updated custom columns to make it more flexible for advertisers to use,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land, “With the new UI, advertisers can more easily see their data and work with it to derive new insights by comparing different metrics. We’ve also added additional features based on advertiser feedback. We’re looking forward to bringing these new features to all advertisers in the next few weeks.”

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Advertisers have reported a new Asset Library within Google Ads. “Asset Library, as it exists in Ads Creative Studio, is coming into Google Ads,” a Google spokesperson confirmed to Search Engine Land.

Tip of the hat to Brett Bodofsky for first bringing this to our attention.

Why we care

The Asset Library may enable advertisers to improve their workflows. For example, you could upload an image and then reuse that image in different campaigns. Additionally, it can be used to make any Standard Rich Media creative dynamic by switching out images or videos while the campaign is live. The Asset Library can also be used to host dynamic assets and reference them from within your dynamic feed.

More about the news

• The Asset Library is currently in closed beta; Google has not announced when it will roll out to more advertisers.
• The Asset Library will display any existing image assets the advertiser has in their account. From this view, advertisers can choose to search among existing assets or create new assets. 
• The Asset Library was first introduced with the launch of Ads Creative Studio, which unifies tools previously found across YouTube, Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager 360, in June 2021.

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Google Ads will begin rolling out image extensions to desktop devices in the coming weeks, the company announced Tuesday. This update also applies to dynamic image extensions.

Why we care. Image extensions may help make your ads more visually appealing, which might encourage visitors to click on them. In a few weeks, they will also be available on desktop, enabling you to show relevant images to users whether they’re at home or on the go.

If you’re already running image extensions on mobile, they’ll automatically show on desktop devices as this update rolls out, so make sure to monitor performance so that you can assess whether this is something that’s worthwhile for your brand.

Image extensions on desktop. Prior to this update, image extensions only showed on mobile devices. For advertisers that are already using image extensions, their ads will automatically show with image extensions on desktop devices as this update rolls out.

Desktop device performance can be broken out by segmenting your data by “Device.”

Dynamic image extensions are also expanding. This update also brings dynamic image extensions, which automatically select the most relevant image from your ad’s landing page, to desktop devices. In addition, dynamic image extensions are also now available for all languages.

Stock image library. Google has also added a free, searchable library of stock images to help advertisers source visuals. To access the library, select “Stock Images” when you’re asked to choose an image for your image extension. Stock images can be cropped to a square or landscape format from directly within Google Ads before adding it to your image extension.

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Beginning this month, advertisers can serve text ads from Spanish ad groups in the U.S. on all devices and publishers, Microsoft Advertising announced Tuesday. The company also announced updates to the Microsoft Audience Network, including support for Video Ads and Feed Ads in the Audience Network Planner and the ability to choose between CPC or CPM pricing.

Why we care. There is a large demographic of Spanish speakers in the United States. Being able to deliver your messaging in the right language and target those users may help you expand your reach, which could mean more conversions.

Additionally, support for Video and Feed Ads in the Audience Network Planner can help you get a better overview of your potential audience while planning your campaigns across more ad formats. And, CPM pricing is a nice option to have for advertisers that are looking to increase their reach and brand awareness.

Spanish language ads. Any campaign that has Spanish selected as the language can now serve in the United States. Spanish language ads serve when the user self-identifies as Spanish-speaking or the query is in Spanish.

Microsoft offered the following recommendations for advertisers just starting out with Spanish language ads:

• Separate your Spanish and English ad copies into different ad groups and choose the corresponding language at the ad group level.
• Create Spanish extensions for your Spanish ad group.
• Bid boost for your Spanish ad groups, or have a higher base bid, so that your Spanish ad can be shown over your English ad.

For branded campaigns, Microsoft recommends keeping the same keywords in both ad groups. For non-branded campaigns, the company recommended choosing the appropropriate keywords for each corresponding ad group. All other settings (automated bidding, targeting, etc.) should be kept the same.

Audience Network Planner extends support to Video and Feed Ads. In addition to Image Ads, the Audience Network Planner now supports Video Ads and Feed Ads as well.

CPM pricing is now available. First announced in October, advertisers on the Microsoft Audience Network can now specify a maximum amount they’re willing to pay per 1,000 impressions (CPM). CPC pricing remains available, should you want to switch between the two bidding strategies.

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