Paid Search In Q4: Everything You Need To Know To Stay Ahead
We stand firmly against gatekeeping at Axe & Kettle, and so we’ve created an overview of everything you need to know to get the most out of Paid Search in Q4.
Q4 is a pivotal time for paid search activity. With year-end budgets, holiday promotions, and increased consumer spending, businesses must capitalise on the surge in search volume. Whether you're promoting end-of-year sales, launching new products, or retargeting potential clients, Q4 provides a prime opportunity to optimise your campaigns and capture high-intent traffic in a highly competitive market.
The importance of staying ahead of trends in the digital landscape for Q4
Costs & efficiency — With the majority of accounts now running on auto-bidding, this has, to an extent, taken away advertiser control of costs, with CPCs across most industries on the rise YoY. It’s vital that campaign managers keep a close eye on performance, traffic cost (particularly Brand) and competition going into Q4, and fully understand the levers in place to keep CPCs as low as possible whilst not affecting performance.
Testing — Test. Test. And test again. What may have worked last year may not be your golden bullet this year, and with all the platform changes launched in 2024, there are more options than ever to test. Be ready with creative, bidding strategy and product feed optimisation tests to learn what’s resonating and working with your audience now. Starting yesterday.
Flexibility — Be flexible but cautious. Be ready to make changes but remember that these changes can take time and so don’t tie your account up in knots pulling too many levers at once. Be proactive with market trends and reactive to market changes, make your ads relevant, timely and ensure they convey your brand’s core values. This is what your competitors will be doing.
Emerging Trends
Utilising POAS bidding — Adopting profit rather than revenue as the focus for campaign success, particularly for Shopping ads, to ensure you’re directing your budget to the most valuable products and sales. Platforms such as profitmetrics.io help to ensure your campaigns are working with real time data, and enable you to activate POAS bidding within your campaigns, but if 3rd-party tools aren’t available then look at manually managing the product lists until Google rolls out its profit-focused bidding.
Creative options — From image extensions and optimised shopping feed imagery, to interactive AI-powered experiences and Google Lens integration, creative assets are now a vital part of paid search campaigns, and with more sophisticated AI-image generator tools within the platforms, more and more advertisers will be able to offer up such creatives that are on-brand and more engaging for users, such as 3D product spins, video highlight assets and animated image ads.
Manual bidding — With traffic costs rising, there’s an increasing number of advertisers reverting back to manual bidding, particularly within Brand, in order to test performance against lower CPC levels. Don’t be afraid to test this if relevant to the account.
Upcoming changes
Performance Max — This campaign type is constantly evolving and Google has been slowly rolling out more insights and data points for performance so advertisers have more visibility on what’s working and what’s not, as well as more tools for AI-generated imagery.
Quick snappy summary
Automation — Embrace what AI and automation has to offer both creatively and from a management perspective but ensure creative is on-brand and bidding strategies aren’t inflating costs.
Testing — Testing and A/B experiments are vital for learning what works and what doesn’t, as well as giving you the edge over competitors if you can identify what makes your audience engage.
3 quick takeaways for luxury brands in Q4
Optimisation — Feed and creative optimisation to ensure customers can find your products and that they stand out within Shopping ads.
Segmentation — Product segmentation (ideally based on POAS) to ensure you’re investing in the highest value products that provide the most profitable margin.
Focus — Don’t spread yourself too thin — focus on what works within your budget and do this well.
