State of PPC Global Report 2024 by PPCsurvey talks about concerns about the search market and it was revealed that AI is going to be the top priority for the search market this year. AI has been used in Google ads for quite some time now. First, it was used for keywords, then automatic bidding and now it is being used for placing automotive creatives. The top goal of 72% marketers in 2024 is to achieve large growth and the aim to increase their ad spend efficiently to target ROAS and CPA. Marketers want to reduce their wasted spend, prioritize the safety of consumers and optimize the performance other than the ad accounts. One in five marketers say that they are not able to increase their ad budget so they have to efficiently make the best out of their existing budget.

On the other hand, advertising budgets are increasing and 12 out of 23 campaigns are expecting an increase in their ad budgets on Google Ads and Meta Platforms. 63% of the experts have chosen Google’s Performance Max Campaign for increased budget issuance. Investing in this campaign is expected to generate more profit than any other campaigns under Google and Meta. Despite the adoption of Performance Max Campaign, a lot of marketers cannot reach the requirements needed to achieve the campaign in full form like assets that are needed for YouTube and some other platforms. Google knows about this issue and that’s why it is trying to use Generative AI in the Performance Max Campaign to create assets for the marketers.

Report shows that, over the past year, trust in ad platforms has taken a hit, with LinkedIn being the sole exception, boasting a net positive sentiment. Google, Twitter, and Meta witnessed notable declines in trust percentages at 54%, 51%, and 42% respectively. These platforms encountered hurdles like prioritizing automation over user control, reputation damage, unwanted content proliferation, and general unreliability.

There has also been a change in bidding as marketers are now using automated bidding but manual bidding is also seen. Bidding isn’t used for prominent strategies and is just being used for Target Impressions. A new feature called Demand Gen Feature has also been introduced but it still isn’t as popular as exact match. This is because the exact match feature is much more advantageous for advertisers than the new feature that is mostly being used by advertisers that need to distribute ads other than Google Search.

Many PPC experts admit that campaigning has become harder since the last 2 years, mostly because of practitioners and automated campaigns like Performance Max. The platforms where the ads are used are also being deemed untrustworthy. Only LinkedIn has some positive impressions on advertisers. Google, Twitter and Meta have seen the decline in trust rate.

Overall, the ad spend is expected to increase by 8.2% in 2024 and 50% of this global advertising spend will go to Alphabet (Google, YouTube), Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Amazon, Alibaba and ByteDance (TikTok, Douyin).