2020 will be known as the year when tables turned. This is a time of crisis. We all know it, and we’re all fed up with it. 

However, crises always bring renewed opportunities etched onto the flip side. 

It’s up to the savvy and the resourceful to find these valuable unseen opportunities, while the foolish and the desperate sit complaining by the wayside. 

Case in point, Google AdWords: 

A revolutionary ad network that had recently grown past the point of saturation – it’s now flourishing with exciting opportunities that you should watch carefully, and seize confidently. It could provide some real leverage to your business.

Read through the following sections for some context and clarification. 

Google AdWords and the contextual ads revolution that created our digital world 

It’s now 2020, and Google Ads have grown so successful, they remain the largest source of revenue for one of the world’s largest companies – Alphabet, Inc. (the parent company to Google and its diverse subsidiaries.)

This is no fluke, and the numbers have been consistently rising over the years; attesting to the ubiquity, relevance and increasing potential of PPC advertising.

(source: abc.xyz)

Originally called “targeted advertisements”, contextual ads revolutionized modern marketing in a number of ways. Google Ads made advertising accessible to the masses. It allowed setting up meticulously targeted, data-driven campaigns that proved extremely effective.

Traditional advertising used to be a painful, high-stakes process that involved multitudes of different professionals, intense background research, heavy guesswork, and long-term planning. 

It was not something lay people – or even small-to-medium businesses – could easily dabble with. 

Google set out to break this mold by introducing AdWords. It made the entire advertising process incredibly simpler, manageable, accessible, and significantly more precise.

Additionally, Google Ads created a highly effective ecosystem that allows advertisers to reach out directly to their target audience – with uncanny accuracy, speed, and control.

Their seeds of innovation have firmly taken root, and by 2020 have grown into a colossal tree that spans the digital world. 

Context was the key.

The modern age of digital marketing ensued. 

Nearly two decades later, in broad 2020, context is still the key to marketing success – and Google AdWords is just as relevant as it has even been; if not even more so. 

Google AdWords, your personalized sniper rifle to lock in on valuable sales leads.

Google Ads is actually a two-sided coin. It comprises Google AdWords (the marketer’s side) and Google AdSense (the publisher’s side).  

When you advertise through Google AdWords, you can choose to display your ads on relevant search results and/or on relevant websites within the massive Google Display Network.

We’re not throwing around the word “massive” casually. We’re talking about a network comprising over two million websites, through which you can effectively reach as many as 90% of all Internet users. 

When you advertise through AdWords results are nearly instant, and detailed reports start pouring nearly in real-time. This opens up exciting new possibilities that simply weren’t available in traditional advertisement platforms. 

In the modern age of digital advertising and PPC (pay-per-click) business models, it’s now dramatically simple to fine tune campaigns to make them profitable (this is not the same as saying it’s as easy task, mind you).

If traditional marketing was akin to trying to kill birds with a shotgun, contextual ads are not unlike a sniper rifle. 

Advertisers can now tap on the actual train of thought of their target audience by providing them with precisely tailored campaigns.

When setting up your PPC campaigns, you can explicitly target specific web searches and instantly put your ads there – simply by out-bidding the competition. 

Likewise, you can place your ads instantly in any of the millions of websites and apps available under Google Display Network.

Naturally, this approach proves extremely successful. 

You can actually put your products or services in front of your target audience, at the exact time when they are conceiving of buying your products and services. 

You can do this by tapping on a massive network that includes Google Search Results as well as the massive Google Display Network.

It’s a massively profitable, heavenly match: 

Not only did Google AdWords proved a superior, key tool for marketers of the digital age – but at the same time, Google AdSense provided a way for webmasters to start accruing revenue from their efforts, by creating ad inventory dynamically, in real-time… and making it instantly available to all Google AdWords marketers.

This innovation was arguably one of the main factors that allowed Google to become a dramatically profitable company, as well as one of the main reasons why many people realized that it was now possible to make a living by running websites, blogs, and generally publishing content online. 

The same potential remains available to you in 2020 – although the AdWords marketplace is at this point effectively saturated across all verticals, which calls for renewed strategies and renewed approaches. 

Google AdWords evolution: from contextual ads to ad trackers

By the mid-2010’s the market had already become so saturated it was very challenging for anyone except the savviest marketers with the deepest budgets managed to set up profitable campaigns. 

At this point, the industry started turning from contextual ads to something even more advanced, refined and effective: ad trackers. 

This was around the time when most websites started running disclaimers regarding their use of third party cookies. 

What actually started to happen at this point was that websites started collecting information about the ads you had been shown while visiting (and how you interacted with them). 

By cross-referencing this information, advertisers were able to make their context follow their potential customers until they were ready to purchase their products, rather than just aiming for the right context and hope to find buying intent there.

At this point, you (as an Internet user) started having the feeling that ads actually followed you around, and your smartphone sometimes appeared to magically guess what you were planning to purchase next – sometimes just as soon as, or even slightly before, you actually formulated your intention to buy.

As you can imagine, this strategy proved even more effective that contextual ads.

It would likely become the way of the future of digital advertisement. If only Internet users hadn’t pushed back, arguing over privacy concerns.

As 2020 loomed in the horizon, it became increasingly clear that ad tracking would likely be curbed – or outright banned – in the near future.

This strongly implied that classic contextual ads were bound to make a comeback. 

As if that wasn’t enough, life had yet another plot twist in store that would push modern marketers even further away from their comfort zone…

Covid-19 and that other monkey wrench in the finely tuned PPC cogs

The early 2020 pandemic massively destabilized the world economy, in a way that overhauled the entire terrain very unpredictably.  

This massive upheaval would naturally cause repercussions to the AdWords network. 

Some companies had no choice but to cut back on their digital marketing budgets (or even shut down their online operations), while other companies actually benefited from the change, depending on their verticals and how significantly the effects of lockdown interfered with their line of business. 

But Covid-19 wasn’t the actual monkey wrench that caused these changes. It was only an additional storm that further destabilized a market that was on the verge of change. 

Change tends to uncomfortable for established business ventures, but it can be very uplifting – as far as new, up and coming ventures are concerned.

A market in the verge of change is a market ripe with opportunities. 

If you’ve been looking for a time to get started with Google AdWords, 2020 will arguably be the perfect entry point. 

This is the time when you can turn tragedy into triumph, but stepping into the AdWords marketplace and using it to boost your business. 

If you’re looking for a way to put AdWords to your service, make no mistakes – there is a steep learning curve ahead. There is competition to be outsmarted. Luckily, there are also strong allies available to you. 

We can help you set up your campaigns and find positive ROI without wasting any time, energy and money. 

Why not reach out to us now, to see how we can help you turn around these challenging times… and make something positive out of the chaos?