Proper use of Google AdWords requires that you, the business, pay attention to both your present and future. Without an eye on your present, you won’t know how your ads reach the current market. And without the other eye on the future, you won’t know how to align corporate goals with new SEO and PPC capabilities.

The new year has nearly arrived, so here at Atria, we want to help prepare you for anything 2017 will offer. To get a jump on the next 12 months, this post will show you three areas of focus that could become extremely important to your goals for any campaigns that reach past the present day.

Related Keywords

This blog has talked about the importance of ad quality and its cousin, landing page quality. The latter should become part of your focus in 2017 as you use services such as the AdWords Keyword Planner to determine which keywords best serve your businesses and connect your content to readers.

The link above from TheNextWeb suggests that your landing page can benefit from use of your most powerful keywords in your landing pages. In particular, you will want to use the best keywords in the first and last paragraphs and in images’ meta tags while you use less popular keywords throughout adjoining content.

Although that generic advice is important to absorb, the only way you can place the best keywords in those positions is to understand the behavior of your users and the keywords that attract them most. How can you understand the behavior of your customers? Before anything else, try attribution.

Data-driven Attribution

Google introduced a change in its conversion attribution settings this past May. It added the data-driven attribution model to allow analysis of a user’s path toward purchasing a product. With enough information (AdWords users with at least 800 click in 30 days), it can scan the path of any buyer through multiple ad interactions and show businesses how users arrived at a purchase.

This type of attribution only works for high-volume accounts, but if you belong to that group, you could gain a lot of insight about a field that some outlets predict will highlight search in 2017. When you know the common paths your users take before purchasing one of your products, you can build similar paths time and time again for your mutual benefit.

Greater Space for Ads

In keeping pace with this blog, you may now know that Google now offers more space within its ads and on its front page for you to reach customers. Longer headlines, expanded description lines, and the restructuring of ads in search results all give marketers more turf.

Here’s the quick refresher: You now have the chance to use two 30-character headlines and a single 80-character description line in your campaigns. Google also now allows four sponsored search results at the top of a Google search and three at the bottom. Although Google’s change also marks the removal of space on the right-hand side of a search results page, it leaves you as a winning bidder with a more prominent location to display your longer headlines and descriptions.

You may already take advantage of these changes. Now you need to press forward with the knowledge that all your competitors are also on board. These changes took place throughout the summer of 2016, but their effects will be felt in the months and years to come. Everyone will see an increased chance of completing conversions, so you must remain diligent and keep abreast of AdWords news from Google and here at Atria. Your standing as a PPC success story depends on it.