7 PPC Trends You Can’t Ignore This Year: Expert Roundup

The year’s breakout PPC trends include AI Max, enhanced TikTok search ads, more ways for brands to connect with video creators, a rise in Bing users, and fully automated Google campaigns.

You might have a meticulous bidding strategy and laser-sharp audience targeting. 

But have you kept up with the ever-evolving paid search landscape and the latest pay-per-click trends? 

This includes shifts in searcher behavior and search engine algorithms.

The latest PPC trends for 2025 can give your campaigns the boost they need to convert your audience and differentiate your brand from the competition.

Below, HawkSEM Lead Strategist Ian Dawson shares his strategies and tactics to meet the shifting tides of PPC advertising. 

We’ll cover his top 2025 PPC marketing trend predictions and how they can help you crush your marketing goals this year — and beyond.

To truly leverage Google’s PPC automation for success in 2025, you’ll need to have a hawk’s eye on your data. (Image: Adobe)

1. Google marches toward fully automated campaigns

Google’s machine learning (ML) algorithms help you automate (and save time) with its automated campaigns, including smart bidding and Performance Max campaigns.

Smart bidding is crucial for brands that want to optimize PPC campaigns based on their unique budgets and business goals. We love using the Target CPA bidding strategy to keep lead or conversion value consistent with the cost our clients pay per acquisition.

But to truly leverage Google’s PPC automation for success in 2025, you’ll need to have a hawk’s eye on your data. 

After all, you want to give Google the best possible chance to give you the right output based on performance and audience criteria.

This means aligning your campaigns with data from audience research and customer data from your customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

You can also collect valuable data from Conversion Value smart campaigns, which gives you real-time data on how much revenue each conversion gets you. 

Dawson loves automated bidding strategies specifically for their data collection potential.

“There’s always a benefit to exploring fully automated campaigns to help uncover new data; an answer for an unasked question,” he says.

But can you get the same benefits with a manual campaign? Not quite. 

“With a manual strategy, almost every aspect of your plan is a known and intentional effort,” Dawson explains. 

“With fully automated strategies, you might learn something about your marketing efforts that you did not know to ask about.”

But enough about Google. Let’s make way for a runner-up that deserves your attention this year.

2. Bing usage is at an all-time high (a plus for B2B businesses)

It’s no secret that Google is the world’s most popular search engine. But Bing doesn’t fall far behind. 

In fact, in March 2024, over 1.4 billion unique global visitors had visited Bing.com, up from 1.3 billion visitors in the previous months, according to Statista.

That’s definitely worth a second look, which is why marketers have contributed to a consistent annual increase in Bing’s search advertising revenue (which reached over $12 billion last year, by the way).

On top of Bing’s trends of increasing performance, brands still benefit from cheaper cost per click (CPC) due to the decreased competition compared to Google.

Microsoft (which owns Bing) also lets you use multimedia search ads, giving you serious real estate on your audience’s search results sidebar — a feature not available on Google.

Finally, SaaS and B2B businesses shouldn’t ignore Bing for its prominent audience of desktop searchers. While more people in general use mobile, Bing’s audience tends to see more search queries from people using desktop computers.

Why should B2B businesses pay close attention here? Because desktop devices are the tool of choice for those who make larger purchases (and purchases in general). 

People tend to browse at the top of the sales funnel on mobile but convert on desktop.

Pro tip: B2B leads still lacking? Give your marketing campaigns a boost with expert insights from a specialist B2B marketing agency.

3. Google rolls out the AI Max campaign setting

As we’ve mentioned before, AI Max (formerly Search Max) is a new artificial intelligence feature for Google Search Ads campaigns. It offers search term matching along with text and URL optimization.

After beta testing it earlier this year, Google officially launched AI Max, calling it “a comprehensive suite of targeting and creative enhancements,” in May 2025. 

According to the search engine, the main benefits of AI Max are:

• Better reach via expanded keywords
• Increased campaign performance 
• A cutting-edge PPC strategy
• More efficiency through automation
• Enhanced transparency

Learn more about AI Max and find out what our expert team members have to say about it (and what it might mean for the future of digital marketing) in our AI Max blog.

4. New YouTube features make video ads more accessible

Today’s digital audience loves video content. HubSpot says people are more likely to learn about brand products through videos and are more likely to share video content. 

But Dawson notes that despite a growing affinity for video formats, businesses haven’t always been able to take advantage of it as a medium.

“In the past, a company would need a hefty advertising budget to simply create the video assets required to run a video campaign in Google Ads,” he says.

This made video PPC ads too costly a marketing strategy for many businesses, especially newer ones. A videographer, studio space, and valuable time in your marketing schedule weren’t so easily dispensable.

But Dawson highlights that YouTube has introduced new tools and features to make video advertising easier than ever. Notably, YouTube’s bumper machine tool lets you create bumper ads out of videos shorter than 90 seconds:

“Now, companies have rich editing tools and the ability to create video ads from existing media content, right in the YouTube interface,” says Dawson. 

“In addition to these features, most advertisers have high-quality video recording abilities using smartphones.”

Google also recently announced Creator Partnerships in Google Ads as well as YouTube BrandConnect.

Creator Partnerships in Google Ads is a new creator partnerships hub that offers “improved sponsored video discovery, creator search, and paid and organic reporting for linked videos,” according to Google.

YouTube BrandConnect is a self-service platform connecting creators with branded content campaign opportunities. 

Brands can use YouTube’s influencer dashboard to execute branded content campaigns and identify creators to partner with.

Further reading: Learn about remarketing, masthead ads, and personalization in our expert YouTube ads guide.

5. Voice search optimization can capture more audiences

If 2024 was the year for visual search trends, 2025 is the year for voice search. Think about it: do you notice more voice note options in your iMessages or WhatsApp chats?

They’re pretty convenient, especially for people on the go. Plus, if your first language isn’t English, they make it easier to communicate with English-speaking friends and colleagues.

Picture this: someone wants to find a product fast, but they dislike typing or texting. Just like voice notes are increasingly common in social chats, voice searches have become more prominent on PPC channels.

Both Google and Bing have AI-powered voice search functions. That said, we’ve noticed something interesting across target audiences in various niches: people don’t always type how they talk. 

Meaning? Voice search optimization will require you to:

• Keep ad copy conversational: Write how people would speak by using more long-tail keywords.
• Listen to your audience: Study their social media activity and any source of casual conversation
• Boost your local SEO: One of the most popular voice search queries? “[product or service] near me.” So naturally, Google Assistant generates much of its voice results with top organic content, as well as Google Business Profile listings.

6. Explore TikTok advertising (if you haven’t already)

No matter your target audience, we’re going to suggest at least exploring TikTok to reach them.

Why, you might ask? “By the end of 2025, the short-form video platform is projected to generate 33 billion U.S. dollars in advertising revenue,” according to Statista. Pair that fact with its over 2 billion users across the globe, and the picture becomes clear. 

Simply put, this social media platform has changed the game.

TikTok offers a variety of advertising options. These include TikTok Search ads, which appear in search results just as they would on Google’s search engine results page in response to a query.

Further reading: Check out our step-by-step TikTok ads guide to help you craft TikTok campaigns like the pros.

7. Leverage AI internally for research, reporting, and more

AI coming back up in this list probably isn’t surprising. 

According to SurveyMonkey, 43% of marketing professionals automate repetitive tasks and processes with AI software, and 41% analyze data for insights with AI tools. 

“I like to use AI as a way to help create rough outlines and drafts of efforts,” says Dawson. “It can be helpful with ad copy creation, keyword research, and landing page copy.”

We love keyword research tools like Semrush and Ahrefs. These SEO tools are efficient in gathering valuable keyword data like volume, difficulty, competition, and search intent.

However, the added benefit of AI within the keyword research process is in how quickly it can process that data and turn it into informational insights to give you the best strategic recommendations.

ConversionIQ harnesses AI to determine the most profitable keywords across your digital advertising strategy, attributing every last dollar to them.

AI for keywords? Awesome. But what makes AI useful in the content creation process?

Personalization is one key aspect, as it can interpret thousands of audience data points to recommend certain copy combinations. 

This becomes especially valuable for landing pages, where personalization can be the difference between a bounce and a conversion.

Still, Dawson recommends keeping a close eye on any AI marketing activities:

“It’s important to treat any AI output as a draft and to thoroughly review before use.”

Why it’s important to stay on top of 2025 PPC trends

Nothing in digital advertising stays the same for long. 

Imagine you didn’t update your PPC strategy from 2016. You’d miss the boat on entire social media platforms like TikTok, which only launched that year and became a goldmine for digital advertisers with a younger audience base.

Here are a few more reasons to stay on top of PPC trends:

• Enhance user experience: Reflect new audience needs and online behavior in your updated PPC strategy.
• Reduce ad spend: Find more strategic ways to spend your budget with updated bidding strategies to account for new algorithm updates.
• Employ new tech: Embrace AI’s new use cases and harness new PPC platform features to better reach and convert your audience.

Essentially, PPC trends help you maintain a relevant, effective strategy that continues to rank high on the SERP and convert your audience as much as possible.

You can’t expect last year’s PPC strategy and trends to work the same next year. Your potential customers change how they search every year, and in response, search engine algorithms change to meet them with PPC automation and AI.

Now it’s your turn to pivot your strategy accordingly.

Armed with the knowledge of 2025 PPC marketing trends and how to work with them, you can elevate your business’s search ads to propel higher traffic and conversion rates.

The takeaway 

Let’s be real: All these technological advancements in the PPC world aren’t easy for even seasoned marketers to keep tabs on.

That’s why brands that want results rely on award-winning digital marketing agencies like HawkSEM to keep their PPC campaigns at peak performance.

How do we do it? With decades of paid search experience to inform our strategies, a die-hard commitment to master Google’s algorithms, and a robust tech stack to back it all up with the data we need to succeed.

Sure, you still have to pay for each click. But with an average of 4.5X ROI, that cost per click (CPC) quickly becomes a minimal investment.

Let’s launch your PPC campaign today.

This article has been updated and was originally published in February 2024.