The list of Top PPC Influencers in 2020

It’s never too late to get an expert’s opinion, is it? We’ve selected for you a list of experts who are continually developing, participate in conferences, record podcasts, write articles, conduct webinars, and share useful insights on social networks.

Want to know what the best of the best think about the top PPC trends of 2020? Wondering what services and tools they use? Read the experts’ comments and put these tips into practice!

Top 40 PPC influencers to follow

1. AJ Wilcox, Founder B2Linked. com — The LinkedIn Advertising Agency.
2. Akvile DeFazio, President of AKvertise, Inc., a social media advertising agency.
3. Andrea Cruz, Digital marketing manager at KoMarketing.
4. Amy Bishop, Digital marketing consultant, columnist for Search Engine Land and frequent industry speaker including events such as SMX, HeroConf, Utah DMC, State of Search and more.
5. Amy Hebdon, Founder of Paid Search Magic and a Google Ads Conversion Expert
6. Bill Leake, CEO, Apogee Results.
7. Brad Geddes, Co-Founder, Adalysis: PPC Recommendation Software for Google Ads & Microsoft Ads.
8. Byron Marr, Paid Media Strategist at Aira Digital.
9. Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism for Search and Advertising at Microsoft.
10. Dan Saunders, Performance Marketing Manager at Ingenuity Digital.
11. Dan Wardrope, Founder of Flexx Digital Ltd, a digital lead generation agency.
12. Elizabeth Marsten, Senior Director, Strategic Marketplace Services at Tinuiti.
13. Etgar Shpivak, Co-Founder of Fixel.
14. Fernando Constantino, CoFounder & CIO at CleverEcommerce. com.
15. Fred Vallaeys, CEO at Optmyzr.
16. Gavin Dickinson, Associate Director at Neo Media World.
17. JC Hite, Founder & CEO at Hite Digital.
18. Jeff Sauer, Founder of Data Driven U, professor & Google Analytics consultant.
19. Joe Martinez, Director of client strategy at Clix Marketing.
20. Joel Bondorowsky, Executive Director and Founder of PPCDesigns.
21. John Lee, Learning Strategist at Microsoft.
22. Jon Kagan, Director of Search & Biddable Media at Results Digital.
23. John Sargent, Director at Think VEN.
24. Julie Bacchini, President and Founder of Neptune Moon LLC, co-host and organizer of PPCChat — A Weekly Twitter Chat On PPC Topics.
25. Liam Wade, Head of Paid Media at Impression.
26. Isaac Rudansky, CEO, AdVenture Media Group.
27. Kim Barrett, CEO, founder, speaker, and trainer at Your Social Voice.
28. Kirk Williams, Owner of ZATO, a Paid Search PPC micro-agency of experts.
29. Mark Irvine, Director of Paid Media at SearchLab.
30. Mark Meijs, PPC Strategist at iProspect.
31. Marty Weintraub, Founder of Aimclear® Marketing Agency and Business Author.
32. Mike Rhodes, Founder & CEO of WebSavvy. com. au.
33. Navah Hopkins, Director of Paid Media at Hennessey Digital and international speaker.
34. Patrick Gilbert, Executive Director at AdVenture Media Group.
35. Purna Virji, Senior Manager of Global Engagement at Microsoft.
36. Samantha Noble, Founder of Biddable Moments and Digital Females, Keynote and Conference speaker, marketing consultant.
37. Sanja Jovanovic, Paid Media Director and Co-founder at Victora.
38. Susan Wenograd, Director of paid media efforts for Nextiva, and the paid media reporter for Search Engine Journal.
39. Tom Walkden, Head of PPC at WMG // Ingenuity Digital.
40. Wijnand Meijer, Co-founder and CEO at TrueClicks: PPC auditing and monitoring built for teams.

12 experts comment on the top PPC trends of 2020

Amy Hebdon

What are the best PPC tools in your opinion?

The best and most underrated PPC tool is your brain. Everyone’s trying to automate and plugin their way to success, but they don’t stop to think about the needs of their prospects. What are prospects searching for? What do they need to know and believe about you before they’ll take action? Applying a little thought can get you further than dozens of paid tools.

What are the most important PPC trends to watch in 2020?

Know how the pandemic is affecting your account. It might be weird to think of the pandemic as a “trend,” but it definitely is, and it has impacted your customers and your competitors. Pay close attention to what’s different and why.

Brad Geddes

What are the best PPC tools in your opinion?

The best tools to use in PPC depend on how you manage your account. If you’re using Google’s automated bidding, you usually just need to add a workflow tool like Adalysis.com to your stack to manage your accounts. If you aren’t using Google’s automated bidding and you need to bring in third-party data, then Kenshoo is a great tool. It’s common to see people use a third-party bidding system and a workflow tool at the same time.

Overall, these are our favorite tools:

Workflow — Adalysis.com

Bidding — Kenshoo.com

Audience management — Adobe audience manager

Analytics — Google Analytics, unless you’re using Adobe Audience Manager. In that case, Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics can work well.

Tag management — Google Tag Manager

What are the most important PPC trends to watch in 2020?

COVID has changed how users view and interact with ads. Consumers are looking for more real-time information on deals, business hours, protection measures, business statuses, and other things. We’ve seen an increase in account performance for accounts that are making more ad adjustments to meet consumer expectations better than ever. The frequency of ad changes and the use of additional data with ad customizers is going to continue giving businesses an edge in marketing compared to those relying on old ad creation or automated Google ad serving techniques. While automation and machine learning will continue to be an important trend for years to come, this year we expect to see bigger gains from advertisers who are tightly controlling and updating their ad messaging than we have in many years.

Byron Marr

What are the best PPC tools in your opinion?

I love Optmyzr for how quickly it can give insights and perform custom audits. Being able to see a quality score at the campaign/account level, for example, is handy for getting a snapshot into where improvements can be made. Unbounce would be my number one, though. The difference a fast-loading landing page can make on results usually outweighs smaller more incremental campaign optimizations — go Unbounce!

What are the most important PPC trends to watch in 2020?

Machine learning isn’t the future of PPC: it’s the present. Smart bidding and dynamic creative formats are things to embrace to drive the best possible performance for your clients or business. It’s a big shift for many advertisers, of course, and where you add value will need to change. But being able to bid based on intent to convert is something I welcome. Our role now is feeding in the right data and giving that data the best possible conditions in which to perform. Make sure your conversion tracking is accurate and that only primary KPIs are included as “Yes” so you don’t end up being measured based on revenue but optimizing for mailing list subscribers! Ensure you include USPs and product or service features/benefits in your RSA headlines and descriptions. This is something we’ll continue to see is a trend moving forward, along with more updates to the Google Ads UI.

Christi Olson

What are the best PPC tools in your opinion?

I’m always going to be a huge fan of XLS and Microsoft Advertising Editor / Google Ads Editor. :) Another tool that’s a must-have is a toolkit of scripts to automate and help with reporting and monitoring!

What are the most important PPC trends to watch in 2020?

There are two trends, privacy, and data, that are converging right now and that PPC professionals and digital marketers alike need to keep in their periphery. Privacy and the impact that local, regional, and country-specific privacy initiatives will have on data collection and use. The desire for more user control of data is leading to a potential scenario of the cookieless world, threatening to impact the data we use for tracking, attribution, and audience targeting. When I talk about privacy and data, I see search marketers roll their eyes, and it’s because they’re thinking in the weeds, not at the bigger picture of how data restrictions might impact PPC campaigns. One of my favorite strategies in my PPC arsenal is using segmented audience targeting to reach our existing customers and net-new prospects. Without data, the strategies I create would be near impossible. It takes us back to targeting a keyword instead of targeting a person with intent who is behind the keyword.

Dan Saunders

What are the best PPC tools in your opinion?

The best PPC tool I have is SEMrush. Its keyword volumes are a lot more accurate than other tools I’ve used in the past, so it’s really useful when I’m forecasting.

What are the most important PPC trends to watch in 2020?

One thing that I don’t think is too far off on the horizon is persona-based machine learning. Google and Bing ads are rapidly evolving, and it’s not going to be too long before you can plug in a persona for your audience and Google/Bing will write a high-converting ad for you. We’re nowhere near there yet, but I’d definitely keep an eye out. In the meantime, marketers have to focus on the basics. Build our customer personas to the nth degree. No level of detail is too small. When you know what devices, times of day, stages of the buyer journey, etc. your customer is at any given time, you’ll be unstoppable.

Etgar Shpivak

What are the best PPC tools in your opinion?

I would love to endorse Zest.is. This isn’t a PPC tool, but it’s the best knowledge resource I’m working with. It gives me the best, filtered, top-notch content on PPC, and it’s part of my morning routine.

What are the most important PPC trends to watch in 2020?

I believe this year’s focus will be on first-party data. Now that Google has announced they will kill the third-party cookie, we’ll see most advertisers focusing their efforts on getting a betting understanding of their CRM, apps, and website pixel data.

We’ll see more and more advertisers try to manipulate between technical and legal restrictions (like GDPR and CCPA) in order to focus the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Fernando Constantino

What are the best PPC tools in your opinion?

Optmyzr and Cleverads.com.

What are the most important PPC trends to watch in 2020?

Google is pushing its automated tools (i.e. smart display campaigns) while removing the finetuning capabilities of marketers. So marketers who need sophisticated ad campaigns are losing control of them.

Isaac Rudansky

What are the best PPC tools in your opinion?

Google Ads, Excel, and Optmyzr.

What are the most important PPC trends to watch in 2020?

The most important trends to watch out for are automated bidding, less search term data, less control over bids, and more intelligent conversion tracking.

Joel Bondorowsky

What are the best PPC tools in your opinion?

It depends a lot on the needs of the sales funnel. For example, if you’re taking leads, you need some sort of CRM, but the number one tool for PPC is Microsoft Excel, hands down.

What are the most important PPC trends to watch in 2020?

Marketing is taking a full circle. It used to be all about creatives, then things went online and advertising turned nerdy. A good online advertiser needed to know how to use these complex tools and numbers, but now the platforms are doing such a good job with targeting that the main differentiating factor is back to the creative.

John Sargent

What are the best PPC tools in your opinion?

The best PPC tool is email/the phone/Slack/another communications platform! Especially now in difficult trading conditions, the overall digital marketing objectives and business hypotheses must be business-led. Even the best technical expert in the world won’t know your company’s operations and customer base better than you. The best decisions are the basic technical tweaks made together with the business rather than clever technical adjustments made for PPC-only reasons!

What are the most important PPC trends to watch in 2020?

Keep a very close eye on how Google is taking more fine-tuned options away from the advertiser. Removing many search queries at the start of September is a good example, as is the trend toward enforcing Responsive Search Ads (which are good overall, but not for every scenario, although Google is keen on making them so) and the simplification of and encouragement toward automated bidding. For many advertisers, these will work well, but when they go wrong, the number of options you have without technical expertise will be limited. It will pay to be wary! :)

Mark Irvine

What are the best PPC tools in your opinion?

The best tool is the one you and your team will actually use every week with every client. Think of what you need to do across the board for your clients and invest in a good tool to automate that. Personally, I love Data Studio for that reason. It removes what could be hours of mindless reporting work every week so we can focus on what provides more value.

What are the most important PPC trends to watch in 2020?

2020 has been a wild year, and it’s quickly turning a lot of older trends on their heads. As people are less mobile than they were in the past, we’ve seen many mobile searches become desktop searches and many more searches become local. As these trends are evolving faster than any of us may notice them, it becomes increasingly important to understand how and when you can rely on AI/ML to optimize for microtrends before they emerge.

Patrick Gilbert

What are the best PPC tools in your opinion?

Optmyzr and Opteo. The former for data visualization and reporting, the latter for account alerts.

What are the most important PPC trends to watch in 2020?

Increased adoption of automation. As an industry, we’re finally getting over this hump where more people are embracing automation and smart campaigns… Some aren’t as thrilled about this, but there’s no turning back. The next step with this is finding creative ways to use automation to our advantage, and coming up with new ways to “guide the machine.” There’s a lot of creative ways to manipulate your conversion data, for example, so that you can better inform the machine about your business goals. These sorts of strategies will really move the needle in the coming automation era.

Take the advice and follow the guidance of leading experts to win despite the challenges of 2020!