PPC for B2B: Lessons from 2024, Plans for 2025

By Stacey Pendrich, head of PPC

Like many of the years prior, the PPC space underwent significant changes in 2024. From the continued integration and development of AI tools by search engines to the steady rise in CPC (Cost Per Click) and increasing competition, PPC has become more complex and expensive than ever.

Staying on top of trends and being proactive in your digital strategies is becoming ever more crucial for ensuring success in an environment where achieving a return on investment is becoming increasingly challenging. Given this importance of staying on top of the trends and changes for ensuring success, we highlight the top 5 developments in PPC in 2024 and offer insights on how to adapt your strategies to continue succeeding in 2025.

Section 1: Rising Costs and High Competition in 2024

From 2019 to 2023 average CPC increased 40-50%, this trend continued into 2024, seeing a 13% year on year increase in costs.

As more companies realise the effectiveness of PPC advertising, increased competition has made advertising in this space more expensive, with businesses needing to allocate more budget to stand out from the crowd and win bids. While PPC can still be a highly effective marketing strategy, the rising costs and technological complexity make mismanagement of spend more likely.

To counter this, campaign optimisation is key. Understanding commercial intent within the B2B space and optimising targeting, copy and CTAs to align with these searches is key for reaching the most relevant users who are most likely to convert, reducing CPL and enhancing ROI.

Our expertise in optimizing ROI through effective paid campaigns is exemplified in our work with Contis, where we successfully boosted paid search traffic by 21% and improved click-through rates by 23%.

Section 2: Data in 2024 and Beyond

Google’s decision to phase out third-party cookies was officially scrapped in 2024. While this development has paused changes… for now, the lessons learned in preparation for the removal of cookies remain vital, particularly regarding the growing importance of first-party data in paid campaigns.

In the B2B space, Google’s automated  Performance Max campaigns are a great way to automate many aspects of paid advertising, including ad placement, bidding and targeting. However, these are often underutilized, largely due to their reliance on first party data in order to generate leads that actually generate business, however, as Google and other platforms continue to allocate more resources towards these machine learning algorithms, and further push them to advertisers, companies must prioritize collecting first-party data to fully leverage these continually improving tools.

Furthermore, new U.S. privacy laws from Delaware, Iowa, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and New Jersey are following in the footsteps of GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), limiting third-party data access, cross-site tracking, and targeted advertising. These laws will likely accelerate the importance of first-party data, making it essential for marketers to adapt now to stay ahead of any future data privacy regulations.

Regardless of whether third party cookies continue to be a core part of Google’s ecosystem or will face another phase out strategy soon, first-party data is invaluable. Preparing for digital privacy changes is essential as these could happen at any time, avoid being unprepared and scrambling to gather compliant data for online marketing and start collecting first party data now. Furthermore, leveraging this first-party data is absolutely necessary to capitalise on the PPC tools that both Google and its competitors are heavily investing in, ensuring your strategies stay ahead of the curve and your campaigns remain profitable.

Section 3: Technology Advancements

The increasing role of AI in digital marketing is unmistakable. AI-driven PPC tools have been rapidly adopted by platforms, tools such as Microsoft’s Performance Max, TikTok’s Smart+, and Pinterest’s Automated Campaigns were all launched in 2024, with  Meta’s Advantage+ and Googles Performance Max launched a few years prior. These tools reflect a clear trend in the industry towards platforms focusing on, and integrating, AI tools in advertising. These tools are powered by machine learning algorithms that will only become more efficient over time, becoming familiar with these tools and collecting the conversion data necessary to fully utilise them will become a necessity going forward

Additionally, AI-driven search engines, such as Perplexity AI and the 2024 launch of Search GPT, are gaining traction and could potentially reshape the future of online shopping. While these platforms are currently more focused on B2C sales, the advancements in AI witnessed across the digital space suggest they may soon make their way into B2B marketing, potentially offering new opportunities for marketers to utilise these tools in 2025.

In parallel, voice search is gaining momentum. Research into voice assistants highlight that 30% of internet users aged 16-64 use voice assistants each week, and roughly 65% of people aged 25-49 use voice-enabled devices daily. While voice search may be less relevant for B2B currently, optimising PPC campaigns for voice search requires small adjustments to your keyword strategies and could generate more leads as the adoption of this technology grows. Optimising for voice search requires adjusting to the conversational nature of voice queries, using longer-tail keywords and phrases that reflect how people speak, for example adding in prefixes such as “Who are the”, “Which companies offer” and “Who are the best” can all aid in more effectively targeting voice search queries.

Section 4: Google Faces Competition

In 2024, the U.S. government deemed Google a monopoly, which could lead to significant changes in the digital advertising landscape. Google may be required to share the user data it collects with competitors and stop collecting user data that cannot be shared due to privacy restrictions, all in an effort to reduce its dominance.

This shift could open the door for competitors, particularly Microsoft, which has been gradually increasing its market share, up 27% since 2020, while this figure only represents 0.73% growth in search engine market share overall, this highlights that Microsoft is poised to secure a larger portion of the search market should Google’s dominance weaken.

While tools such as Microsoft Performance Max, are incredibly useful for B2B marketers, to automate bids, targeting and ad placement, and  target or exclude users from paid campaigns based on their LinkedIn profiles, Microsoft’s small market share has dissuaded many from marketing on the platform. Therefore, changes in market share could make Microsoft ads a far more effaceable platform for PPC in 2025.

However, despite facing antitrust scrutiny, Google remains a formidable player with over 90% of the search engine market share and substantial resources to weather the storm.

Section 5: Hyper-personalization

Hyper-personalization, which focuses on delivering individualized experiences based on data and AI, is becoming more prevalent in marketing. While this concept is widely used in sectors like FMCG and entertainment, its relevance to B2B sectors is developing with more businesses adopting ABM strategies. Advancements in AI and predictive personalization are already helping to serve customers with the products and services they want before they even start searching, and with the advancements we have seen in AI technologies over the last few years, its impact on B2B is inevitable.

Section 6: Omnichannel Strategies

Whether it takes 7,8,9 or more touchpoints for a potential customer to make a purchase decision, being at front of mind generally means being in front of eyes. As the amount of time that users spend online searching for, and consuming, information increases, it becomes ever more important to target and retarget potential clients wherever they are online and deliver a cohesive message. By employing an omnichannel strategy, focusing on both paid and organic marketing we generated 4.35 million impressions in two months and generated 53 leads within the first 24 hours of launch for Munich Re Automation Solutions.

As the PPC space becomes more complex and competitive, staying informed and adaptable is key. Rising costs, new data privacy laws, AI-driven tools, and staunch competition are all reshaping the way that businesses approach digital marketing. Partnering with an agency like Aspectus can help you to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to these changes, as a Google partner agency we keep our finger on the pulse and make changes to your digital strategy before they impact your sales.