How to Create a Profitable Paid Search Strategy for 2026

[music] feel. Hey [music] Hello and welcome to the dojo, a search marketing podcast from Exposure Ninja. I'm Charlie, CEO at Exposure Ninja, and today I'm joined by the brilliant Rebecca, who is our head of PPC, and we're going to be talking all things paid search strategy for 2026. We're going to look at what's working, what's not working, what to ditch and leave in the past, and some award-winning campaigns as well. Rebecca, welcome to the dojo. Where shall we start? Let's say that we're working on our 2026 paid search strategies. Where do we start? What do we do? Oh, there's so much so much at the minute with the paid search strategies. Quite a lot has changed um this year. And if you've tuned in to our other podcast, you'll have heard us speak about all the new changes with AI and all the new changes with tracking. Um so there's lots of updates to Google Ads, Microsoft Ads. Um, Meta Ads has had a lot of changes throughout this year as well. So, it's really what you need to do is like hone in and find where you as a brand, where your position is and where you can fit in, which platform your um customers are hanging out on and how you can get in front of them at the right time. Um, that's a brief brief overview of like paid search for 26 2026. Okay, fantastic. So, let's say that we've got a good idea of where our customers are hanging out, maybe based on our past data. We've done a bit of analysis between meta with Google ads and let's say the business is feeling pretty confident, but they're looking at their results from 2025 and they want to obviously we all want to level up. They want to level up the results. We want to get even better. What is the first thing you would recommend that a business does? Firstly, what you'll see with a lot of the Google updates is that we need to have a really strong firstparty data structure and make sure with the um Google sandbox privacy updates as well which have been like back end of 2024 2025 that's been ongoing but we still get accounts where we see you know they've not got Google API set up they've not got J4 conversions um they've not connected a CRM to the account. So, we need to make sure like that all the first party data is connected to the Google Ads account because we're moving more away from which click got the conversion and more towards a strategy where it's like what role did my ads pay in the conversions. So, it's it's what influence your ads have and making sure that we can get around all these privacy features that have recently come around this year. That would be my main main focus point for any new client of Exposure Ninja and it's the first thing that I look for when I'm doing um reviews for potential leads as well. Okay, fantastic. This sounds like it might get a bit tricky for those who are not technically minded. How important do you think it is to have someone in the business that is like purely focused on the paid search strategy? Yeah, it is really important to have somebody who's focused on the paid strategy because the role that we see that we're playing now is more of um a data analyst role, a data researcher role, but then you always you have to have like a creative mindset at the same time and be able to tell tell a story of your brand or tell a story of your service. It's AI is doing the heavy lifting in the bid management which was um probably the front point of um a PPC manager role but now we're seeing we're playing more of an investigative role. Um we're dealing with tracking set complex tracking setups. Um we're working with third party software CRM like HubSpot and Clavio and all those kind of things. And then um rather than like writing text ads, I mean we still write text ads, but there's a lot more like we're writing video briefs, we're writing landing page briefs, we're giving CRO recommendations. So instead of just looking at this is my search structure, these are my keywords and this is my bid where we've got a more holistic view um across what's happening on the paid platforms as well and the journey beyond that. I do actually want to dig into some of the things that have worked fantastically well this year because what you're referencing there is like such a joined up strategy when it comes to paid search like beyond just our Google Ads account or our Meta account actually thinking about the email marketing the CRM data that we've got the landing pages and how well our website's converting all of these things sort of come into what makes a really successful campaign certainly across all of the clients and sectors that we've worked in and I am like incred incredibly proud of our PPC team this year because we just picked up three brilliant awards at the global search awards 2025 and that was best UK PPC campaign and best US PPC campaign like that's so wildly good to dominate the UK and the US and these two clients they were in completely different sectors so the UK was age care bathrooms bathrooms installers DSLD mortgage was our US campaign which is finance and mortgage sector so a very strong uh YML, your money, your life sector. Totally different industries, but both of them had really joined up campaigns. Rebecca, you actually ran the age care bathrooms campaign yourself. It's one of your big success uh clients. So, I would love to hear a bit about what you think worked brilliantly and what made that an awardwinning campaign because that one was when it came in flatlined PPC and it went to like a 2.4 4 million run rate in about nine months from ads and ads was like the main commercial engine behind it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so proud of that campaign and and the other award wins that we've done as well. But that working on that account and working with that client was such like it was such a pleasure to work with that client as well. They were so collaborative, which I really think helps um make a successful paid ad strategy and a successful marketing strategy. Um we really needed to like pick the client's brain, pull apart the business, look at um look at the gaps in their marketing funnel from all aspects, not just PPC, and then like reverse engineer where we could plug the gaps from each channel. So like we did the funnel backwards. Um, so it was a really great campaign to work on and the success of the PPC campaign just came from um like lots of people will say that but looking outside the box, not it not employing like a traditional search structure, testing every element and working with the other departments to see how they then can help us push those leads down the funnel and eventually convert them. So some of the things that I've just spoke about earlier like making sure the tracking was correct was like a main point for PPC and connecting the CRM data which allowed us to see the journey from the PPC touch points right through to the um the final deal that the end customer and the revenue that that end customer um had. And sometimes that can be a little bit tricky with lead generation campaigns, especially if you don't have a CRM. And we get a lot of conversations from um new clients or potential clients where it's like, "Oh, I'm working with an agency or I'm working with a freelancer and you know, they're saying they're delivering a 100 leads a month, but I've only converted two." So, it's about having that communication with your client, having that communication between the CRM and what you're doing within Google Ads so that you know the optimizations that you're making are actually driving the revenue as well. Um, rather than just, you know, like look at all these conversions in my head account. We're looking beyond the PPC platform. So that was like the first thing that we set up and the most important thing that we had to execute and then beyond that it was um working with the other departments. So using what um what SEO were doing, looking where we could plug the um keyword gaps where SEO struggled or where they needed some more attention, we could plug that gap with paid and then making sure that we could retarget top offunnel leads. Um because of the nature of this client um we could not upload customer lists because there's health in personal ads advertising policy from Google ads. So again we had to think outside the box and um any top offunnel traffic we couldn't remarket to. Um, so that's when um, we collaborated with the email team to make sure that for every part of the funnel, we've got an email flow that would just scoop up all those people that hadn't converted and to make sure we'd got a really tightknit campaign there to make sure we could see the attribution and the touch points and drive that conversion. And then another really important part to that campaign was um the AI features that we used within the campaign. So we had PMAX campaigns running and we had broad match tests. So what we did is we set up some tests outside our core campaigns to identify new opportunities. Once we saw an audience, a keyword, um a market that we liked and that showed some success, then we would add that to our core campaign as well to really drive and scale that revenue. It's absolutely amazing. I've got in my notes as well that that AI generated search campaign structure that we uh set up uncovered quite a few different high intent terms that we hadn't initially seen and drove around 600 conversions just from finding those new keywords which I think is just a testament to when AI is used really well in paid search it can be really effective but I know that that isn't always the case we've seen in other campaigns that AI doesn't necessarily drive the same results so a testament to the importance of actually testing and doing something different. Um the other award win we had which was best US PPC campaign was for DSLD mortgage which was run by our fantastic colleague Chenade and a huge success story especially in such a difficult and regulated sector drove 11k leads in the first year from a website that was converting at pretty much zero when it came to us. But this one had some commonalities, different market, but some similar principles about how we earn trust and use landing page and work sort of multi- channelannel on it. Um, Rebecca, I'd love to hear a bit about how the DSLD campaign worked and how we got such a wildly good result from it. Yeah. So, with the DSLD campaign, there are some similarities with the age care bathroom campaign. Um, but there's also some like things that we tested that completely didn't work for DSLD mortgage, which is why, like you've just said, you really need to test AI. Um, so originally we had um set up a PMAX campaign to see if we could um scale and reach um new target audience that way. Um, but unfortunately this didn't work for that client and it may not work for a lot of clients, but it is worth testing. So with that one, we saw a lot of lowquality leads coming through and that ate away the client's budget. Once we switched that campaign off, we saw the search performance like rebounded immediately on that one. So that's like an instance of where Pmax just wasn't right for that audience, wasn't right for that client, but it's something that we tested. Um, and then the sim similarities within this campaign as well was making sure that we got um a highly converting landing page. So even though like Chenade was responsible for PPC, she was also like briefing in and collaborating on the PPC landing pages um and how we wanted those to work. It was very important to the client as well that they got a certain amount of qual like high intent qualified leads. So um with this particular client there's certain um people who are elleible for mortgage and they only wanted the top percent um of people that had got great quality um great credit scores and that they could sell a mortgage to immediately and make sure that they could contact them within a really tight turnaround. Um, so we built um landing pages with calculators and an eight-step lead qualification form to make sure that those that are really interested and have the right credit, income, and intent were getting through to um the DSLD team fast and that they could be picked up really quickly. And the other part of that as well that is similar to age care is making sure we've got the first party data. So the CRM feeding back the leads into Google ads and making sure that we could see which geol locations were converting at higher rates and what type of customers were converting at a higher rate as well and making sure they were like genuine leads and not just you know low intent leads. Our landing page and paid search performance on that campaign was so impressive that I I actually spoke about it at Brighton SEO. My whole presentation was on how we achieved conversion rates on those landing pages of like 8% 10% 13% some of them even higher which is a really incredible result I think just because the funnel was so joined up and the ads so well reflected the keywords that were being searched we hid it in the ad copy we saw it in the landing page and when you're an actual user going on that journey you could really feel like as if you were flowing through it was amazing um the other thing that I feel like has been Big theme here is email is kind of the quiet hero going on in the background behind paid search. How important do you think it is to have an effective email setup, Rebecca, when you're running paid search campaigns? Yeah, I think it's really important to capture those leads that's gone quiet. Um, we do have like remarketing tools within um the PPC channels, but like you say, email is so important. Firstly, you've only got your management fee to pay on that. So, that's a a free way of re-engaging those leads. And we can make sure we tailor um the messaging so that the um experience is um the same across all the channels. So, when they're coming from PPC and they're not necessarily ready to convert, we can feed them, we can nurture them, we can see the journey that they're going on up until they do convert. And it's just so important especially with um clients that can't that you know they have some policy that they means they can't remarket remarket and update customer lists and even those that can't even with um like ecom clients. It's so important to keep those people engaged even when they're not searching for your product so that when they do come back, your brand is at front of mind and then they could convert directly or they could see another ad. So, it's really really important to have a good automation newsletters just a really good email campaign. Brilliant. And when we're thinking ahead to 2026, because we've spoken quite a lot now about what was really effective this year, and I'm sure some of that will still be true next year, but what things are you expecting to change? Um, so for next year, there's there's quite a few it's how people have started to search that has changed so much. So people are using voice search to search for things. people are using more conversational queries. Um, so we're expecting to see like the keywords that we're using change. So a long time ago we used longtail keywords and then we went to single keywords. Um, and now it's it's like we've gone back again. So we've gone back to the more conversational search queries. Um, so we're not oversegmenting campaigns anymore and we're not focusing on the bid management. We're more focused on the signals and the data quality and making sure those keywords are broad and we're capturing all those search th those more high intent searches that are after something quite pi specific and then um telling that story again. So, like I said earlier, we're becoming more of a storyteller. So, we need to make sure that we've got a really good um paid content strategy as well. So, the content that you're pushing, so whether that's ebooks or blog posts or anything else, the actual text on the ads, the videos that we're promoting. So, we're going to see paid search. It sounds quite strange to say go beyond search. So you need a whole video paid video strategy um the discovery network and we'll see a lot of um like multi- channelannel strategies as well um such as using email plugging the um SEO the organic gaps and um those those more holistic strategies. This all sounds like both exciting and a little bit overwhelming. And when you're talking about how people's search habits are changing, I can imagine the first thought that a lot of people had there was, well, a lot of people are using chatbt. Like their queries are long. I think the average chatbt query is around 23 words now compared to something like four or five words for a Google search. How do you think it's going to play out with ads coming into these platforms? Do you think it's going to knock Google's confidence? Do you think Google Ads is still going to be big? Like we know already that Perplexity is testing ads in beta in the US very very select very very select audience of large uh multinationals. What do you think is going to happen? It's quite exciting, isn't it? I think for the first time I can say I actually don't know how this is going to play out. I'm really excited to to see it and test it and and figure out how it's going to work, but I don't know what effect that will have on Google or if Google will come back with something else to compete because at the moment we're seeing a lot of traffic being lost to the LLMs. Um so we know that people are moving away from Google and searching on chat GPT and Gemini and uh all the other AI platforms. Um so if they start offering ads in there as well, I would expect that it would only be natural that they start purchasing sending leads within those platforms as well. So it's it's exciting and a little bit well like we can speculate but still a little bit unknown. So yeah I'm very excited. Yeah, I think it's hugely unknown. My suspicion is well we know that these AI platforms we know already from Perplexity rolling out ads. We know that they're figuring out how to put ads into their ecosystem and not have users completely distrust the results they're getting in AI. My suspicion about Google is paid ads is their biggest revenue driver. They must have something up their sleeve. Like they must have a plan for how they're going to manage this so that they don't lose market share once these AI platforms start integrating ads and opening that up broader for businesses to use. Because I think there will be a lot of businesses who are initially very nervous about running paid ads in AI, which I think is incredibly natural and normal reaction to it. But there will, I think, also be some very uh excited first movers who want to try them out and going to figure out like how does it perform compared to Google. So I think Google's going to have to have a really good plan. Uh yeah, it all remains to be seen. As you say, we're kind of guessing. No one has a crystal ball here. Yeah. Well, they have AI mode and I like to use that. So, if that was a a separate functionality or they they did something different with that and made the whole of Google that, then maybe you'd see like a bit more competition. Um, but yeah, I'm interested to see how they will um compete with the other big ones in the market. It's all to play for. There were two things you mentioned that you feel like we should leave behind in paid search strategies in 2025. The first one was over segmentation and the second one was bid management. Can you speak a bit more to why you think these are not coming into 2026 in the way that we've used them before? Yes. So like as we've mentioned like people are searching completely different in a different way. um they're using more conversational queries and the the like you say the length of the search is so long. Um so by having really tight segmentation you're going to miss a lot of those opportunities. So say for example um like us just marketing agency is a is a gen generic keyword people won't necessarily just put marketing agency anymore. they might work in finance, so they're looking for a finance specific marketing agency. And if you've got that on exact match, you're going to miss that search. And if you're oversegmented, your budget is distributed a lot finer. So you're you're going to struggle to compete, you're going to struggle to appear in the searches. So where we're moving to more conversational, more broad match and um just more AI um like AIAX and PMAX campaigns, we really need to make sure that you know we we're not we're not over segmenting and missing out on those queries. So yeah, over segmenting is is going to be left behind definitely for sure and we've already seen that in the back end of this year as well. And then the bid management side of things, we really don't I mean I do still use like target CPA on some accounts and cost per click, but it's very very rarely I'll I'll see a campaign that is using those bid strategies anymore. we can leave it to AI to distribute that budget because we're making sure that the AI has the data it needs to be able to differentiate from a low value lead and a high quality lead. And that's why it's so important to focus your strategy around your first party data. And if you have a direct connection with Google Ads, it's very important to connect that so that AI can adjust those bids for you um without having to manually every day or setting up rules and scripts to ch to change those bids when things fluctuate. We can let AI do that for us and focus on the more meaningful strategies that we can apply. Let's talk a little bit about AI in Google ads actually because Google now has quite a few different AI features. It has done for a while and from our testing right that age care bathrooms AI search campaign performed brilliantly uncovered loads of high intent keywords and then on the opposite side we tested Pmax on DSLD and we killed it really quickly because it just wasn't bringing in the kind of lead that we actually wanted to get. How do you think marketers and PPC managers should think about AI within Google Ads? Because I can see why some people would be quite reluctant to test something that then they might need to kill if they feel like it's not going to work. You don't know how long to test it for. And then there's going to be other people who think AI features are great, like I can automate some of this stuff. It means I have to do less. What's your perspective on that? I think it's very it it definitely depends on the brand and I would encourage everybody to set up a test environment um outside your core campaigns when you know your core campaigns are your revenue drivers. You don't want to be oh I'll just switch AI max on and see what happens because your comp your revenue is probably going to tank if you do that. So, you need to be testing in a controlled way. And I get that people don't want to turn things on and switch them off really quick or waste budget, but if you don't test, you're never going to know if there's um an opportunity there. um we can take a like um an educated guess on how things are going to go and we have like um like a checklist that we go through to make sure like is this business is this client would would it would they be suitable for running a an a an AI style campaign. So if they have lots and I keep saying this but this is the main takeaway lots of first party data then that is a good um indicator that you would get potentially get good results from any AI campaign because the signals are back and forth between the platforms and we can again make high value datadriven decisions. Um the second factor would be to make sure you've got really um well optimized PPC landing pages and that the copy on those landing pages is written by a human. If you have AI content on your landing pages and then plug it into an AI feature, that's when you're going to get really low quality um ad copy back and those kind of things and that's when it really doesn't work. Um so with age care bathrooms, we had um content marketing on there and they did a really amazing job of writing all the content for the PPC landing pages. We made sure that you know we got dual CTAs and that um you know everything from a CRO and a user experience was really good and that's why when we um had the I mean it wasn't called a IMAX at the time but it was like an early variation of a IMAX that's when that worked really well when it pulled bits of copy from the website when it pulled the keywords from the website to match up that's when that worked really well as well. So again, like AI is never going to take over from a PPC sense. You still need to have you can't just put PMAX on and leave it. You still need to have some human interaction in there. Somebody to interpret the data and obviously the human elements of the copy and the landing pages as well. So they're my two things that I would say yes for testing AI. Fantastic takeaways. It seems like first party data is a really huge element to a successful campaign from what you've shared so far. If someone's thinking like, I don't even know if I have that much first party data. I don't even know exactly what data I want. What should they be looking at? Like where should they be if they're trying to get more first party data? What would you recommend they do? Yeah. So that's really good question actually because we do have um clients that have come to us and they haven't got any um customer lists that or the customer lists aren't big enough to serve within Google ads um because you've got to have an a thousand match rate. So they might have a 300 match rate. So what we do in that scenario is we'd um build a top ofunnel strategy as well to harvest data and this is where email comes in as well. So, we'd be serving top offunnel content such as um join our webinar, um download our ebook, here's a quiz, what product service do you need, and all those kind of um great lead genen content. Um and on PPC, we would gate that you you wouldn't necessarily have it gated on your website, but from a from a PPC, you'd want that gated so that you could harvest that data. Sounds sounds really creepy, harvest, doesn't it? But so you could collect that first party data and then that's how you would build your contacts up in your CRM or if you don't have a CRM you can do offline conversions and it's literally just a list export. Um and that's where you you would be able to build and get the real value from your campaigns. Amazing. Okay. So Rebecca, we want to put together a cutting edge paid search strategy for 2026. What do we do? What are all the things we need to hit? Where do we start? Great. So, first things first, make sure your tracking is working. Make sure you've got your enhanced conversions. Make sure J4 is synced to your ad account. Next, you'd want to connect your first party data. So any lists, CRM, offline conversions, and any profitbased lists as well. So even if it's you don't have a CRM, make sure you know how much your customers clients are worth. And then again, we want to go beyond search. So we don't want to just have search ads. We want to see video. We want to see you on the discovery network. We want to see you um targeting all points of the funnel within Google Ads. And then lastly, attribution. It's not just about the click from the conversion. It's did they watch a video and convert? Did my ads influence a purchase a contact, etc., and those kind of things. So we want to make sure we're looking at datadriven attribution and um more of a marketing model mix as well to get the real impact. So we understand the real impact of ads on a campaign. Brilliant. And if you are a marketing manager or a PPC manager and you're reporting to a seuite or a senior leadership or a board of some kind, their first question is going to be, you know, we put this amount in to our ads. What can we expect to get back? How would you manage a question like that if you were in that situation? And how possible do you think it is for someone to forecast from how they've performed this year into next year? Yeah, it forecasting can be tricky within PPC, but we have a lot of tools to our advantage. Um, there's lots of benchmarks published as well. So, if you were new to a business and you didn't know, um, cost per clicks, conversion rates, all those kind of things, we can look at benchmarks. But um the real things that we would be looking at for forecasting into the next year is um the data in the um CRM so that we can actually see the value that the ads drove and um when we're not just looking at vanity metrics. So we're not just like oh we got 30 leads in January we can maybe get 40 leads the next year if we improve the conversion rate. we're looking at the actual value from the ads. So, it's very important to be looking at the attribution model and making sure that we know the real impact and the real revenue from the ads as well to be able to forecast into the next year. Brilliant. And if you had to leave everyone with one final thought, the biggest recommendation you would give to someone managing PPC next year, what would it be? Don't oversegment. [laughter] Don't oversegment, but still think about personalizing in the right way from what you've said because so many of our successful ads and the types of funnels you've described are actually quite personalized to a specific customer persona, right? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. They um they people want to have their pain points or problems answered within your ad. So whether that's a text ad or a video, make sure it you're speaking to the person that you're wanting to get in front of. Brilliant. And then don't over segment when you're actually setting up the campaigns. Fantastic. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining me today. It was amazing to hear everything that we've done this year and what we're doing next year for paid search. If you're listening and you need a hand with your paid search strategy, then you can get in touch with Rebecca via LinkedIn. You can get in touch with me via LinkedIn if you like and you can send a message through our website. We're more than happy to have a look at your accounts and see how they're performing so far, make a couple of recommendations. And if you were having a small panic about your first party data or thinking that you didn't really have a very good CRM setup, then we are also a HubSpot partner. We work across other CRM as well. So, please feel free to get in touch and ask us about those. Uh, thank you so much for listening everyone and have a great week. Thank you.