PPC has always been a fast moving world but, in the last couple of years, that change has accelerated dramatically. Paid Search was once a reasonably straightforward channel: spend more, get more, right? Today, things are more complex. Increased costs, fiercer competition, and the growing influence of AI mean advertisers are having to pay more for less, while platforms such as Google are increasingly shaping outcomes in their own favour.
Here, we’ll look at how these changes are playing, as well as exploring how COSAC, despite previously strong results on Paid Search, are having to adapt to this new landscape with a complete rethink of their existing strategy.
It’s no secret that CPCs are on the rise. Third-party research has consistently shown that advertisers are paying on average around 20% more year on year simply to secure the same level of traffic. What was once a straightforward and reliable growth model (increase spend to increase results) has stagnated. Now, budget uplifts go straight into maintaining visibility and matching last year’s figures, instead of generating the incremental growth that all businesses strive for.
CPC inflation is showing no sign of slowing any time soon, and reflects a broader truth – Paid Search as a model is, more than ever, favouring platforms over advertisers. With reduced transparency, additional automation, and lesser granular insight into campaigns, blind trust in Paid Search as the singular lynchpin for a marketing strategy is being eroded.
At the same time, impression share has become harder for brands to dominate. Advertisers face a two-pronged assault: large, established competitors taking huge chunks of share, in addition to smaller, more agile competitors chipping away around the edges. While the latter may seem insignificant on the surface, enough of these “guerrilla” style competitors will have a compound impact on how much available share remains.
These challenges have been amplified by AI driven features across SERPs. AI snippets and overviews now occupy significant real estate, relegating both paid and organic listings further down the page. Advertisers are paying higher CPCs and competing against more rivals, all for fewer available slots. With AI snippets also often satisfying queries without a click, organic CTR has fallen sharply. For many businesses, PPC is now expected to pull a double shift – driving its own conversions, plus compensating for the loss of organic performance.
For COSAC, these combined factors highlighted the uncomfortable truth that Paid Search was no longer the slam dunk channel it had once been for them. ROAS on Paid Search was better than it had ever been, but overall sales and revenue volumes were down by a significant amount year on year. Simply spending more was not a sustainable option, which forced us into a strategic question – was Paid Search alone still the right channel to meet our goals, or was it time to pivot?
Bing and Meta stripped and ready to come on
With a pivot the resounding answer, our focus turned to diversification. For COSAC, that meant moving beyond the confines of Google Ads and exploring channels with less pressure from competition and AI interference.
The first step was Microsoft Ads (Bing). While the platform is somewhat limited by lower overall search volume compared to Google Ads, it also provides clearer visibility, lower CPCs and a less aggressive competitive landscape, in addition to its demographic being well aligned with COSAC’s product offering. This made it a strong complement to Google, helping us to claw back lost efficiency.
The bigger shift came with a push into Paid Social (specifically Meta). This was previously unexplored territory for COSAC, but it brought with it a host of key advantages:
Despite this diversification and anticipated improvement in results, Paid Search has to remain one of the backbones of performance. For COSAC, it continues to deliver the core bulk of sales return, and provides the safety net it always has while newer channels scale. Maintaining balance is crucial – despite the current cadence needed on Paid Search, it remains necessary to maintain performance and presence. What has become clear, however, is that it can no longer be the only lever utilised, with other channels key for long-term resilience and growth at sustainable (and profitable) levels.
While channel diversification is all well and good, if you aren’t building on solid foundations, you run the risk of bringing the entire house down as you scale. Alongside our expansion initiative, we also ran both UX and SEO audits for COSAC. The UX audit identified clear friction points on the website, and optimisations delivered an immediate uplift in conversion rate. This highlights a key point often overlooked: converting more of the traffic you already have is the most efficient way to boost sales. Meanwhile, the SEO audit confirmed a solid foundation already in place, generating good organic rankings – here, upkeep is essential. As AI continues to reshape how organic results appear and perform, those practising foundational SEO principles will always rise to the top.
COSAC’s experience proves that yesterday’s strategies, as successful as they might have been, won’t always deliver tomorrow’s results. A successful marketing strategy now requires constant analysis, as well as a willingness to change course when necessary. To remain static is to ignore that the digital landscape we find ourselves in differs massively from even one or two years ago. COSAC’s pivot will allow them to unburden themselves from a singular channel facing upheaval and move to a more diverse model, with the takeaway clear: circumstances are reshaping PPC, but with agility and foresight, these challenges can be turned into opportunities.
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