After the announcements at Google I/O 2018 earlier this year, we are very excited (if not a little scared) about what’s going to be announced in Google Marketing Live this July.

Last month, we heard that Google’s Smart Compose will help us write our emails, Style Match will tell us where we can buy the clothes we like and Google Maps will be able to advise us on local restaurants.

However, the most jaw-dropping moment came when Google Assistant called a hairdresser and made an appointment in tones so convincingly human (right down to umming and ahhing) the hairdresser remained entirely unaware that she was speaking to AI throughout the call.

It’s clear that voice search is not going anywhere. In fact, Google have put a lot of time and money into improving the experience; they’ve not only added 6 new voices for personalisation, but have also removed the need to start every sentence with ‘Hey Google’, making the whole experience of voice search much more natural.

So, what does this mean for paid search?

With voice searches often including 10 keywords or more, we know it’s likely that we will need to expand our long-tail keywords to cover the longer voice search terms. We will also need to get smarter about question keywords; tools like answerthepublic.com are a great way to find high-value natural language phrases to add to our keyword lists.

Localised search is also likely to get more interesting as natural language gets involved. Rather than searching ‘Chinese restaurant near me’, people may start to search for local businesses in a more natural way, for example ‘are there any Chinese restaurants close to Theatre Royal?’.

But the one big question we have is, are we going to be marketing to ‘assistants’ rather than humans? Will our ads be trying to convince Alexa or Cortana that our business is better than our competitors? According to research by Bing, in the next two years, 54% of consumers will expect their digital assistant to make purchase recommendations; this number is expected to jump to 85 percent within five years. So, it looks like we might need to change our strategy to convince the assistants our product or service is the one!

As well as advancements in online-offline tracking and automated bidding, we hope that Google Marketing Live will shed some light on the implications of voice search for PPC. If you haven’t already registered, you'd better hurry! #Excited