Microsoft Advertising's Hopkins Says Buyers Arrive Too Informed For Old PPC. Consolidate Or Lose. Fundamentals Persist, Obviously.
Navah Hopkins, Product Liaison for Microsoft Advertising and MAI, argues that PPC campaign structures need consolidation, stronger conversion values, and flexible assets because buyers now arrive better informed through AI research. She stresses balancing AI creative assistance with disclaimers, brand guidelines, and message constraints to participate on AI surfaces while protecting business needs. The fundamentals of PPC have not changed, but the account structures built around older search behavior no longer match how people actually research.
This demonstrates the concept of funnel compression. The mechanism: AI research tools let buyers do comparison shopping before they ever click an ad. By the time they arrive, they need persuasion at the decision layer, not the awareness layer. The lesson: stop building campaigns for cold traffic when your traffic is already warm.
Navah Hopkins, Product Liaison for Microsoft Advertising and MAI, speaking to a community of 75,000-plus digital leaders through Ask A PPC at Search Engine Journal.
- Open your current Google Ads or Microsoft Ads account and count how many campaigns you have. If you have more than five serving the same audience, you likely have fragmentation.
- Pick one campaign and write down what a buyer who already researched via AI would need to see to convert. Compare that to your current ad copy.
- Add a message constraint or brand guideline note to your campaign settings that requires every ad to include your single strongest differentiator. This forces flexible assets to still sell on message across any AI surface.