PPC Hero Conference 2025 – Our Recap

PPC Hero UK returned in April 2025, joining forces with Brighton SEO for a dynamic two-day event specifically for search marketers and paid social professionals. 

The Search Seven PPC Team have rounded up their key takeaways from the talks, packed full of actionable tips and psychology-powered insights to help supercharge your campaigns.

From eye-tracking studies, psychology-based ads, & Total Search strategies there was plenty to take away from this year's conference. 

Talk Summaries - PPC Hero Blog

What Are You Looking At? Creating Better Ads Through Eye-Tracking Studies - Felix Beilharz

Felix gave us a demonstration of his work using eye-tracking technology to understand what people focus on when watching ads. By analysing where viewers look, he identifies what grabs attention and teaches us how to design ads that guide the eye and keep the focus on the product.

Based on his findings, Felix provided a variety of tips for both image and video ad formats:

Image Ads:

• Position text near the product so people can get key information quickly without shifting focus.
• Faces attract attention first, so place the product next to the face or have the person’s eyes looking towards the product to subtly guide the viewer.
• Avoid animated stickers, they are often hard to read and can distract from the product.
• Use arrows to guide the viewer’s eye toward important elements like the product or key message.

Video Ads:

• Use motion and animation strategically to direct attention and maintain engagement.
• Use fast cuts that show the product or key text to build a visual storyline, but avoid cutting too quickly, or the message may be lost.
• Stage the product in unusual ways to stand out.
• Be selective with visual emphasis, if everything is highlighted (product, text, background objects, logos), then nothing stands out. Keep the focus on what is important.

Ad-diction Method: Create Psychology Based Ads That Convert -

Paolo Santanicchia

Paolo explored what truly captures people’s attention in advertising and shared how to design ads that resonate on a deeper, more emotional level.

He highlighted that purchasing decisions are often driven by emotion, explaining that people buy products to:

1. Solve a problem
2. Gain social status
3. Or simply feel good (retail therapy)

To understand your audience’s needs, Paolo recommended tapping into keyword and competitor research, alongside emotional insights sourced from comments and reviews to better connect with them. These methods reveal the problems customers are trying to solve, the expectations they have, and the language they use to describe their pain points and needs.

Applying Psychology to Ad Creation

• Speak your customer's language: use the same words and phrases they use when describing problems in negative competitor reviews. Show that your product fixes what others fail to.
• Test various headline styles such as microdata, education, and hard promise copy in your static ads to enable search engines to display richer and more relevant results.
• Highlight real benefits: look at trends in positive reviews - what do people consistently praise? Use that language to frame the value your product brings.

This sparked a great internal chat at Search Seven about how we balance emotional and rational messaging in our client campaigns. Expect to see more psychology-led copy in our ad testing over the next few weeks!

Data Isolation vs Integration: The Future Of Effective Media Planning & Strategy - Sarah Clarke

Sarah delved into strategies to effectively navigate Google’s “messy middle” - the virtual space where customers are won and lost - highlighting the shift from the era of digital to the era of intelligence, where cognitive biases are significantly influencing a person’s decision-making process.

Seven additional tactics from Sarah are listed below.

1. Focus on macro-level KPIs.
2. Set up short-term and long-term metrics.
3. Utilise attribution modelling to help bridge the gap.
4. Tell a story with the data you have.
5. Adopt an experimentation mindset.
6. Consider the impact of your creatives.
7. Identify where AI and machine learning can help.

Leveraging PPC & SEO Collaboration For Winning Search Strategies - Ellie Connor

Ellie emphasised the importance of breaking down silos by advocating for the ‘Total Search’ approach to advertising, which combines both paid media and organic search strategies to maximise visibility, drive traffic, and reduce costs.

This similar holistic perspective ensures full coverage across the user journey by leveraging keyword sets across both channels for overall uniqueness within Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), leaning into Sarah’s cognitive bias theory and the subsequent halo effect - where positive impressions in one area can influence our feelings in another - ultimately driving better results.

That's A Wrap From PPC Hero Conf UK!

The PPC Hero Conference provided the team with a broad range of new knowledge and insights into the ever-changing landscape of Paid social media and PPC. 

We'd love to hear your thoughts - Please do get in touch if you'd like to chat about the above in more detail!

A huge shout out goes to all the organises and speakers at this year’s PPC Hero. The paid media specialists at Search Seven are excited to apply their newly gained knowledge to their existing and future paid media campaigns.