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There are over 4 million active AdWords advertisers out there and the number is only growing.

As we all know, the only thing Google loves more than inventing new and better ways to do things is being very mysterious about these new ideas.

Based on the information we currently have, what should we expect from AdWords for the next 10 years?

Let’s take a peek at what I think the future of AdWords may look like:

1) Templates for Popular Industries

Creating a professional AdWords campaign can take up four hours! Isn’t that crazy? As a PPC strategist, I would love to see predefined templates for the most common industries.

If you think about it, the keyword planner already gives suggestions for ad groups and keywords when scanning a website. My expectations are that Google will provide a 2.0 version of the keyword planner that will give us more accurate suggestions on ad groups based the most popular type of industries in AdWords such as taxis, divorce lawyers, locksmith, plumbers, and realtors.

Google’s VP of Product Management, Jerry Dischler disclosed in July of last year that Google plans to scale new mobile ad formats for multiple industries. So we should expect Google releasing specific mobile ads formats for different verticals.

2) Keywordless Future

In my opinion, keywords will outlive their usefulness to Google, and advertisers will have to adapt to this.

In case you are hesitating if this is actually going to happen, I’ll show some example where Google is already killing keywords:

• Google shopping is driven by product feeds, not keywords. Even though we can still add negative keywords they are feed based.

• Dynamic Search Ads (DSA): Google’s web crawlers scrape through the content of your site, match unique pages with keywords, and then dynamically create ads that match the most relevant landing page – no keywords required.

• Reduced access to query data: Google has slowly started to provide less query data to marketers. Initially, this change only impacted SEOs, but it would not surprise me if the search query report in the AdWords disappears soon as well.

So, why is Google doing this? My guess is that reducing keyword enables Google to confine more advertisers into fewer auctions. That results into more competition and higher CPCs per click, which means more money for Google and more traffic for us.

3) New Buy Button on Mobile

33% of all Google search clicks are generated through mobile and this metric just keeps rising. In order to drive mobile transactions Google will be adding a new “buy button”  to its search results. This will make it easier and faster for consumers to buy products directly from mobile search ads.

Less “What”, More “Who”

I believe that the future of online advertising will be more about “audiences” than “intent.” In other words, as advertisers are able to collect more information about consumers we should focus more on “who” is buying instead of “what”. Essentially, Google will move away from keywords in favor of people-based targeting.

Guess we’ll find out in the next 10 years!