Massive changes are taking place in both the automotive and the marketing industries, and automotive marketers are caught right in the middle.
On the automotive side, both the unprecedented supply chain disruptions and semiconductor shortages that began during COVID-19 continue on to today, with many industry analysts predicting that inventory levels will never return to what they were pre-pandemic. In 2024, EIU forecasts that the sector will also be weighed down by slow consumer spending, high interest rates driven by stubborn inflation, and big bets on electric vehicles. On top of all that, in the longer-term, the resolution of the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike will likely result in UAW brands raising their prices to account for increasing employee salaries—and other auto brands may follow suit as part of a trickle-down effect.
And on the marketing side? Nothing major: just signal loss driven by the continued deprecation of third-party cookies, an uptick in digital advertising regulation and scrutiny, and massive technological advances that stand to redefine the landscape... you know, nothing much.
Amidst all these challenges, automotive marketers must prioritize strategies and tools that allow them to make the absolute most of their advertising dollars and their people. To that end, here are three trends that will be top of mind for future-forward auto marketers in 2024:
We all know that prioritizing the collection and extension of first-party data is a must as we move towards a privacy-friendly future. As marketers in the automotive industry move in that direction, leading brands and dealers will begin to consolidate their databases and execute a coordinated first-party data strategy to reduce the duplication of efforts and to make the most of all the data available to them.
Most automotive brands have had CDPs and data lakes in place for a long time. Now, those tools are being adopted within the dealership ecosystem, and with more sophisticated audience segmentation capabilities, dealers will be able to share more relevant audiences with brands and to deploy those segments on their own. Most dealerships have significantly more data than brands just by virtue of the nature of their business, so there’s a huge opportunity to share that with brands. This consolidation and coordination of data between brands and dealers will reduce duplication of tactics and strategies and allow both parties to make the most of all the first-party data available to them.
Automation is key for digital marketers who want to make the most of first-party data for personalization at scale. After all: If first-party data constitutes the wheels that enable marketers to connect with consumers, then automation is the engine that allows marketers to use that data effectively. (Sound familiar?)
But that isn’t the only use case for advertising automation. Automation can help automotive marketers build and deploy omnichannel campaigns more quickly, automatically optimizing pace and spend across all channels and moving budget from low performing channels to high performing channels—saving advertisers both time and money. For automotive marketers, the efficiency offered by these tools will be a game-changer for overcoming challenges like slow consumer spending, high interest rates, and signal loss. These technologies are developing quickly, and there’s a benefit to getting your foot in the door early so that you're primed for taking advantage of all the innovations coming down the line.
Artificial intelligence is another area that’s innovating quickly, and savvy automotive marketers will be keeping an eye on the space to ensure they’re tapping into all the ways AI can work for them. There are a host of ways marketers can leverage AI, such as using generative AI tools and DCO to produce marketing content and deploy targeted one-to-one email communications at scale. AI can also assist in personalizing and automating parts of customer communication via websites and call centers. Like automation, artificial intelligence tools can provide both time savings and cost-efficiencies, giving automotive marketers a competitive edge in a particularly competitive moment for the industry.
2024 is a year for automotive marketers to step on the gas. Marketing teams can get ahead by prioritizing the collection and extension of first-party data and coordinating that data with their brand/dealer counterparts; and embracing automation and AI tools that can reduce manual labor and save time as well as money. The road to automotive marketing success is clear—why wait?
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Hungry for more 2024 trends? Check out our 2024 Trends Report for everything digital marketers need to know for next year.
The 2024 US election cycle is poised to be quite the ride for political advertisers. There’s a contentious presidential race at the top of the ticket, a slew of other high-profile races further down the ballot, and a highly partisan and emotionally charged voter base, to name just a few of the elements shaping the terrain. To add to the drama, awareness-building and fundraising efforts start earlier each election cycle, so the wheels of 2024 campaigns are already in motion.
Amidst these complexities and record-setting election ad spend—projected at a whopping $12 billion—political advertisers must have the latest strategies and insights to plan and execute winning campaigns. To that end, here are some key trends that campaign teams should keep top-of-mind as they develop strategies and partnerships heading into 2024:
Linear TV advertising has long been a go-to for campaign teams. It provides a familiar, engaging experience and gives political advertisers the opportunity to promote their messages in an emotional, memorable way. But over the past several years, there’s been a decrease in linear consumption: In July 2023, linear TV fell below 50% viewing share for the first time, with most of the time lost to linear shifting over to streaming. Savvy political advertisers are following these habits—thus reaching voters who watch less (or have never watched) linear TV. Plus, CTV offers political advertisers all the same benefits as linear, as well as the ability to target, measure, and optimize those ads more precisely.
CTV viewership is increasingly popular across all generations, but particularly so amongst millennials and Gen Z. This makes it a critical resource for political advertisers looking to motivate younger voters to head towards the polls, as well as those seeking to extend the reach of their TV buys to audiences who are not viewing linear tv.
Given that booming popularity, it makes sense that political advertisers are continuing to shift investment into CTV. In Basis, for example, programmatic ad buying on CTV grew by more than 60% in percentage of impression share from 2020 to 2022. Strong growth is expected in 2024 as CTV spend is forecast to reach $1.3 billion in spending during the 2024 cycle. To make the most of the expanding CTV opportunity, political advertisers should leverage a mix of buying approaches—including direct, programmatic guaranteed, private marketplace (PMP) deals, and open exchange—to ensure their campaigns stay on-budget, and seek out highly valuable exclusive CTV inventory through select partnerships to extend reach their reach.
Interested in a deeper dive into political connected TV advertising? Check out our comprehensive guide >
Ultimately, all elections are won at the local level—even presidential races come down to specific districts in key battleground states. As such, using geotargeting and voter files to reach voters based on geography is an established practice for political advertisers. But as technology has advanced and ad inventory expanded, more opportunities for advanced targeting have arisen. Perhaps the most notable of these technologies for political advertisers? Automatic content recognition, or ACR.
ACR is a technology that tracks what viewers watch on their smart TVs, thus allowing advertisers to place ads in a more targeted way. Though not available on all devices, it is available on an increasing amount of premium CTV inventory. By using ACR, political campaigns can create voter targeting segments of viewers who have seen a competitor’s ad, as well as those who have seen their own candidate’s or cause’s ad. These are segments that can be layered on top of geotargeting and voter files, allowing digital buyers to make even more personalized impact and extend reach to non-linear households. And though this technology is not brand new, there is now sufficient CTV inventory—due to increased viewership—that political advertisers can leverage it at scale for their 2024 campaigns.
The third and final trend that political advertisers should keep top-of-mind heading into 2024 is the importance of crafting relevant and interest-based messaging—especially in the context of mis- and disinformation. False and/or misleading content is, to some extent, inevitable during an election cycle, and most constituents will encounter it at some point. This is, in no small part, due to the growth of social media platforms and other online spaces where inflammatory online discussions can run rampant. To make matters worse, many major tech companies (think: Meta, Google, Amazon, X, and Alphabet) have recently made major cuts to their internet trust and safety teams.
So, how can political campaigns ensure their candidate’s true message is resonating with and persuading key voter groups? In short, by adapting quickly to the current narrative and nailing the creative messaging. Political advertisers can break through the noise of mis- and disinformation by personalizing messaging to create connection based on issues voters care about. Issues will define the 2024 election, and political advertisers will benefit from leaning heavily into interest-based messaging and targeting. For example, reproductive rights will be a major issue discussed by candidates during the 2024 cycle. Aligning a candidate’s pro-choice stance with voters passionate about reproductive choice will create connection and activation. By responding rapidly throughout a campaign and expressing a candidate’s views in a way that is clear, authentic, and emotionally resonant with audiences, political campaigns will ensure their message is cutting through a clutter of news and garner a strong share of voice.
Amidst what’s already shaping up to be a complex and highly competitive election cycle, political campaigns will need to ensure they are maximizing every dollar in their ad budgets in the year ahead. To that end, teams will benefit from using connected TV to reach audiences when and where they’re tuning in, leveraging advanced targeting technologies like ACR, and being strategic with their messaging to break through mis- and disinformation.
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Hungry for more 2024 trends? Check out our 2024 Trends Report for everything digital marketers need to know for next year.
Cannabis is becoming more and more mainstream in the US: 2023 saw continued growth in the social acceptability of cannabis use, new states legalize medicinal and recreational cannabis sales, and a major social media platform change its policies to allow for cannabis advertising. The cannabis market is forecast to reach a whopping $50.7 billion in sales in 2028, representing an 88% increase from 2022’s $27 billion.
While the industry is clearly on the rise, cannabis marketers have plenty of challenges to contend with—from a maze of advertising regulations, to economic uncertainty and inflation, to the upcoming loss of third-party cookies in Chrome and shift towards privacy-friendly digital advertising. To both navigate these challenges and capitalize on the market’s potential, cannabis marketing teams will need to prioritize brand awareness, crafting targeted strategies that make the most of the spaces where cannabis can be advertised and where their target audiences spend time.
Here are some trends and tips for making the most of cannabis ad spend in 2024:
There are a lot of consumers out there who are new to cannabis. So, when they go to purchase a cannabis product, they're often choosing whatever the budtenders recommend, whatever looks flashy and fun, or perhaps most commonly—especially during inflation—whatever’s at a good price point for them. As such, it’s extra important for cannabis marketers to drive education of their brands and generate interest in their products. Connected TV, digital audio, and digital out-of-home (DOOH) are great channels for accomplishing this. Marketers can tap into CTV private marketplaces (PMPs) that accept cannabis, such as Telaria and FreeWheel, cannabis-friendly podcasts, and digital out-of-home partners like Place Exchange.
In 2024, cannabis brands looking to amp up awareness and differentiate themselves most effectively will also need to ensure their tactics are as targeted as possible. One way to get more targeted with these efforts is to identify specific consumer personas and tailor lifestyle content that extends beyond cannabis use specifically for these groups. There are segments of consumers who enjoy things like cooking, gardening, and outdoor activities in addition to cannabis, so tapping into those interests is a great way to create consumer personas for targeted advertising efforts. And looking towards a privacy-first future, CTV and podcasts also offer contextual targeting opportunities where cannabis marketers can reach these groups of people.
While cannabis brands are very familiar with traditional out-of-home, 2024 should see more and more marketing teams spending on digital out-of-home (DOOH).
DOOH is great for cannabis advertising for a variety of reasons. First, it offers all the benefits of traditional OOH, plus all the benefits of digital advertising—the ability to target, track, optimize, refine, measure results, and quickly switch out creative as needed. Also, as cannabis gains legal status in different regions, an increasing number of dispensaries are emerging. The more dispensaries there are, the more opportunities there will be for advertisers to leverage in-store DOOH screens to reach customers who are ready to buy in prime places and moments.
At the same time, while there are many restrictions when it comes to advertising cannabis online, DOOH comes with fewer restrictions, so advertisers can get many more impressions from a wider audience. Overall, it's a great way for cannabis brands to get more bang for their buck with less red tape.
Finally, next year should see more and more cannabis brands trying to engage audiences beyond the digital world. For example, brands will likely invest more time and money in educating budtenders on their products: If you go into a dispensary and have no idea what you're doing or what you want, you’re going to ask a budtender for their advice. If those budtenders are educated and excited about your products, then they'll be more likely to talk about them with those customers.
Savvy marketers will also lean on real world engagement opportunities that are more commonly associated with B2B advertising—such as conferences, panels, and interviews—to get people talking about cannabis and their brands. These strategies can help make up for all the regulation and restrictions that exist for traditional and digital cannabis advertising.
Overall, cannabis marketers will need to approach brand awareness in new and creative ways in 2024 to differentiate themselves in a market where everyone is vying for consumers’ hard-earned dollars. By prioritizing targeted messaging, digital out-of-home, and real world engagement, cannabis brands of all sizes can ensure they're making the most of their marketing dollars and setting themselves up to capitalize on the explosive growth coming to the cannabis space.
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Hungry for more 2024 trends? Check out our 2024 Trends Report for everything digital marketers need to know for next year.
B2B advertising has reached a digital tipping point.
In just five years, B2B has gone from spending just 29% of its media dollars on digital channels to a projected 49% in 2024. That’s an increase of nearly 70%!
Simply adapting to this digital transformation would have been a big task in and of itself. But B2B marketers have been navigating the digital shift while battling through a global pandemic, a prolonged economic downturn, supply chain challenges, layoffs in the tech industry, and a significant shift in who is making purchasing decisions in the B2B landscape. Even more, rapidly approaching on the horizon are the signal loss challenges that will change (and have already begun to change) how B2B marketers connect with target audiences.
Overall, it’s clear that B2B marketers will need to be flexible and adaptable as they navigate an increasingly complex landscape. With all this in mind, here are some key trends B2B marketers should consider in 2024:
In 2023, 60% of B2B marketers said that social media was their most effective revenue-driving channel. It’s no surprise, then, that social media will continue to dominate in 2024. This is likely to prove particularly true when it comes to partnering with influencers and subject matter experts across key platforms, such as Meta and LinkedIn, as B2B marketers continue to rely on these content creators to drive personalized connections with their audiences.
To make the most of the social media opportunity, B2B marketers should be deliberate about which creators or subject matter experts best align with their product(s) and/or services. They can then leverage many different types of content—from user-generated content (UGC), to testimonials, to case studies, and more—to build up credibility, trust, and connection with prospective audiences.
Speaking of building connection, digital video is another channel that will be crucial to helping B2B advertisers elicit emotion and foster relationships with target audiences in the year ahead. Video allows marketing teams to capture audience attention with the power of sight, sound, and motion. These qualities can be particularly impactful for B2B brands when leveraged for sharing education- and testimonial-driven content. Plus, with digital video, marketers can tailor that content specifically to target audiences.
Even more, by leveraging compatible creative across multiple video channels, B2B advertisers can create a curated and consistent customer experience. For instance, teams could use CTV for upper-funnel awareness tactic targeting for specified geographies, reinforce those ads with digital out-of-home (DOOH) displays in the same geographic areas, and further reach target audiences by placing pre-roll video ads within reading content that relates to their specific product or service offering. And, thanks to the benefits inherent to digital technology, video campaigns can now be measured and optimized to maximize a team's return on ad spend (ROAS).
It’s no secret that generative AI has been making quite the splash—both within the world of advertising and beyond—and B2B marketers can use this emerging technology in a variety of ways.
AI-powered chatbots on a website can help improve the user experience and automate lead generation by swiftly and efficiently gathering relevant information on a customer’s needs, making quick decisions to support those needs, and setting sales teams up for success. Generative AI tools can also assist in the content creation process, either for brainstorming or early creation phases. Just remember: Since authenticity and credibility are critical for fostering connection with audiences, a human team member should be reviewing anything generated by AI to ensure that everything is up to par with brand guidelines and to prevent outdated or inaccurate information from sneaking its way into the content.
Amidst the complexity of today’s B2B advertising landscape, it can be tough to know what marketing teams should focus on. But by using social media to connect meaningfully with target audiences, leveraging digital video to show how specific products or services can help solve audiences’ problems, and making the most of emerging AI technologies, savvy B2B marketers can find success in 2024—and beyond.
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Hungry for more 2024 trends? Check out our 2024 Trends Report for everything digital marketers need to know for next year.
Like students cramming for a final exam, the pressure’s on for marketers at colleges and universities.
Undergraduate enrollment has declined since 2010, driven by increased skepticism about the value of a college degree and hesitance around acquiring student loan debt—even though college grads tend to earn more and experience lower rates of unemployment. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated undergraduate enrollment declines, with rates dropping by a whopping 9% between spring 2019 and spring 2023. And though graduate enrollments saw a bump during the early days of the pandemic, those numbers also declined in 2023. Then there’s the looming college enrollment cliff, which promises a 15% decline in the number of college-aged students starting in 2025 due to lower birth rates during the Great Recession.
Add it all up, and it’s clear that 2024 will be a critical year for colleges and universities. The good news is this pressure has seriously upped the value of higher ed marketers. Smart leaders will be prioritizing and investing in their marketing teams, which gives marketers the opportunity to shine by taking creative approaches to big challenges.
Looking for some ideas to give your 2024 planning a competitive edge? Check out the following trends set to shape the year ahead:
Interest in online classes and flexible learning hasn’t slowed, and according to a survey of Chief Online Learning Officers at higher ed institutions, that demand for online courses will continue to grow in the years ahead. Students want online, virtual, and hybrid options, and savvy advertisers will prioritize showcasing these offerings as colleges and universities continue to invest in them. Providing digital experiences like virtual events and campus tours is a great way to show students that you know how to tailor engaging digital experiences.
Creating hyper-personalized ads for students will also be crucial for higher ed marketers in 2024. If a college or university can make prospective students feel like an ad is speaking specifically to them—and that the institution in question is a great fit—that can be an effective strategy for winning over individuals who may be on the fence. At the same time, this approach ensures that marketing budgets are spent as efficiently as possible.
Investing in research and having the ability to slice and dice data like enrollment numbers is key to supporting these efforts. Consumer personas in higher ed have shifted significantly in recent years, and the “traditional college student” persona has morphed into multiple target audiences. There are a lot more nontraditional students, such as part-time students or students enrolled in shorter-term non-degree programs. Marketers need partners who can pull research on consumer and market trends for them and then dig into their enrollment numbers to get specific about where it makes the most sense to invest.
In terms of executing on those hyper-personalized ads, programmatic advertising can provide targeting opportunities so that institutions can reach particularly niche audiences. For example, an omnichannel programmatic strategy allows teams to remarket individuals on higher funnel platforms—which are starting to remove some of their targeting capabilities and the data segments marketers can tap into with the onset of signal loss and third-party cookie deprecation—using insights gained from other channels. Leaning heavily into first-party or DMP data to really figure out what prospective students are looking at on your site and what their priorities are is another great way to maintain that hyper-personalization as we move away from third-party identifiers.
The growing use of artificial intelligence in marketing is a trend across all industries. For higher ed marketers, it’s important to start testing and learning with AI tools now so as to develop a comfort and ease with that skill set, which will put marketers in the best position to quickly jump on any new AI-based opportunities that may emerge in the next few years.
For target audiences, no matter the vertical, attention spans are a lot shorter than they used to be. However, this is especially true for the younger prospective students higher ed marketers are looking to target. Having access to AI-powered features like VR campus tours or chatbots that can answer people’s questions right away are very effective for keeping an audience engaged.
Also, some social platforms, like Meta and TikTok, offer integrations to create augmented reality components. Basically, marketers provide creative assets like images and headlines, and the platforms will try out different variations of those assets until it identifies what is going to perform the most successfully for individual consumers. It’s a great way to leverage AI for creative optimization.
Overall, the focus for savvy higher education marketers in 2024 will be on digital—not only marketing universities’ online and virtual opportunities, but also taking advantage of and getting comfortable with digital advertising tools that empower hyper-personalized advertising, such as programmatic and AI. Education marketers who lean into these digital opportunities are sure to pass with flying colors.
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Hungry for more 2024 trends? Check out our 2024 Trends Report for everything digital marketers need to know for next year.
What’s new in the realms of paid search and social media? This month, Courtney Shaw, VP of Social Media Solutions, and Maggie Shelton, Director of Search Media Investment, compiled all the latest news, trends, and resources for easy access.
To comply with European Union regulations, Meta will begin offering people aged 18 and over who live in the EU, the European Economic Area, and Switzerland the option to pay a monthly subscription fee to use Facebook and Instagram without ads. Those who don’t subscribe can continue to use the platforms for free, while seeing ads deemed relevant to them. Advertisers do not need to take action as a result of this update, and campaigns targeting people ages 18 and up are expected to continue delivering as planned.
Google's new generative AI tools are designed to help marketers create, edit, and iterate on images with less reliance on professional tools or creative teams. The tools can perform basic tasks like altering the background color behind product images, as well as more advanced jobs such as adding products to specific scenes (for example, you could ask Google's AI tool to "place this item on the beach, surrounded by shells"). As Google continues to expand its range of ad formats, this will most immediately be useful to help version creative into multiple ad assets.
“Please put a hat on this horse and make the background red…no, blue…no, green…”
As early as consumers have begun their holiday shopping, 50% still have more to buy after Cyber Week, and they’re going heavy on digital for their research. Marketers looking to maintain momentum from the cyber holidays should consider an omnichannel approach to reach shoppers who are determined to find the right gift. Google has more supporting information and insights here.
Eggnog helps!
Snapchat’s creator community is thriving, with content creators growing highly engaged audiences by giving Snapchatters an authentic look at their lives. Creator Collab Campaigns is Snapchat's new suite of products designed to make it easier for advertisers to partner with the platform’s influential, audience-rich creator community.
Amazon's massive share of the e-commerce market provides them with robust audience targeting data. Advertisers can now leverage this targeting across Amazon and Amazon-owned properties (including Twitch and IMDb). While campaigns are currently display-only and limited to select verticals, they represent a huge opportunity for advertisers trying to reach more hard-to-find cohorts of consumers.
Now that’s Katniss-level targeting.
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Cannabis marketing regulations are multi-tiered and constantly in flux. While an array of cities and states have legalized and decriminalized various forms of cannabis, the substance is still illegal at the federal level. At the same time, social media platforms like Facebook, audio platforms like Spotify, and search platforms like Google each have different policies for how marketers can promote cannabis products. And on top of all that, cannabis marketers must comply with a growing matrix of consumer privacy regulations. The result? An ever-shifting regulatory landscape that requires a considerable amount of up-front research compared to other consumer packaged goods.
While navigating these various regulations might feel like reefer madness, marketers can minimize overwhelm by approaching them in four tiers: Federal, state, platform-specific, and from a general advertising compliance standpoint. Read on for an overview of each layer:
At the federal level, cannabis marketing is regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Advertising Division (NAD). There are two big rules that brands must follow here. First, to comply with the FTC’s Truth in Advertising laws, product descriptions must be backed by legitimate research and must not mislead consumers.
Second, brands may not make any claims that a cannabis product can cure, prevent, diagnose, or treat a serious disease. Brands may, however, make what the FDA calls a structure/function claim. A structure/ function claim:
For example, a brand could not legally state that a CBD product cures insomnia, but it could legally state that a CBD product promotes sleep.
On the state level, State Departments of Health set regulations for cannabis advertising. These regulations vary widely—for example, cannabis marketing is generally prohibited in Delaware, while cannabis marketers in Colorado can advertise across a variety of channels, granted those advertisements adhere to certain restrictions. While there are some general State-level cannabis marketing rules that hold true across the board, it’s critical to research marketing regulations in each state where you plan to advertise. While you’re at it, make sure to look into cannabis advertising restrictions based on city and county jurisdictions as well!
Marketers must also research cannabis marketing guidelines for each platform where they plan to place ads, as they all vary. For example:
With accessible and affordable advertising options like Facebook, Instagram, and Google largely off the table, marketers will need to tap into tools designed to clear this regulation barrier. Basis, for example, is integrated with Cannavu, which operates the largest ad marketplace for curated, compliant cannabis advertising opportunities. Cannavu accesses ad impressions on canna-compliant publishers, automating the publisher selection process for marketers.
Beyond ensuring that campaigns meet the requirements of federal, state, local, and platform-specific regulations, cannabis marketers must also be aware of the broader shift towards privacy-friendly advertising. This includes preparing for the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, updating marketing strategies to meet the growing consumer demand for data privacy, and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and CPRA.
The movement towards privacy-first marketing means that marketing teams must be particularly diligent about compliance when acquiring and activating cannabis customer data, and that they must vet all their partners and vendors to ensure that they display the same level of attention to privacy. At the same time, as more and more privacy-focused regulations pop up across the country, cannabis brands must continually monitor these regulatory developments to in order to avoid costly fines.
There you have it: By approaching cannabis marketing regulations at the federal, state, local, and platform levels, and by meeting the requirements of the overall advertising industry’s regulations, marketers are sure to cover all their regulatory bases.
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Interested in learning more about the cannabis marketing landscape? Check out Cannabis Marketing in the Roaring 2020’s to learn about who is buying cannabis, how to market to them, and what sets a cannabis campaign up for success.
You’ve just landed your dream job as an SEM professional, and your boss is asking you to deliver your “PPC campaign strategy”—you know, that brilliant, air-tight plan you put together to help your brand or client not only meet, but exceed their business objectives?
There's just one small problem: You don't have a strategy. In fact, while you may know a lot about PPC, you’ve never actually sat down and documented how you make PPC magic happen. Where do you start? There’s so much to cover and so little time, especially given the fact that developing a competitive PPC campaign strategy isn’t as easy as it used to be. Advertisers now have a number of ways to target their audiences, which makes distributing ad spend a challenge.
Don’t worry—we’ve not only organized the process of developing a PPC strategy into an easy framework, but we’ve also created a quick PPC strategy checklist to ensure the strategy you do eventually develop is an effective one.
In short, our five-step framework for an effective PPC strategy involves selecting the right platforms, targeting features, and ad types to deliver your message, and balancing your investment in each. If you’re ready to develop a more advanced PPC campaign strategy for your business, these 5 steps can help you get a head start. Let’s dig in!
Defining what you want to achieve with PPC is the most important part of building an effective campaign strategy. Getting clear on your goals will help you choose the platforms and ad types that are best suited for your marketing needs.
Consider these common PPC goals:
If your main goal is brand awareness, then social media and display ads are ideal for your strategy. If your priority is to generate leads, then you can explore Facebook’s lead capture ads. If your main goal is to drive sales, then most of your PPC investment should be in search or product listing ads (PLA).
Sophisticated PPC strategies use a combination of ad types and platforms to target their audience. First, determine your main goals and prioritize them. Then, use this information to decide which platforms and ad types you should invest in.
Next, let’s review how to target your audience with Google Ads PPC. The kind of audience you target and their point in the sales funnel will also tell you which advertising options you should invest in.
The key to success with Google Ads audience targeting is not targeting the most relevant keywords related to your business, but targeting based on intent. The keywords you bid for, the ads you display, and the landing pages you send people to all need to match the position individuals are at in your sales funnel.
There are three main categories of search intent keywords:
Now, most businesses can’t and shouldn’t target all these categories of keywords for PPC. The ones you focus on should depend on your business type and other marketing strategies. For example:
Of course, search isn’t the only PPC channel you can optimize for. There are several other types of audiences you can target on the Display Network, YouTube, and Gmail, such as:
When targeting large amounts of keywords, creating unique optimized landing pages for your ads can be a challenge. However, directing visitors to generic product pages or landing pages equates to wasted ad spend. Not only are site visitors less likely to convert, but their on-site behavior can also lead to lower Quality Scores, making reaching them through PPC even more challenging.
The most effective PPC managers draw a strong link between audience targeting and landing page optimization. The more relevant a landing page is to the initial search intent or audience demographic interest, the more likely it is that site visitors will click through, sign up, make a purchase, or otherwise take action.
Here’s an example of thoughtfully optimizing landing pages based on initial search intent: You searched for “freelance accounting software” and found an ad for Xero:
You click through and their landing page copy focuses on their value proposition for on-the-move freelancers, not business owners as a whole:
That level of message match—from the intent of the search query, to the carefully crafted ad copy, to the optimized landing page verbiage—provides a valuable user experience with high relevance that’s more likely to result in the user taking your desired action.
Once your audience targeting is set up and you’ve created your relevant landing pages, you’re ready to create and optimize your ads.
Your ads serve as the link between search intent/audience interest and the landing pages you’ve already optimized. The goal is to briefly illustrate your unique selling proposition and offer value. You’ll want to experiment using different copy, visual media, extensions, and other elements to optimize your ads.
For search campaigns, Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) make it easy to include a variety of headlines and description lines that Google will mix and match to create an ad that’s targeted toward what it knows about the user. The key is to include variety, so your headlines and description lines should have varied calls to action and value propositions. You can’t just rewrite the same headline and make it slightly different. Try to include as many keywords in your ad as possible and match it to your landing page content. You want the user to have a seamless experience from keyword to ad to landing page. Google will automatically show the top-performing ad creative the most often.
Beyond ad copy, elements like sitelinks, callouts, phone numbers, reviews, and location extensions are great ways to include more information in your ad and take up more room on the top of the page. At the same time, this will push your competitors further down in the results.
When you have enough data to make decisions, swap out the lower-performing ad assets (the headlines, description lines, and extensions) for new variants. Over time, you’ll improve your ad quality and your account performance.
As we discussed above, ad content optimization integrates better into the ad creation process when you use the right tools. The real focus of your analysis is identifying what keywords and targeting features help drive your campaign goals.
Here are some important metrics to consider for search, display, and/or social ads (depending on your campaign goals):
If your goal is lead nurturing, you may also want to take on-site engagement metrics, such as number of page views or new or returning visitors, into consideration.
Keeping track of key metrics can help you evaluate the relevance and effectiveness of your advertising elements (ad copy, targeting, landing pages, etc.). It can also help you understand which keywords and audience targeting strategies are most valuable for your unique business.
There are a lot of ways to optimize your PPC ads for conversions using data science. Once you have a good understanding of the best keywords and audience targeting, you can use those insights to implement advanced targeting strategies to improve your ROAS even more. Using query segmentation to prioritize revenue-driving keywords is one example of an advanced bid optimization strategy you can implement manually.
PPC strategy optimization is an ongoing process. Here’s a quick checklist to recap the steps you need to take to optimize your strategy.
These five steps are foundational to developing a competitive PPC strategy. The key is to identify at what points in the sales funnel you want to target your audience, choose the right platforms and ads to accomplish that, and then optimize your PPC advertising material. Over time, you’ll identify what elements of your strategy deserve the most investment to improve your ROAS.
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Have you heard the news? The future is cookieless, and it’s coming up fast—in the second half of 2024, to be precise!
To prepare for a world without third-party cookies, it’s important that members of the advertising industry understand what’s changing and embrace new ideas and collaboration. The success of any identity solution is heavily dependent on scale, and so partnering with an independent owner of a solution with the most scale—or, better yet, partnering with multiple—is likely to be the best option when the dust settles. Working as a group, evaluating options, and sharing principles is the best course we can take to minimize the impact on customers.
With that in mind, here’s a look at the current and future state of third-party cookie deprecation and how groups are working toward innovative identity solutions.
Yes, third-party cookies are on their way out. That said, it's not an all-at-once farewell: Firefox and Safari have already eliminated cookies, while Google, over the past few years, has announced, then delayed, then again delayed Chrome’s third-party cookie deprecation. Despite these postponements, the day will eventually come when third-party cookies are no longer supported in Chrome. However, the transition will be an incremental one, starting in Q1 2024 with about 1% of Chrome users, and progressing gradually from there.
The demise of third-party cookies stems from concerns over consumer privacy and data protection. 86% of people in the US say data privacy is a growing concern for them, and with consumers demanding more control over their online footprint, legislators have stepped in, enacting privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and CPRA. At the same time, tech giants and browsers are taking proactive steps to rebuild trust by putting an end to the cross-site tracking that third-party cookies enabled.
Cookieless tracking monitors user activity on websites without relying on browser cookies. These tracking tools allow marketers to measure cookieless click-through conversions, granting them the ability to track performance, report on campaigns, and maximize ROAS without compromising consumer privacy.
Unfortunately, there’s no “silver bullet” replacement for third-party cookies (yet). Savvy marketers are leaning into a mix of privacy-friendly solutions to minimize the impact of third-party cookie loss on their campaigns, including (but not limited to) cookieless tracking, first-party data, contextual targeting, anonymized data sources, premium inventory, and audience profiling.
New identity solutions have also emerged, offering ways to glean insights from and target messaging to audiences while adhering to privacy-first principles. What do these burgeoning identity solutions look like? Let’s dig in:
In February 2020, the International Advertising Bureau (IAB) introduced Project Rearc, a global initiative designed to get stakeholders across the digital advertising and media supply chain together to re-architect digital marketing in a consolidated effort to harmonize personalization and consumer privacy. And in June 2022, as part of this initiative, IAB Tech Lab released its Global Privacy Platform, a mechanism for transmitting consumer choice signals from websites and mobile apps to advertising technology companies.
Along with other industry leaders, Basis has been an active participant in Project Rearc—reviewing the proposals, evaluating specs, and providing feedback. It proposes rigorous technical standards and guidelines that inform how companies collect and use such an identifier so that:
LiveRamp introduced IdentityLink in 2016. The technology, now known as RampID, allows resolving hundreds of different identifiers for consumers used on devices and marketing platforms in a privacy-compliant manner. It doesn’t matter if data is offline or online, first-party CRM or third-party behavioral, online exposure data or mobile app download data—all of it can be tied back to a unique, privacy-safe identifier at the consumer level.
The digital media ecosystem is a dynamic one, with new methodologies, tools, and opportunities emerging every day. The third-party cookie has been a protagonist for the last 20 years, but it’s not the only character in this story. And with the third-party cookie going the way of MySpace, we are at the dawn of a new era for adtech—one filled with opportunity and room for innovation in the way we connect with our audiences.
Advertisers who focus on making the most of their first-party data and cookieless media alternatives, optimizing campaigns based on real-time learnings, and embracing identity solutions that are high-performing and privacy compliant, are sure to be well-positioned for the cookieless future.
As we go through these changes together, it’s important that industry players stay committed to working together, listening to the market, collaborating with regulatory bodies, adapting and developing new products, and keeping customers/users abreast of changes as they develop. If we can do that, we’ll all emerge from a place of strength and primed for success in our new, cookieless world.
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Want to learn more about how to embrace the cookieless future? Check out Beyond Third-Party Cookies: Your Guide to Overcoming the Identity Crisis.
