March 22, 2024
Paid media advertising sees many changes each year but remains a firm player in the eCommerce landscape continuing to drive revenue by evolving to changing behaviors in the market. Below are some of our top trends and predictions for 2024 and beyond.
Video content within paid media advertising continues to grow and play an important role for campaigns. This is especially evident within the eCommerce industry as 90% of shoppers state that video content helps them make purchase decisions.
There are some easy ways for you to jump on the video bandwagon, including Google Ads integration with YouTube, allowing you to easily add video content to your ads from the site. Google also offers an auto-generated video content option where they scrape image content from your website and merge them with assets from open image libraries to generate a video for you. However WMM does not recommend this option as it tends to produce low-quality, generic content.
Video content is also easy to incorporate into social media channels including video content in Meta ads via Reels, short-form and long-form video content. Studies suggest that ⅓ of users who engage with video content further engage with the brand. Optimizing ads for paid social channels can boost brand awareness and generate more conversions.
WMM video content creation recommendations:
As marketers we battle with increasing platform costs and lofty business goals, and this year we’re predicting to see increased CPC costs as competition is at an all time high. In 2023, compared to 2022, 61% of industries saw an increase in CPC within Google Ads.
WMM recommends that you focus on the things that you can control within campaigns:
On the plus side, the increase in CPCs will likely put off some competitors that are struggling in the paid media space and therefore level out the competition. As long as you have a plan in place that takes into consideration the CPC increases in 2024, it is not the time to pull back or you risk losing customers to new competitors entering the market.
As we’ve discussed, costs continue to increase year-over-year within the big players such as Google, Bing and Meta. However, there are plenty of other ways to reach your eCommerce audience outside of these platforms. We recommend that you diversify into other platforms and take advantage of less competitive spaces via Amazon and TikTok.
Amazon’s conversion ready audience is attracting more and more eCommerce advertisers each year, and is starting to chip away at the gap between the market leaders in the paid media market displaying rapid growth. Although Google and Meta have an advantage in terms of scale of audiences, Amazon ads has an advantage when it comes to intent to buy and provides access to audiences who are further down the sales funnel with Conversion Rates on average 12%!
TikTok is not a platform to be overlooked in 2024 for eCommerce businesses as users are not only spending time interacting with content but also converting. Its audience has seen rapid growth in recent years with 100 million U.S. monthly active users in 2023. It’s especially good at reaching a younger audience with studies suggesting that 40% of Gen Z prefer TikTok over Google and Instagram. Key categories within the platform include: beauty, fitness and home. Search ads on TikTok can be easily generated utilizing ads you are already running, and can appear in multiple placements within the TikTok SERP based on users search queries and audience signals such as historical behavior and ad relevance. Sounds a lot like Google ads to us.
Source: https://www.tiktok.com/business/en/blog/introducing-tiktok-search-ads-toggle
Incorporating AI technology into your paid media strategy is no longer a choice for marketers as 2023 saw changes firmly integrate within platforms including Paid Search and Paid Social, from Google Performance Max campaigns, Broad Match keywords, AI-generated ads and machine learning bidding solutions gaining importance and favorability from the platforms.
As these tools become more sophisticated, we are forced to rely on them more and more in order to compete and save time. However, moving into 2024 the need for the human touch prevails with the requirement to leverage the technologies available in order to maximize ROAS and differentiate from competitors. There are some downsides to the new AI machine learning technologies including:
WMM recommends you utilize AI automation within your paid media strategy combined with first party data and strategic human thinking in order to win in 2024. However, you should not solely rely on AI technology. Continue to be inquisitive and ask important questions of your campaigns.
Have they gone yet? We’ve lived under the threat of the deprecation of cookies since 2020 but is 2024 the year that Google Chrome finally acts on its warning to advertisers and gets rid?
Google is piloting its new approach by removing 3rd party tracking from 1% of its users and plans to roll out further to all users throughout the year. The removal of 3rd party cookie tracking could have some significant effects to marketers including:
We suggest you begin to invest further into your first party data collection via server-side tracking. For example, incorporate an audience management tool such as Adobe Audience Manager and set-up Google consent mode to help mitigate the loss of platform level data and allow you to continue to track users. With this data in hand you can pass it back into advertising platforms, for example, directly into Google Ads and Meta Business or via analytic platforms such as GA4 and differentiate from competitors.
In order to be able to continue to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, incrementality testing is the way forward. Incrementality testing is the statistical method used to determine the impact of a specific campaign on a desired outcome. It works by isolating the impact of a campaign and determining whether it has an incremental effect beyond what would have been achieved without the campaign. To run an incrementality test, you will need to divide your audience into two groups: test group (subjected to changes) and control group (no changes) and compare the behavior of the two groups. A good way to approach this is via A/B testing.
With the loss of audience cookie data it’s also a good idea to bolster your contextual advertising as this approach solely relies on website content and therefore doesn’t need user’s data in order to reach desired audiences.
In conclusion, to win at paid media in 2024 you will need to adapt to rising cost and cookieless challenges, diversify platforms and ad formats as well as incorporate AI automation technology into your campaigns, all carefully balanced with human direction and first party data. Those that sit back and take a more conservative approach run the risk of being overtaken by competitors who are keeping up with trends.
Reach out to WMM today to see how we can help you win in 2024.