How is performance media changing in 2017? At True Interactive, we consider questions like that all the time. We have to. Our own performance depends partly on our ability to stay on top of the changing performance media landscape in order to be trusted partners to our clients. We surveyed our own team to find out what’s on their minds as we examine the changing nature of performance media. We’ve summed up our thinking below.
Three key themes emerge from our internal survey: the evolution of mobile, the increasingly sophisticated nature of attribution, and the rise of voice search. We see performance media strategies going through a mobile-first phase before ultimately entering a post-mobile phase. Meanwhile, attribution is getting more precise thanks to the development of better tools in discipline like paid search, and advances in voice search are challenging businesses to refine their paid and organic content for voice queries, which are much different from text-based queries. Read on for more detail:
- “We’re entering a post-mobile world. With mobile now accounting for 60 percent of all searches in the United States, marketers are becoming more comfortable with integrating mobile into their media planning and implementation rather than calling out mobile as its own emerging channel requiring a standalone paid media strategy. Maximizing the value of mobile certainly requires an understanding of mobile’s distinct attributes, but in 2017 our industry will continue to shed a fixation with ‘mobile first’ thinking.”
- “No More John Doe. It was not long ago that targeting focused primarily on finding the best keywords and honing in on the most optimal geo locations when trying to reach customers. Now through both SEM and social channels, advertisers can further narrow their customer search based on demographics including age, gender, education, and income, as well as interests, topics, purchasing behaviors, and device preferences, to touch on just a few. Based on data collected about your customers, there is also the option to target lookalike or similar audiences – potential customers who share characteristics similar to those individuals currently targeted. Testing various targeting options can help paint a picture of the ideal customer and make advertising spend more efficient. These refined targeting options have opened the door for smaller businesses with limited budgets to engage in online advertising as they are able to focus spend on a tighter subset of potential customers and stretch their advertising dollars.”
- “With the continued growth of mobile on search and social channels advertisers will need to begin evaluating the appropriate metrics for a mobile first world. Click through rates though vital to the industry will need to be reengineered with mobile users not having the same motivation behind clicks. The continued study of interaction will be weighed heavily in 2017 as advertisers will need to understand what ad formats and text will work best for users at all times of day, whether it be shorter for the work day when users glance at their phone for a quick break or creating a longer story that will carry the user throughout the day and eventually lead to a conversion. With this interaction rate and attribution will need to be viewed alongside click through rate to determine a brands true returns from mobile advertising efforts.”
- 2017 will be the year that digital marketers embrace audience targeting. I’m not just talking about social platforms and remarketing, but also for search. In 2016, we continued to refine strategies around Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) and Similar Audiences for Search. Both tactics give the opportunity to either exclude irrelevant audiences or to increase bids for more qualified leads. I believe keywords will still play a critical role for search marketers, but with CPC’s increasing, advertisers are looking for cheaper ways to reach relevant user types. Last year, audience targeting was something new that many people were just testing, but with the growing trend of a personalized ad experience, we can expect to see a dramatic increase this year.
- “The marketers that outperform their peers in 2017 will be focused upon utilizing analytics to optimize targeting. The publishers have altered the game so that by default ads will show to as broad a target as possible. Therefore, the skilled marketer will adjust and strive to narrow targeting layers in order to retain the most relevant audience. Efficiency is the goal and analytics will be the tool used to properly identify that refinement of targeting.”
- “The evolution of artificial intelligence is changing the way people search online. Voice searches are increasing due to a growing popularity of personal assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or Amazon’s Alexa. When consumers are speaking to these assistants, they are using a more natural language, thus altering their search behavior. As of right now, Google and Bing do not provide a way to track voice searches. Voice searches are translated into text and listed as regular search queries. At times you might see, ‘Siri, can you . . . ‘ or ‘OK Google’ before a search term, but that’s not always the case. Jumping into 2017, I predict that we will see more to come focused around artificial intelligence and voice-technology.”
We invite our readers to have a conversation with us about the direction of performance media. What trends do you see in the marketplace?
