It’s a new year and a new decade, which, if its anything like the twenty-tens, will be filled with tons of changes on the digital advertising front. Majority of businesses now recognise that having an online presence is essential, however, a basic presence is simply not nearly enough for 2020. Now you have to pay to play.
Ensuring you are up to date with the top paid advertising trends for 2020 will ensure your brand achieves the right amount of reach to the most engaged relevant audience at the right cost per sale. Some of trends will require more time, some more strategy. But, if you want to keep working smarter while growing your business, the following digital advertising options could be exactly what you need.
1. Automation Profitation
If you’re already on top of your Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising management, then you’ll know there are already a lot of automation options within your Google Ads dashboard. In 2020 I expect yet more elements to be powered through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and managed through automation, with increasingly fewer choices for manual intervention in specific areas.
This doesn’t mean that human management is no longer required. But it does mean that you need to identify clear goals and have a broader strategy in place to help guide that AI to give you click-through predictions you can rely on and for automation to then aim for the optimal results.
Its also important to remember that whilst AI ad tools can crunch most things that can be turned into numbers more quickly and accurately than people, what it can’t do (yet!) is speak to people and truly understand their motivations, needs or psyche.
2. The Rise of Amazon in Paid Ads
Google is currently the undisputed majority share owner within the world of online paid advertising. These stats back up their position:
• Google’s PPC segment income was $32.6 billion between April and June in 2019, some 16% higher than the same period in 2018.
• Some 63% of people are more likely to click a Google paid ad than from another brand.
• The average ROI on Google advertise spending in 2019 was 20%, or $2 for every $1 spent.
While I expect that reputation to hold firm in 2020, by the year’s end its lead could be reducing. That’s because after a strong 2019, Amazon is utilizing its online strength and further expanding into digital paid advertising, both on and off its own sites.
Amazon is working to make use of a growing consumer trend where shoppers and online surfers increasingly want to make a purchase while browsing on a variety of social media sites. It’s worth looking at your paid ad strategies and plans now to incorporate this trend early, rather than part-way through the year when your advantage is lost.
3. Personalisation & Hyper-Targeting
While neither of these are a particularly new trend, they are going to be increasingly abundant in 2020. Indeed, research shows that some 33% of users will click on a paid search ad if it directly answers their question.
The reason online users are increasingly discarding general ads is largely driven by the saturation of digital advertising; online users are bombarded with ads, both paid and organic ones in search engines and while using social media.
To help your brand stand out from others and appeal to your target audience you need to create parameters that will send specific ads to users in specific situations. That means retargeting is one option, but making use of broader analytics that come from different platforms can help you target certain age groups in a specific geographical area, or adding seasonality.
However, to get personalisation right you need to know your audience well and then create ads that are relevant to specific segmented groups, which will encourage them to engage and increase your conversion rates.
4. Video Killed The…
The growth of video within paid digital advertising in the past few years hasn’t gone unnoticed. However, the success of video in advertising, particularly on mobile, has becoming increasingly clear:
• 53% of users engage with a brand after watching a video from them on social media.
• 93% of business say they’ve gained a new customer through the use of video on digital advertising.
• Some 88% of users will engage with a website that has video, than one that doesn’t.
This suggests if you want your business to achieve the next step in terms of growth during 2020, video could well be the right way forward. While you may baulk at the cost behind creating video-based content for ads, it’s also interesting to note that many digital video ads are created fom a company’s existing content, helping to minimize your initial investment. There are also stock video websites or sites such as Fiverr.com where low cost animators and video creators can be found.
5. “Alexa. Find Me Revenue”
Optimizing your paid ads for voice search is something more and more businesses are testing and perfecting. With smart devices such as Google Home and Amazon Echo products increasingly featuring in customer’s homes, predictions are that over 50% of searches in 2020 will be voice searches.
To ensure your business can take advantage of that, its more important than ever that all your paid advertising is also optimized for voice search. One way to do this is to update your keyword searches by adding conversational phrases relevant to your business, messaging, products or services. Or, as voice searches are typically phrased as questions, that means using words such as ‘how’, ‘best’ and ‘what’ in your content to show that its useful and answers questions.
It’s also important to remember that voice searches are typically longer than text ones, so your key phrases should reflect that. Another voice query detail to consider is locality; people who are driving somewhere who use voice search will probably want search results relevant to specific locations, so keep that in mind with your content creation too.
6. Privacy and Transparency
If anyone thought that online users would begin to forget about prominent data scandals from the past couple of years, they’d be wrong. With GDPR popping up all over the place, the public are more informed than ever about data privacy and they want to be confident that any company they engage with is upfront and keeping their data safely used, stored and deleted.
While this might not seem totally relevant in terms of paid digital advertising trends, its something all brands should address. This can be done by including details on data privacy and usage within your advertising. Even if it’s just a link to a page on your site that give all the details they might want to know, this is something that can help encourage a good reputation, greater engagement and ultimately, more sales. Also ensure that any landing pages comply with any and all relevant GDPR rules.
Data Sources:
Google advertising revenue
63% of people to click on Google
Average ROI
33% of people click on paid search ads that answer their query
53% of user engage with a brand after video & 93% of business
88% of users engage for longer
50% of all searches in 2020 will be voice searches