“New Year, New You,” as the saying goes. But what about “New Year, New Media Strategy”? There is no better time to reflect than now to decide what changes need to be made for the year ahead for performance marketing. Our paid media team looks back at what they have learned in 2023, and how these insights can be leveraged for a record-breaking 2024. Below, are our New Year’s Resolutions for Paid Media:
Ever been working in a digital ad platform and see notifications that you should be making optimizations you weren’t planning? Or maybe you’ve heard from your platform reps that your account could be performing so much better if you changed tactics?
If these have caused you to second-guess yourself, it’s time to stop. Repeat to yourself: “I am the expert on my account strategy.”
Ad platforms earn money from advertisers, and account representatives are trained to sell advertisers on the platforms’ most profitable tactics– whether or not those are beneficial to your account or compatible with your strategy. Think for a moment: If you are segmenting audiences in Meta based on target personas or specifically targeted interest groups, why would Advantage+ targeting make sense? If your brand is mapping customers to specifically targeted messages based on long-tail keywords on Google, why would you add a broad match to your campaign?
The media suggestions that promote automated platform solutions often give you less control and insight, and therefore fewer opportunities for optimization. Meta strongly pushes Advantage+ targeting and creatives, for instance, but these often contrast with a brand’s color and font palette and can even go against company or legal regulations for messaging and targeting. (And, hello! Who is using neon green Times New Roman for their brand? A personal learning for us this year.) Meta Advantage+ also removes the opportunity to optimize creatives for a specific placement or audience segment.
If you or your client still feel lured by the promise of a 3-6% lower CPA from platform suggestions, consider this: We haven’t seen any direct evidence that a lower CPA is inevitable if you make the suggested changes. In fact, in some of our experiments, the automated solutions had over 100% higher CPA or failed to convert at all. We’ve even onboarded accounts where suggestions were implemented that didn’t make business sense, and it was clear why they weren’t converting. Did LinkedIn expand your audience to a lot of users from Fortune 500 companies when your target was small business? Is the Google Audience Network putting your children’s clothing line ads on tax accounting sites?
Those platform notifications, popups, reminders, and constant representative recommendations can be pesky, but you are the expert on your account’s strategy. Don’t wait for 2024, start now and dismiss those suggestions where you know they don’t fit.
LinkedIn ad costs are notoriously high, averaging between $5-$6 per click. Compared this to the average $1.72 for Facebook and the B2B CPC for Google Ads, LinkedIn is twice as expensive as other platforms. With such a higher cost, there can be a strong push to ensure ROI on the spend by focusing on conversion or lead-generation-based campaigns. But your conversions just will not be as high without an awareness campaign.
Our data shows that a re-targeting strategy will typically have a 50% higher conversion rate than a total conversion rate. The logic may be to drive awareness on lower-cost platforms such as Google Ads, and then focus on conversions on the platform. But the same reason LinkedIn is so great for B2B conversions (and therefore more expensive) also means it’s great for building awareness of your product and services within your desired demographic. True, if your potential customer uses a search engine to find you, they may be already in the market to purchase. But if your potential client has never heard of your product or service, they need to be informed of the product to know to even be in-market – and LinkedIn, with its built-in business purpose and detailed business targeting capabilities, is the superior place to do so when it comes to a B2B product or service. The CPC for LinkedIn is worth it – you will build awareness with a more relevant audience and create a better specialized re-targeting audience.
On June 30, 2022, Responsive Text Ads became the default ad type for Google Ads, with Bing Ads following suit shortly after. Expanded Text Ads continued to serve after the switch but could no longer be edited or updated. And despite a year & half of not being able to update or redirect my ETAs, they are still the top-performing creative across many of our campaigns. Informed by tightly themed KW groups, refined by straightforward A/B testing, and supported by conversion reporting; our ETAs were crafted and perfected by years of testing and optimization. By comparison, RSAs are meant to increase impressions and expand reach with little consideration for conversions or success metrics.
So, what is my plan of attack? Since we are limited to only 3 RSAs per ad group, I plan on utilizing 1 RSA as my evergreen while I use the other 2 for testing. My evergreen RSA utilizes at least 8 headlines and 2 descriptions and hopefully has a “good” or higher Ad Strength. Since clicks and conversions are not available at the asset level, my testing RSAs will only have 3-5 headlines and 2 descriptions (anything lower and the system will likely throttle impressions to the point of not generating data). Additionally, I may pin headlines or descriptions that I am particularly interested in collecting data for.
As high-performing assets are identified in my test RSAs, I will add them to my evergreen RSA. I will refine my evergreen to include the best-performing headlines and descriptions from the tests, as I trim out the assets with the lowest impression levels. While impressions are not my success metric, I know I will not generate conversions from an asset Google will not serve. As my evergreen is refined and performance improves, it will eventually show higher CVRs than my legacy ETAs. In 2024, I will retire my ETAs and finally allow them to ride off into the sunset.
One of the strongest tools we have in our playbook for upper-funnel campaigns is the ability to sequence ads in a specific order of our choosing. Ad sequencing, a tool available on both YouTube and Meta, allows us to tell our client’s stories by introducing audiences to the brand with a shorter video and then serving them longer videos that delve into our client’s value propositions or specific product features that they would like to highlight.
Ad sequencing is easy to set up in both the Google and Meta UIs and is a valuable tactic for driving users down the funnel. When tested, Ad Sequencing outperformed standard video targeting for media health metrics, showing higher VCRs (Video Completion Rates) and AVOC rates (Audible and Viewable on Completion). More importantly, Ad Sequencing significantly outperformed standard video targeting at driving aided awareness, consideration, and usage intent on both YouTube and Meta. Lastly, retargeting users who have previously been served sequenced ads has proven to be a strong tactic for driving bottom-of-the-funnel conversions at an efficient CPA (cost-per-acquisition.) For 2024, I promise to take advantage of ad sequencing and work with my clients to create compelling creatives that tell their stories in an optimal order.
Cheers to a better-than-ever media performance in 2024 – and beyond!