Finding out what changes will occur in the world of contextual advertising in 2021. Key trends, key changes, and skills that advertisers will need in the near future.
What has changed in contextual advertising in 2020?
Last year Yandex and Google paid a lot of attention to the development of smart technologies. They made it possible to add payment functions to Yandex.Direct and Google Ads, not by clicks, but by conversions, and to offer new ad formats in their services (for example, on YouTube).
The approach to creating advertisements began to change, and many campaign functions were automated. In the future, these trends will only gain momentum and become popularized.
Top Anticipated PPC Trends of 2021
Let’s move on to the changes ahead for targeting marketers, marketers, and PPC professionals in 2021.
Increased demand for ML technologies
Machine Learning technologies have grown from being something new and incomprehensible to being a must-have technology in contextual advertising. Only an extremely blinkered and orthodox marketer will deny the influence of ML on promotion tools.
Now ML-technologies are used in Yandex.Direct to create automatic promotion strategies. The service interface provides tips for optimizing advertising campaigns and increasing their effectiveness.
There will be more and more of these elements, and machine learning will make its way into all areas of advertising.
Diffusion of automation
Gradually, the control over the situation will be taken away from marketers and targetologists. Automated promotion systems through contextual advertising are increasingly bringing real positive results. They began to be used by specialists in the field of advertising, and not only those who cannot cope with manual settings.
There is a chance that artificial intelligence will learn to cope with the selection of an audience better than humans. Machine learning, coupled with massive amounts of data, will enable computers to anticipate the desires of users even before they go online. So now you need to retrain and interact with new technologies, and not count on the fact that they will disappear into oblivion.
New roles for marketers and targeting experts
In connection with the introduction of ML technologies, there will be a redistribution of responsibilities between humans and computers.
A living advertising specialist will deal with:
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audience and product analytics,
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selection of USP and ad units that will be displayed to users,
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development of advertising strategies,
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suggestion of hypotheses,
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setting up analytical systems,
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selection of ad formats for specific products,
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evaluating the effectiveness of the selected advertising campaigns and individual solutions,
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quality control of landing pages.
At this time, the robot will do:
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selection of audience and semantics,
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setting up targeted advertising,
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creating advertisements,
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optimization of existing campaigns.
The list of tasks for the machine came out modest, but the successful solution of each of them is extremely important for promoting the product as a whole.
Deeper implementation of end-to-end analytics
Omnichannel is one of the main trends in modern marketing. Marketers not only combine several channels of information into one, but also try to track the entire customer journey from appearing on the network to converting into profit.
This approach is also facilitated by modern tools aimed at deeper tracking of the audience and their online behavior.
This is important, since contextual advertising is far from the only option for a user to interact with a brand. Using only it, it will not be possible to form a correct opinion about the effectiveness of the current advertising campaign.
New ad formats
Automation will allow not only to simplify the work on promotion in general, but also free up time for marketers to refine aspects that were previously given less attention. For example, the quality of advertisements.
The ad must grab attention, deliver the right message to potential customers, and communicate beautifully about the brand’s services. With the growth of competition and the development of the Internet, you have to generate even more sophisticated and catchy ad units in order not to miss out on a potential client.
Improving voice search
The number of voice requests from users is constantly growing. Advertising professionals should understand that voice searches are significantly different from text searches. Queries are quite long, they use synonym phrases associated with primary keys, but with a much lower frequency.
Because of this, we have to expect the improvement of technologies for recognizing queries and displaying results for similar key phrases. But given the rise in popularity of voice search in general, the rise in popularity of related technologies won’t be long in coming.
Spreading audience targeting
Instead of selecting an audience by keywords and basing the entire advertising campaign around search queries, targeting of certain groups of users according to interests and intentions is increasingly used. The corresponding categories of settings appear in Google Ads and Yandex.Direct.
Also, the growing popularity of audience targeting is facilitated by the reduction in the amount of information about users’ search queries in the Google Ads system. Mastering new practices will allow us to adapt to changing conditions for obtaining data and reduce dependence on information about users.
Increased demand for video ads
Both Yandex and Google in 2020 presented many new products related to video advertising. The first has vertical videos for mobile devices, non-skippable videos with ads, and other innovations. The second added new types of YouTube ads, including voice-overs.
Analysts believe that the number of video ads will continue to increase in 2021. While this niche is still free enough, beginners can master the new format and gain an edge over competitors. In addition, there is time to learn how to properly spend funds specifically for this type of ad.
How will entrepreneurs have to act?
PPC professionals will have to take a fresh look at many challenges and pay more attention to aspects that were previously not a priority. They’ll have to …
Scale ad campaigns
This is necessary to collect more information. A large-scale advertising campaign will allow you to collect a critical mass of indicators necessary to accelerate the selection of an audience and optimize promotion.
This helps to “saturate” the machine learning system with the necessary information to increase the efficiency of its work (automatic search for target audience and targeting). And sending large amounts of data to search engines helps improve the performance of automated strategies.
Given the progressive expansion of ML technologies in advertising, the need to collect large amounts of data for “artificial intelligence” cannot be ignored.
Switch to auto strategy
Despite the fact that some experts are skeptical about automatic strategies, the transition to them can be considered one of the main trends and the most preferred solution for the development of advertising in 2021.
Skeptics believe that this type of promotion can be costly for advertisers, allegedly Yandex will create more favorable conditions for itself. But this is not the case. It is profitable for Yandex to grow the market, and not destroy it, taking away all investments from there in an instant. Also, some users consider automatic strategies to be ineffective, but the previous year proved otherwise. Auto-strategies show positive results and often reach the level of “human” tuning.
Leverage more data in analytics systems
Machine Learning technologies work really well and show impressive results in terms of conversions only with a sufficient amount of input data. Everything should be used, including information about costs and clicks from various ad systems.
Sometimes you even have to use micro conversions as a source of information for setting goals in services like Yandex.Metrica. However, in this case, you need to monitor the correlation coefficient between micro and macro conversions.
Change the way you think about creatives and unique selling propositions
Here we turn to automation again. It will handle most of the semantics tasks. At this time, contextual advertising specialists should pay more attention to creating more effective unique selling propositions.
Standard solutions and clichés won’t work. In 2021, it is necessary to create creatives with specific proposals so that there is no ambiguity in the communication between the brand and users. It is important that a potential buyer from one block of contextual advertising clearly understands the brand position, the service offered and the benefit for himself personally.
Improve the quality of landing pages
In 2020, the cost of attracting people to landing pages (landing pages) has increased. In this regard, it is necessary to pay more attention to the conversion rate of such sites. To do this, we need to direct more efforts to optimize not only contextual advertising, but also the landing pages to which this ad leads.
Instead of a conclusion (checklist)
That’s all for now. Let’s repeat the general theses and finish:
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It is important not to reject automation, but to master new mechanisms, entrusting more and more tools and functions to robots.
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It is important to create more engaging and clearer trading applications so that the user instantly has a positive impression and a sense of benefit when they see the ad.
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When creating new advertising campaigns, you will have to take into account the voice requests of users.
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We need to collect more information and use it to train automated systems.
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Landing pages of 2021 should be even more efficient in terms of conversion, as their maintenance has become too expensive.