2024 brings a surge in automation and optimisation across platforms, streamlining ad creation and enhancing performance. Google shifts towards entity-based searches, signalling changes in keyword match types. A funnel approach dominates marketing strategies, with Google venturing into demand generation. Remarketing evolves amidst the demise of third-party cookies, requiring data management for effective targeting. AI revolutionises ad creation and optimisation, promising easier, higher-quality, and better-performing ads. Stay ahead of these trends to maximise your marketing impact this year.

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Automation & Optimisation Going Hand In Hand

 
This year a lot of platforms will be rolling out more extensive automation and optimisation. From creating multiple text snippets to enhancing images, the aim will be to increase coverage from a single base ad and optimise it from there. This will be a black box operation, you won’t get insight or control and it will require spend to feed the learning algorithm before the optimisation kicks in.
 
If you know how to craft great ads, it’s a little bit of dumbing down; if you don’t, it’s definitely uprating your ad performance.
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Keyword Match Types – The LLM Impact

 
Google has shown a desire to move away from keywords, especially match types and into more like an entity search. You can see this in the Keyword Planner with volumes being identical for similar and related searches. It still has a way to go to actually be fully operational and useful (despite the hype), but it is the way of the future, whether we like it or not. This may be the year a match type disappears, or their usage becomes effectively redundant.
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Funnel Approach Goes Global

 
There will be more of a funnel approach this year. Google has moved into Demand-Gen, and also plays with the mid funnel with PMax, and search remains at the pointy conversion end (while also potentially being early in the piece, but that’s getting harder to identify). Meta will effectively live more in the awareness phase as its tracking has been cut off at the knees the last few years.
 
Build ads that sell at all points in the funnel, get used to generating demand.
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ATT, Remarketing & Death of a Cookie

 
Remarketing is going to be reshaped. You will need to share portions of your data in a private way to enable remarketing, which makes it more complex. You will not be able to rely on the ad providers being able to track your users. This means you need to strive to collect, keep and organise data on your customers. It’s going to be very difficult for anyone else to do it for you.
 
This is because the Third-Party Cookie is going away, Apple has also made significant strides to protect their users’ privacy. Affinity, segments and types are all going to get a big boost this year.
Light blue star icon with the number 5 in navy, representing a top 5 digital trend for content strategy and CRO in 2024.

AI Aiding Creation & Optimisation

 
I suppose I’d better mention AI as that’s going to have an impact on Paid Marketing this year. You may have heard of it.
 
So, AI is going to help people create ads by writing copy for them, creating or editing images. It will also help to generate different versions of those ads. For the ad sellers, it will allow them to create different versions of the ads submitted, as well as editing and optimising images / creatives. Finally, it will allow the targeting refinement to operate at a much higher scale this year. So, ads are going to be easier, better quality and better performing due to AI. Not bad.
Belmore Digital's Digital Trends 2024 guide by Jeremy Beckett, featuring a smartphone held over a road with an AI-powered network backdrop.

 

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