[Updated for 2023]
Digital media is constantly changing, prompting marketers to change their strategies to uncover new opportunities and keep pace with the competition. Even a subtle change by digital advertising channels can dramatically affect audience responses and results. Facebook and Google, two behemoths in digital paid media, have made significant changes over the last few years and will continue to do so. . How will this affect digital advertising content and strategies in 2023?
Introducing Facebook Advantage+ Shopping
Facebook launched Facebook Shops back in 2020, allowing businesses to sell products directly through the Facebook platform. They recently upgraded the platform with Advantage+ Shopping, which “enables ecommerce and retail direct-to-consumer and brand advertisers to potentially achieve better performance, greater personalization and more efficiency” through fully automated campaigns.
Businesses can set up Advantage+ campaigns to allow Facebook to optimize the campaign settings to maximize returns. This allows businesses and marketers to save time by reducing the manual inputs needed, and streamlines the conversions. Advantage+ will also run campaigns specifically for catalog ads and app installs, and automatically optimize your creative assets.
Improved Facebook Reporting Features
Because of privacy changes worldwide, Facebook reporting was shaken up for a bit. Moving away from the Facebook Pixel and into 2023, they have updated and improved the way ad reporting is done. Facebook has introduced the new and improved Facebook Conversions API (CAPI). This tool has always been helpful for advertisers who want to accurately track their conversions, but now it’s essential for Facebook advertisers who want to strengthen their strategy in a privacy-first world. The CAPI is a form of server-side conversion tracking. Instead of a piece of code that goes on your website, user behavior data is collected but stored on your server (rather than in the browser), and the API connects the server to Facebook’s.
The CAPI will be essential to advertisers when cookies are gone and there is no other way to track conversions and ad performance data. CAPI also captures the important bottom of the funnel activity. Behaviors and actions important to customer conversions don’t always happen on your website. CAPI allows you to send events and data happening on your app, free tool, or offline and recorded in your CRM through to Facebook for ad optimization and improved performance.
Cost Per Lead Increases for Google Ads
Wordstream’s recently released benchmarks report of Google Ads revealed that 91% of industries saw an increase in cost per lead. 21 of 23 industries saw an increase in cost per lead (CPL) year over year, with an average overall increase of 19%. This is significantly higher than 2021’s increase of 5%, in contrast to 2020’s decrease of 4%. However there was an increase of 21% in 2019.
According to Wordstream, the data suggests that factors like high prices due to inflation and ads showing for low commercial intent queries have led to a decrease in conversion rates and therefore an increase in CPL.
The End of Similar Audiences
Starting in May 2023, Similar Audiences will no longer be available to add to new campaigns or ad groups in Google Ads. In August 2023, Similar Audiences will be removed from all campaign targeting.
Similar Audiences was added to Google Ads nearly a decade ago to complement advertisers’ reach of their remarketing audiences. However, due to privacy policy changes affecting marketers worldwide, Google announced in November of 2022 that they will be “building more durable and effective audience strategies in Google’s ads platforms.”
The New Era of RSAs
In 2016, Google doubled the size of its standard text ads with Expanded Text Ads (ETAs). In 2018, Google added an extra headline and description to all your expanded text ads. However, Google ended ETAs in June of 2022, now requiring advertisers to lean on Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) as the new default ad type. RSAs allow advertisers to provide multiple pieces of different text for Google to put together to build the ad that loads on the SERP for every search. This is a machine-learning format that some advertisers complain takes away from the art of PPC and limits brands’ control of their ads’ messages and testing processes. Fans of RSAs rave about the potential to serve over 40,000 unique variations of an ad with enough assets, which one person in charge of ads may have never thought of. Whether you love them or hate them, RSAs are now the way for 2023.
WRAPPING UP 2023 CHANGES IN PAID MEDIA AND PPC
Understanding and embracing the changes coming to Facebook and Google will be essential to marketers in 2023 and beyond. While some of the changes are likely to cause you to make adjustments to your strategy, they will ultimately result in more creativity and a better response rate. In the end, that’s what should matter to marketers. If you want results for your clients and campaigns, get in touch with the digital marketing team at Ironmark. We’re ready to help.
