In 2019, we saw record ad spend across Google’s Search and
Shopping properties — a signal that indicates more competition between brands to
show for search results.
One of the clearest signs of this is the increased competition for sponsored
placements during 2019’s biggest shopping holidays — Black Friday and the “Cyber
Five” weekend.
Another trend that advertisers should be mindful of in 2020
is Google’s expansion of upper-funnel inventory to reach customers earlier in the
shopping journey.
New Discovery ads, improvements to Showcase shopping ads, Gallery ads, and more are
all indicators that Google is paying serious attention to giving advertisers more
inventory to generate demand from the very beginning of the shopper’s
journey.
Brands should consider moving more investment to support their upper funnel
initiatives with these newer formats given that they have the resources to test and
optimize.
In their latest media report, Forrester predicts that
“advertisers will give up hypertargeting for a hyperfocus on creative,” and that
“creative adtech will improve ad quality and cross-channel storytelling as
cheap-looking, product-focused display ads decline.”
Higher-quality creative is essential for building a consistent visual experience for
customers across all of your digital properties, from your Search & Shopping ads to
your ecommerce website and social pages.
Google Shopping Actions was released in 2019, designed to
create a seamless shopping experience across multiple Google surfaces, which
includes a universal shopping cart and instant checkout for retailers that are in
the program. Retailers will likely see further updates to the program in
2020.
Google is promoting this as a streamlined, frictionless shopping experience for the
user.
Under Shopping Actions, Google will handle sales, support and returns, but you will
still be responsible for fulfillment–and that fulfillment must still integrate with
OMS.
Over the last year, we’ve seen Google make big strides in offering more capabilities for mobile app advertisers, specifically with Universal App Campaigns and the new Google Analytics for Firebase.
In 2019, Google retired Average Position in an effort to push users from focusing on average position reporting to impression share. As a result, this forced businesses to rely more on Google’s auto bidding feature.
The integration of online and offline performance is going to
be important in the upcoming year. By creating attributes for offline sales calls,
marketers can begin to understand the customer behind the call and what motivates
them.
From there, artificial intelligence can analyze calls and assign them value scores,
spread this data across your martech stack, and use that data to optimize your paid
search performance.
This will make it incredibly easy to segment your customers based on their
conversations and the outcome of the call.
Data is important, but unfortunately gathering it isn’t
always easy. There are multiple points to collect data from and hundreds of
thousands of tools to collect data with.
This will be less of a problem in the upcoming year. Increasingly powerful AI and
automation features will make it easier for Google’s algorithm to collect more
accurate data.
On top of that, it will help you understand this data better as well. Google’s
algorithm is now capable of predicting and correcting issues that can impact your
data, giving you a more accurate, holistic view of what’s going on in your business.
Amazon DSP — also known as the demand-side platform — is available
under Amazon advertising. DSP enables advertisers to programmatically buy video and ad
placements. Programmatic advertising uses data to decide which digital advertising spaces to
buy
and how much to pay for them.
Advertisers are increasing investment in the Amazon DSP, which allows brands to use Amazon
targeting capabilities in showing ads not only on Amazon owned-and-operated web properties,
but
also those that it does not control.
According to the Tinuiti Amazon Ads Benchmark Report, in Q3 2019, 32% of all Amazon DSP
spend
was attributed to ad impressions that appeared outside of Amazon owned-and-operated
properties.