Adriaan Brits, who is a digital marketing consultant and a popular course author for Linkedin learning, provided us with a glimpse of what pay per click advertisers can expect in 2017, with five specific predictions for the market.
Conversion rate optimization will become more important:
With better tools in place and the large ad networks offering more targeting criteria, conversion rate optimization will be the key differentiator between businesses that are successful with pay per click – and those who simply cannot hack it. It is a science rather than a game of chance.
Remarketing will grow significantly:
Now that businesses have seen proof of better returns with remarketing and went through most major teething problems with conversion rate optimization, many will be more interested to increase their remarketing budgets in an effort to reconnect with visitors who left their site after meeting behavioural criteria: For example those who browsed for more than 2 minutes or went as far as to load up their shopping cart without completing the transaction.
Massive refunds will be claimed against accidental and invalid traffic:
Adriaan says that his agency likes to put back money in the accounts of advertisers. He claims that advertisers are now demanding more transparency from ad networks and that more tools are now available to distinguish valid paid traffic from accidental or invalid traffic. This means that the tendency to bill for hundreds of visitors who click on a mobile ad by mistake, is something of the past, since his agency are now working with card providers to report these charges as unauthorised transaction.
B2B targeting across more platforms may be closer than you think:
Already, the Linkedin platform provides the option to reach decision makers based on their roles. He thinks that after the Microsoft acquisition, marketing analysts and campaign specialists should watch closely to see if Linkedin abilities will be rolled out across other partner networks: “If users of a B2B platform can be tracked on search engines in the same way that Facebook is tracking it’s users on Instagram, then you will see a breakthrough in B2B marketing”.
Media buying software targeting multiple platforms will be a game changer:
As marketers seek to acquire more inventory and evade price elasticity, they will seek to also support other platforms like Bing. Yet to maintain the workflow across many different platforms, single integrated software solutions will evolve to become a necessity for big players.