2018 Takeaways
By Raymond Reid (CEO) | May 15, 2019 | Opinion
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SEO is Still Unappreciated
SEO remains one of the most under-appreciated areas of focus for marketers. The value of effective SEO is clear yet because it takes time to see the results it directly competes against a marketers desire for immediate return on all marketing expenditures and has lead to marketers skimming past it and expecting paid media alternatives to compensate for the shortcomings of their SEO. In short, the value of SEO is that it is the most efficient and effective method for driving conversions compared to all other paid media options and should be the first priority for all marketing expenditures.
Search Engine Marketing
One of the most fundamental issues that still exists with paid search are poorly structured accounts. This leads to an inability to correlate performance due to mis-categorize keywords causing misleading insights from the aggregation of branded, generic, and contesting keywords into a single campaign. This mis-categorization has not only significant performance and budget implications but also makes it nearly impossible to identify what is causing a campaign to under perform.
Metrics
Verify First, Trust Second – Whether a result of fraud, improperly tagged creative, landing pages, conversion points, and / or improperly or incomplete analytics tracking it is increasingly difficult to trust the metrics that marketers are receiving from their agencies, media suppliers, and even there own internal data. In 2018 it became clear that reported metrics should not just be trusted as reported and that marketers need to ask more questions of sources to prove that reported metrics can be believed.
Ad-tech Irrelevance
Despite the love for the minutiae of differentiating factors between ad-tech platforms that industry professionals have, the reality is that in a consolidating marketplace which leaves the choice of platforms down to Google, Facebook, and Amazon the days of celebrated ad-tech platforms and vendors (i.e. DSP’s, DMP’s, SSP’s etc.) is over. With Google and Facebook capturing more than 60% of advertising dollars and an increasing % from Amazon, there is increased pressure on back-markers to find ever cheaper and increasingly suspect inventory to drive clicks, which then leads to questions about the quality of the audiences those back-markers are delivering.
More Strategy, less tactics
Whatever the drivers are, it has become apparent that marketers have become more focused on short-term tactics versus the achievement of long term strategies. This has lead many to make a trade-off that prioritizes short-term paid media efforts in an effort to offset the lack of investment in the development of assets and content to drive engagement with consumers. Paid media is a great method for reaching and targeting consumers but should only be activated once the checklist of other, more efficient and effective, opportunities have been maximized. This will lower the overall cost of acquisitions and improve consumer satisfaction with a brand.
We have come a long way in using technology to be able to make advertising more efficient and effective, however perhaps the time has come to reduce our reliance on technology and return to thinking and planning not just what technologies to use and where to target but perhaps more fundamentally why. I have long advocated that technology was the key to improving advertisings relevance but through the events of the past year I have grown more suspect of the technologies and their use and look forward to the year ahead in which we ask harder and more thoughtful questions about how we help brands reclaim the trust that the use of technologies and platforms have eroded. It will be an interesting year ahead for sure.
Sincerely,
Raymond Reid
Founder | CEO, advertience Inc.
