Contextual advertising 2021: trends and tendencies

What to expect and what to prepare for in 2021 Google Ads Innovations

Changes in requirements to advertising materials

Google Ads is tightening the requirements for advertisers and advertising materials, in particular clickbait in ads. So, from January 2021, ads will need to include information about the product or company. These changes should make advertising more transparent and reduce the number of unscrupulous advertisers misleading users.

Testing of fully automated campaigns

Google continues to systematically introduce automation at all stages of work with advertising campaigns. A new, fully automated campaign type, Performance Max, is already undergoing closed testing. It is assumed that the advertiser will only need to specify the purpose of the advert and add variants of elements for adverts, the algorithm will do the rest for him.

The main difference from smart campaigns in CMC is that Performance Max creatives will be shown on a variety of available platforms: search, CMC, Gmail, YouTube and Discover Feed. This type of campaigns brings us as close as possible to the coveted "Money" button, when the only thing that will be required from the specialist is to top up the account budget. But it's too early to tell.

Changes in the report on search queries

A few months ago there was a very important change in Google Ads, which affected every advertiser who connects search advertising. It's about the search queries report - there is much less data in it. This directly affects the effectiveness of campaigns, because the optimisation of advertising is to find untargeted, irrelevant queries and add new minus-words. Google stopped showing low-frequency queries, even if there were clicks on them. So, now we don't know where we spend part of our budget (sometimes this part goes up to 50%).

At the same time, the types of matching are expanding. Exact match is no longer exact, and phrase match has lost its meaning because the system selects "close variants". One of the solutions is to work out semantics in as much detail as possible at the stage of campaign preparation.

Google Analytics

There are more global changes in Google Analytics: there is Google Analytics 4 - a new type of resource. Its work is based on events instead of sessions and pages, as it was before.

AVSEO recommends setting up and installing the new GA4 on your site now so that the counter starts collecting data and you get used to it. You don't need to remove the previous Universal Analytics counter, it will continue to work in parallel with the new one.

All changes lead us one way or another to the total automation of contextual advertising. Systems have long hinted that users are not very good at setting up campaigns, so it's time to entrust the work to algorithms. We should expect a gradual transition to audience targeting and auto-targeting. Already now keywords mainly determine the topics and segments of the target audience, and then mathematical models are connected, which should find the best combination of "advertising creative - user" in each auction.

In the near future, humans will become robot assistants, at least in the world of contextual advertising. But that doesn't mean that everything will work perfectly without the advertiser's and specialist's participation. Behind the person will remain all the preparation or pre-click: analysis of the target audience, product and competitors; preparation of landing pages and setting up web analytics; correct setting up of tracking of all methods of lead generation and selection of targets for optimisation. There is no artificial intelligence that will do all the work for us. Ultimately, it is us who decide how well a tool works, formulate hypotheses and run experiments. We will definitely not be left without work. We need to learn to make friends with autostrategies, train them correctly and start trusting them.

If we talk about the most promising channels and sources of traffic, there are practically no changes on this front. Search advertising is still #1 for most advertisers, even with the heated auction. Network advertising is becoming more of a reach and media product, however, the profitability of RSNs and KMCs may well satisfy you. Both advertising systems are developing video advertising capabilities. So far, Google has the upper hand with its huge YouTube potential and Google Ads, which has not yet been fully tasted by Ukrainian users.

The year 2021 will be full of unexpected novelties from advertising systems. Be sure to follow the novelties together with AVSEO!