Digital marketing has been the buzzword and service that has evolved significantly, especially over the past decade. In 2010, the concept of digital marketing had 3 main components. In India, if you wanted to be an effective digital marketer, you needed to be knowledgeable about “Google AdWords and Search Engine Optimization (more link-centric and less content-centric at that time and age). Also, publisher display campaigns were popular and preferred by evolved advertisers back then. So as a brand, if you covered all 3 of these, you were already considered an evolved advertiser. The type of media inventory buying during those times was focused mainly on CPM or CPC with publisher, AdWords platforms or any other support.
In 2012, Facebook started gaining more popularity in India, e-commerce companies started entering and the Google Ads ecosystem started evolving towards results-based marketing. Not that digital businesses were profitable back then, but they were becoming more and more popular. Still, most spending used to be pushed toward marketing efforts driven by the visibility or awareness of big brands.
In 2013, a new generation of people started spending more time on their phones; thanks to Instagram and its growing popularity, digital interactions flourished and everyone used their phones more widely. Due to the convenience and ease of use, the influx of users into the digital ecosystem was phenomenal. At the same time, the psychological influence of channels like Instagram and Facebook, such as FOMO, the fear of missing out, began to manifest in digital growth.
The influx of so many new users and the growth of advertiser spending on online platforms allowed the rise of impact-based and results-based bidding strategies. In 2016, Google AdWords was mature enough to move towards goal-based Smart Bidding. The increase in the number of signals about users and the time spent on the platforms gave the platforms more information about the behavior of the users. This allowed the platform’s algorithms to perform at their best and improve their machine learning models to help advertisers find more people who displayed similar behavior. Apps became a huge part of internet and content consumption, not limited to social networks. Audience-based advertising came on the foray and gained a lot of momentum after the induction of machine learning algorithms.
The rise of lookalike audiences, customer targeting campaigns, and lookalike audience concepts allowed advertisers to integrate new machine learning models to find new audiences similar to people who exhibited a significant action (eg, a purchase or a subscription).
In 2022, the reality of this business and the considerations of online advertising have changed dramatically. Today, the advertiser has the option to focus on bottom-of-funnel metrics like (sales, revenue, ROAS, leads, conversions, etc.) of advertising platforms. Two of the largest platforms: Google and Facebook allow advertisers to optimize campaigns with multiple objectives related to business results. In addition, the sensitivity of advertisers to use their 1St Match data to reach existing customers and find customers like the profitable ones on your list has also increased. The various new platforms allow this functionality to optimize the outcome of your ad spend for a desired business action. So more and more advertisers want to focus on an ALWAYS ON performance marketing strategy that is primarily dedicated to business results.
Depending on business maturity and short- and long-term goals, any business today should allocate 20% to 80% of their digital media budgets to performance marketing. It will be interesting to see the impact of this in the cookie-less world.
The opinions expressed are personal.
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