5 online advertising trends you should implement today

Voice search, diversification of activities and artificial intelligence are just some of them

We're halfway through the year and the trends in digital marketing keep changing and building. Although Bulgaria is a very small market for the technology giants that dictate the trends, the changes are felt quite seriously on home territory, not to mention the entire Balkan Peninsula. If you want to keep up with the trends or just "check your watch", see the highlights for 2023 below.

1. Voice Search

Voice search is not something new under the sky, but the increase in its use is. Global trends indicate that this type of search is most used for retail of goods and services, otherwise known as B2C. Furthermore, global studies show that the smart speaker market will be worth $6.5 billion by the end of the year. And in addition, according to SerpWatch, three out of four American households are expected to own a smart speaker by 2025. In Europe, we're running about 6-8 months behind. For Bulgaria, it's about mid-2026.

Judging by the statistics above, it is quite logical to conclude that voice search is expected to be an important part of consumer behavior. Another trend that is expected to accompany them is voice search for local and national businesses.

Perhaps you are wondering how to prepare for this trend? It's actually not as hard as you might expect. Here's what's important: make sure your Google Ads titles and descriptions are written in conversational language , the way consumers would search for them. Use natural and conversational language as much as possible. A good option is to include questionsthat users are searching for. This will increase your conversion chances.

It's also a good idea to check your Google Business Profile (formerly My Business) page regularly for updates. Be sure to fill out your profile as thoroughly as you can, and pay attention to opening hours, especially on public holidays. This makes it much easier for users, and at the same time, incorrectly entered hours are one of the easiest ways to accumulate negative reviews.

Of course, it's okay to share posts, photos and other useful information. If you're having trouble scheduling these, you can take a look at the Loomly and Social Pilot tools. With their help, you can plan posts like new events or offers in advance.

2. Search by images

Functionality that is gaining more and more popularity, not only globally, but also in our country. More and more users resort to image search in order to find what they want as quickly and easily as possible. The trend is to the greatest benefit of all businesses related to fashion and beauty products. Clothes, shoes, accessories, even beauty treatments are increasingly being searched for not directly in search results, but directly in image rankings.

Let's not forget Google Lens, still not so popular option in Bulgaria, but with a seriously growing trend in the States. When clicking on Google Lens, the user can either upload an existing image or take a picture. Based on the image from the user, the search engine starts looking for websites that have similar images. Of course, the goal is to make the search even faster and more efficient. Google says that major improvements to the functionality are expected in the coming years.

To keep up with this trend, it's important to have a library on your site that contains images of all your products or services. However, this is far from enough. In order for your images to rank in the visual results during a search, be sure to add metadata to each image.

3. Diversification

As of 2022, Google is still the most popular search engine worldwide. According to Statista, it attracts around 89 billion visits per month, while Facebook or Amazon get "only" 2.9 billion and 5.6 billion respectively.

Given this information, it is only logical that the competition for advertising space in the tech giant is also the greatest. In contrast, smaller search engines are starting to enjoy increasing interest from advertisers. This is due to less competition and correspondingly lower cost of advertising.

For example, global visitor traffic to Bing - the second most used search engine after Google - was at least 1.2 billion per month in the last quarter of 2022. It's also worth noting here that over the past 6 years, Bing has seen an increase in its revenue from advertisers. In 2022, the second-largest search engine managed to generate $11.59 billion worth of ad revenue.

That being said, this year is a good time to consider diversifying your ad campaigns across different search engines. Besides the ones already mentioned, other options are Microsoft Advertising, and why not Amazon. The latter, of course, is not a search engine, but is a good option to test. Why?

When consumers use a search engine to look for a product, they have not always made a final purchase decision. Sometimes they are just doing research. With Amazon, the situation is slightly different. Most consumers who use the platform have already made a purchase decision and use the site to find what they are looking for at a bargain price. That is, the majority of users have already made a purchase decision and are on the final step of completing it.

4. Artificial Intelligence and Automation

Automations are nothing new under the sun. However, they are becoming an increasingly relevant trend, especially for large businesses operating in multiple markets that want to optimize the performance of their teams. More and more businesses are looking for automated solutions to help them not only with regular tasks, but also with competition research, performance tracking, rankings, etc.

Speaking of AI, artificial intelligence is not only making more and more serious inroads into digital marketing, but has been used extensively since the beginning of this year. Can you guess what we mean? Meta's Advantage+ shopping campaigns use AI to create just that. The same goes for Smart and Performance Max campaigns in Google ads.

Although ChatGPT is not artificial intelligence, but a well-trained chat bot, it can also be used to automate some of the activities of businesses. How ChatGPT can be useful for online stores

5. Smart bidding

As mentioned above, smart campaigns and bidding are now live and if you haven't tested them yet, we highly recommend you do so as soon as possible.

In addition to the keywords in the matching campaigns, bidding strategies in the auctions are an important factor, as is the budget. Smart or intelligent bidding in auctions removes much of the question marks that often arise regarding the bidding of advertising budgets. It is a set of different search engine bidding strategies (bids) that use artificial intelligence specifically to improve campaign performance and, consequently, results.

Let's get back to the substantive topic. Using the statistics it gets from user behavior, the smart bidding model can be a useful tool to help you identify the best budget almost right the first time. Which is a huge help for anyone struggling to get better search engine results.

And here we share a rumor that is unofficial, but we'll share it with you anyway. It is expected that manual bidding on search engines will soon be completely abolished. So if you haven't tested it yet and don't know how smart bidding works, we recommend you check it out soon. Again, when this will happen is still unknown.

Best practice: if you're wondering whether to test the option, keep in mind that it's good to have a minimum of 15 conversions per month for the last 30 days per campaign. I.e. if you have a campaign that has generated 20 orders in the last 30 days is a great option to test. But if it has only generated 5 - you better not throw your budget to the wind.

A perfect example is the Google Performance Max campaign that replaced Google Smart Shopping in Q3 2022. It allows advertisers to upload images or videos to a relevant channel such as YouTube, Gmail or Google Maps. Google's machine learning technology will then test the combinations that will work best for your campaigns. The platform will create the ad mix based on real-time buyer preferences and channel intent. In other words, you combine keywords, images, and videos, and the artificial intelligence just decides which user to show what to and in which channel.

All sounds good so far, but I can't help but share with you something to be on the lookout for, especially if you're advertising in large global markets like the United States of America.

Watch out for fraudulent clicks

PowerTraffick reported that in 2022, 33% of ad clicks were fraudulent. This is proving to be a big problem for advertisers who generate millions in spend each month on ppc campaigns. Some of them even developed their own calculators to estimate what their losses per month are from such clicks.

Here it is good to clarify that this is not always the work of a competitor who is trying to "drain" our advertising budget. And such cases exist, but that is another topic. Sometimes users click by mistake and close the site immediately, which increases the bounce rate. Others click on their own social media ads so they can artificially change the stats as if there is more traffic. So your best bet is to keep track of real traffic through Google Analytics.

These are the most important trends in advertising campaigns according to us, the ADvantage digital agency team, to pay attention to as soon as possible. If you haven't done so already, take a look at them again, think about which one will be the most useful for your business and start with that one. And if you have any questions or need help managing your ad campaigns, contact us.

See you soon! :)