The 6 Essentials of a Successful Paid Media Strategy in 2022

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If you’ve been following along over the past year or two, these paid media trends shouldn’t come as a surprise. Then again, surprises seem to also be a trend in and of itself, so stay on your toes!

Review and reset benchmarks
Build a first-party-first strategy
Stay on top of advanced tracking technology
Test more paid media channels
Be a steward of automation
Master responsive search ads

The 6 essentials of a strong paid media strategy

1. Review & reset benchmarks

Let’s finish off with a recap of the six essential ingredients of a successful paid media strategy:
See our full responsive search ad cheat sheet here.

This also ties closely to the trend toward more automation (especially by Google) in 2021. Some advertisers have noted they do not find as great of performance with RSAs and so, it is no surprise that some have held off on fully jumping into RSAs. At this point, though, the transition is inevitable so it benefits advertisers to place a heavy focus on creating and improving RSAs to ensure that they are putting their best foot forward.
This also ties closely to the trend toward more automation (especially by Google) in 2021. Some advertisers have noted they do not find as great of performance with RSAs and so, it is no surprise that some have held off on fully jumping into RSAs. At this point, though, the transition is inevitable so it benefits advertisers to place a heavy focus on creating and improving RSAs to ensure that they are putting their best foot forward.
This also ties closely to the trend toward more automation (especially by Google) in 2021. Some advertisers have noted they do not find as great of performance with RSAs and so, it is no surprise that some have held off on fully jumping into RSAs. At this point, though, the transition is inevitable so it benefits advertisers to place a heavy focus on creating and improving RSAs to ensure that they are putting their best foot forward.
Single-platform advertisers, on the other hand, or advertisers that have the majority of their eggs in one bucket, struggle to be agile. In instances where that platform does not perform as well as it used to, it is hard to heavily reinvest elsewhere until you have had a chance to test and gather data.

How to do it

Implement the Facebook Conversions API: The power of the Facebook Pixel is dwindling. Start using the Facebook CAPI now to minimize gaps in your reporting.
Import your offline conversions: Google’s OCI helper tool walks you through the process of getting your offline conversion data into Google Ads so you can find similar, high quality leads. Provide your information and it will put together a customized implementation plan with a progress dashboard and everything.
Set up Google ads enhanced conversions: This is Google’s way of providing cross-device conversion tracking without cookies. You can set it up manually with Google Tag Manager or sitewide tagging, or via API. Learn how it works in our coverage here.

Last but not least, the Google Ads portion of your paid media strategy needs to include RSAs. Though advertisers can continue to use existing expanded text ads (ETAs), including pausing and reactivating existing ETAs, new ETAs cannot be created after June 2022.

4. Test more paid media channels

Facebook announced that it would be investing in a multi-year initiative focused on privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) in collaboration with other organizations including the Partnership for Responsible Addressable Media (PRAM), the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). One such technology is private lift measurement, which it has been testing and plans to roll it out to advertisers this year.
In this post, I’m going to cover the six essential ingredients you need in your paid media strategy this year if you want to avoid failure. They include:
To collect more first-party data from your audience, follow these tips:
With new variants on the rise, we could see another totally unique year or we might see trends that resemble prior years, whether that be 2021 or pre-COVID times. The reality is that most of us do not yet know what to expect, so we make use of the data that we have and we revisit it frequently.
For example, with many advertisers scaling back budgets in the wake of COVID in 2020 while social usage was increasing at the same time, CPMs dropped significantly for advertisers that stayed the course (how to combat rising CPMs here). It was tough for advertisers that had not previously had a social presence to determine whether they should transition budget or stay in their current channels, because they did not have a benchmark.

Facebook is not the only large company doing its due diligence, of course. We are seeing it with Google’s Topics API and Microsoft’s Parakeet, as well.

How to do it

If 2020 was the beginning of what seems like an eternity of “unprecedented times” and 2021 was the year of big shakeups, there’s no telling what’s in store for 2022. But based on the marketing trends so far, here are the six ingredients we know you’ll need.

Always be testing out new marketing channels. You don’t have to invest heavily in them, but make sure you know how they work for your business, which offers perform best on them, and what your benchmarks are so that should you need to fall back on it, you won’t be upstream without a battle.
Employ a mix of paid and organic strategies. Head to our list of the 19 best marketing strategies for 2022 and you should be covered.
Don’t promote the same offer on every channel. This is one of our cross-channel marketing mistakes. Find out what offers do best on which channel and then harness that for your strategy.

5. Be a steward of automation

Here’s how to create a strong cross-channel marketing strategy.
Not unlike tracking changes, there has been a clear and concerted effort to move advertisers into more automation. This is evidenced with the rollout of Performance Max, an ongoing push to automated bidding, and a push toward auto-applied account changes from both Google and Bing, where the platforms will automatically make updates—unless advertisers opt out.

How to do it

Test. Personally, I have seen success in automated bidding strategies and Performance Max campaigns, when used in the right instances and at the right times. You have to test them and give them time, as they don’t always work right out of the gate.
Become a steward of automation. Sometimes automation feels like a power struggle. Plus, the lack of visibility makes it hard to trust that something is working optimally. But it can be helpful in many cases. Find things that automation can do well and use it there to free up time on what you need to manage manually.
Educate yourself. Of course, if you’re not familiar with Google Ads’ automation features, get yourself up to speed! You can learn the pros and cons of every automated bidding strategy in Google here.
Try out AI. Automation, machine learning, and AI all come hand-in-hand. Check out these practical examples of AI in marketing to see where you can get started.

Likewise, if another platform is suddenly performing really well, it is hard for advertisers to fully capitalize on it without knowing exactly which targeting options will perform well.

6. Master responsive search ads (RSAs)

Unless you’re a Facebook or Google Developer, there’s not a whole lot to do here except stay informed on what’s being built. However, you can start adopting tools that have already been made available to us.
This year, advertisers need to seek out firmer, more established trends. This will be a year of revisiting what we thought we knew vs. what we saw in 2020 and 2021, while adding external annotations, to try to project what to expect on a go-forward basis.
And I anticipate other companies to have their own testing in motion. It will be really interesting to see what lies in store for us on this front.
For similar reasons, it’s also imperative that you increase your investment in tracking technology—technology that gives you access to the data you need to propel you ad strategies and report on their effectiveness, but that also maintains the privacy of the prospects being targeted.
You can find more ways to prepare for the end of ETAs here.

How to do it:

Establish RSA benchmarks now: RSAs tend to have higher click-through rates than ETAs, but conversion performance varies. Get RSAs active in every ad group now so you can have clear expectations for what performance will look like after June.
Diversify your copy: Each headline and description should be different so Google can mix and match. At least two headlines should include keywords and at least three should not include keywords.
Don’t abandon ETAs! Your existing ETAs will still run after June 30, 2022, you just won’t be able to edit them. So test and create ETAs now that you can pause or unpause in the future.

Having a diverse media mix makes advertisers more nimble and tougher to disrupt, even in the wake of big changes.

Future-proof your paid media strategy

Events of 2020 and 2021 created instances where certain platforms either underperformed or exceedingly overperformed most benchmarks. When those opportunities or issues arise, the advertisers that are prepared to take control of their circumstances are those that have already been proactively testing multiple channels.
Many advertisers noticed Google giving precedence to RSAs over ETAs at auction time in 2021, so it did not come as a surprise to most when Google announced RSAs would become the only option for new ads in the future.