Hello, dear fellow search marketer, and welcome to the year 2023.
It’s time to make some New Year’s resolutions, or at least get ready to make some changes for the new year.
Unlike the New York Jets, there’s a high chance of letting go of the bad “guru” you hired, anticipating a budget (even in a slump), playing with a new bidding strategy, creating a memo about Performance Max/GA4 and giving Bing (I still refuse to call it Microsoft Advertising) The fighting chance you deserve.
Also, don’t forget to migrate your Twitter Ads budget to something that’s already stable.
So, let’s discuss what you need to do now, what you went through in 2022, and what you need to do in 2023.
Think of this as a stupid and “reckless” visit by three ghosts.
What should you do now?
It’s the beginning of 2023, so you’re a little late – but you can still make up for lost time.
Anticipating the 2023 budget
I’ve seen how search budgets are forecasted year over year: the old way “Identification of impression share lost due to budget and saw a 3%-5% increase in CPC strategy that assumes it stays the same”.
Then came the pandemic, and the prediction got a little lower. Now, this method lacks some weight.
Actually, if you stick to this approach, fine, not the end of the world, but you do realize that CPC growth, especially in terms of branding, has seen some outrageous growth in 2022 (starting around April).
Why? There are a variety of theories, but for now, let’s just call it “inflation.”
If you maintain the usual approach, expect to add about 10%-15% on brand CPC growth year-over-year in Q1 and, most likely, more along the lines of 4%-7% growth in non-commercial activities. This comes from our internal estimates – yours should vary.
Next, the ugly elephant in the room – Performance Max – appears. But it gets more complicated if you’ve migrated Smart Shopping to Performance Max, too.
There are two ways to predict this, and frankly, neither will be accurate or insightful – I apologize in advance.
- Look at the Google Recommendation Tool, see what it says for growth on a budget (because we all know it never decreases), take 15%-25% of that growth level (kill the reserve), and give it a try.
- Or gradually scale down from 5% to 10% of your current budget, assuming you’re constantly pushing budget boundaries while flexing up and down depending on seasonality.
Like I said, there are no two great options.
If you want to tweak your research strategy (doesn’t apply to Performance Max), find your way lost in the rankings and work on the fancy formula that PPC Hero Posted a few ways back.
This will help you understand where your current strategy/bids are, which leads to missing opportunities.
This is the time to speed up your budget (if you’re like me, you have a planned budget to spend for literally every day of the year, which will vary based on expected demand).
Content calendar/seasonal flight planning
This often isn’t applicable if you’re new to a business, but it should 100% be part of your plan.
If you’re not new to the business and you haven’t, you are Mr. Wilson of the Jets and deserve to be sued.
Make sure you know your deals, the seasonality of peaks and troughs, and everything else you want to do creatively and budget.
It allows you to pre-create all your assets, approve them, and schedule them for deployment.
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Screenshot from the author, December 2022
Evaluate what you haven’t done
Life and work are busy. This happens to all of us. Odds are, you made some plans for 2022 that you just can’t carry out.
Now it’s time to determine what builds, tests, plans to fly, etc. you haven’t been able to do in the past year and reprioritize them to decide if you should try them in 2023.
I like to use this thought process when making this assessment:
Was this for “fun” or necessity (i.e. is the effort something that would definitely have had an impact on the business, or is it something that just had to be tried and seen if it could help or hurt)?
- If it is a necessity, I hope you have a good excuse as to why not and put it on the books for 2023.
- If it’s for ‘fun’, keep it away for a rainy day.
Was there a commercial impact? (positive or negative) not to do so?
- If the answer is no, then there is no harm or wrong and you can finally give it a try.
- If yes, prepare for 2023, and give a good explanation as to why not.
Consider what you’ve been through.
Much like dealing with your weird aunt/uncle who said something blatantly inappropriate over the holidays, you need to sit down and work it out. an act For your search engine marketing campaigns in 2022.
This helps you decide if it’s all good, bad, or somewhere in between and what you need to think about carefully in 2023.
Look at things big and small.
Max performance
If you switch to Performance Max by choice or force (anyone using smart shopping or local search), it can potentially have both a negative and a positive impact on your year.
negative: You literally have no idea when/where your ad will show, and all you can think of (and you’re probably right) is that Google spilled some of your direct-to-consumer (DTC) money on a really bad Google Display Network placement.
At the same time, you have very little information or ability to explain to your boss why Google relaunched Adwords Express targeted at SMEs as version 2.0 and ruined your transparency.
negative: You’ve done the automatic upgrade of a local campaign to Performance Max and it’s caught how many bugs there are, or you’ve let Google create your YouTube video, and the music makes it more awkward than you’d hoped.
positive: In particular for those running foot traffic campaigns, I (hopefully) saw cost per store visit become somewhat more cost effective, and ecommerce (for those running smart shopping) saw cost per action (CPA) improve.
positive: Performance Max is slowly becoming more reliable, and the ability to migrate to other segments led by potential customers is becoming an opportunity.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
I’ll go ahead and say what we all think (and it’s been posted several times already):
Oh my God, this analytics platform is clearly made by someone who clearly only interacts with yard animals and has vision and not by someone who did a user focus group.
If you somehow managed to survive a GA4 implementation, you now, most likely, curse it for lack of intuition or feel more frustrated with putting up with no bounce rate or even conversion rate until months later.
However, all is not lost. I highly recommend deploying it immediately (if you haven’t already) and running it concurrently with GA UA, so you can work out kinks and learn about the platform while collecting historical data.
You might feel like Google decided to get up and choose to mess with this platform and possibly lose a few weeks of your life trying to make sense of it – so keep that in mind when you evaluate what not to do in 2022.
Bing multimedia ads
I watched their hype in September, especially on the video side, and thought: Bing is finally getting into the video ad game.
But then I realized that you need a raw video file to upload and how small it is.
High hopes, great opportunity, but no size.
I know this article is focused on search engine marketing, but I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on this, as it is still bidable media.
Every brand has different views on brand association, but if you have even a hint of a brand safety concern on GDN, MSAN, YouTube, etc., don’t advertise on Twitter until it’s corrected.
Some of these changes in 2022 will affect you in different ways, good or bad.
The question is, can you learn from it, use it and progress in 2023, with it or without it?
What you need to do in 2023
I’ve done several such “What to Expect in the New Year for SEM” articles over the years, but the last two couldn’t have predicted what’s happening now… again.
With that being said, I’ll go with what I think will mostly happen, and you can take it with a grain of salt:
- The New York Jets won’t make the big game – just accept it.
- Your CPC, especially in Q1, will be higher than any other Q1 on record (especially brand terms), so be prepared to find a way to explain why it’s less cost-effective to make your money.
- There will not be a decrease in demand/search volume until there is an increase in unemployment (2007-2009 recession), so be prepared to address the slight increase in volume.
- Google will become less transparent in a way.
- Bing will eventually do everything Google does.
- If you work with healthcare brands, be prepared to get dumped by GA UA quickly due to HIPAA compliance.
- Most important of all, use first party data as long as you can – but you have to be very good and quick, at building market audience groups and going all criminal minds/FBI rankings serial killer mindset when targeting.
Did I scare you yet? good.
2023 is going to be a wild year for research, and you need to be prepared for it.
But you cannot move forward until you evaluate and process the past. Once that is done, you can plan ahead.
Good luck, search marketers. We’ll all need it.
More resources:
- 6 Search Engine Marketing Best Practices Marketers Need to Master
- Choosing the Right SEM Process: Legits Vs. Hacks
- The biggest PPC trends for 2023, according to 22 experts
Featured image: 3rdtimeluckystudio / Shutterstock
