The State of Performance Marketing 2017

Digital marketing is one of the most dynamic and fastest changing industries in the world. What worked perfectly for you yesterday may not be bringing the desired results today. Therefore, it is important to keep an ear to the ground in order to be the first to know about fundamental shifts in the industry. Adroll surveyed more than 1000 marketers in the US alone trying to figure out the latest performance strategies they use and major challenges they face. 

Here’s what the future holds for us, according to the annual report. 

Programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising, a relatively new concept to most marketers a couple of years ago, continues to gain momentum in 2017. A programmatic approach to digital marketing is now adopted by over 50% of marketers, and 66% of them report that using programmatic technologies results in greater ROI than buying ad space on traditional media channels. This, however, is quite self-explanatory - the use of AI and machine learning allows creating laser targeted campaigns that deliver your message to the right people at the right time, which inevitably leads to the increase in revenue. 

The more business owners start to fully realize the benefits of running programmatic ads, the more popular this concept becomes. Almost two-thirds of surveyed marketers plan to invest more in programmatic marketing in the coming year and expand their campaigns to mobile devices. 

Retargeting 

Around 70% of marketers are already using retargeting, a practice that fully employs the benefits of programmatic marketing. The use of so-called “pixels” helps to reach customers who don’t convert right away through following them all over the web and softly serving ads at an appropriate time. This is why 42% of marketers dedicate more than a half of their budgets to remarketing.  

The most popular channels for retargeting are believed to be Facebook and Instagram due to high viewership and ability to properly track results. 57% of respondents claim that the main reason why they use remarketing is to increase brand awareness, 46% - to generate more leads, and another 42% - to improve the level of social media engagement.     

Email marketing 

Not only are programmatic technologies used in social media advertising, but also in email marketing. Almost 70% of marketers are now moving away from traditional one-size-fits-all email campaigns, instead adopting programmatic solutions to create and send personalized emails based on customer’s behavior on a website. This trend is partly responsible for the revival of email marketing, which has been slowly declining over the recent years. 

Reasons why marketers turn to emails didn’t change much since 2016: for the most part to increase customer loyalty (50%), attract new customers or retain old ones (46 and 43% respectively). The only challenge left is integration: 30% of respondents admit that their emails are not integrated with key performance indicators, which makes it harder to measure success.  

Mobile marketing

While modern consumers spend more time online on their mobile devices than on PCs, marketers are still hesitant to allocate bigger budgets to mobile ad campaigns. Reasons for that are various: low mobile conversion (26% of respondents), lack of performance tracking tools (26%), lack of attribution transparency (20%). 

However, 68% of marketers still plan to invest more in mobile retargeting. Consumers rarely make buying decisions based on one ad that it displayed to them. Cross-device marketing and data tracking are what marketers should be focusing on in 2017.  

Attribution

The one thing that marketers agree upon is that attribution is critically important and should never be ignored. Only 3% of them find it useless, while 75% place great value on its importance and another 40% spend more than a half of their budgets on performance measurement alone. 

However, even though a good old single-click attribution model is still the most popular one, 57% of marketers plan to change theirs in 2017. Focusing only on those customers who actually click the ads deprives marketers of the possibility to analyze the behavior of those who prefer not to interact with them. 46% of respondents are already taking view-through conversion into account when measuring performance, so blended attribution seems to be the preferred model of the future. 

Full-funnel performance marketing

Personalization seems to be the hottest marketing trend this year, and programmatic advertising is not the only strategy you can employ to effectively reach your customers. Full-funnel marketing is a method that suggests that you should approach every customer differently based on the stage of the marketing funnel he/she is at. Upper, middle, and low-funnel campaigns are very different in terms of channels used and budgets invested. 

For example, 36% of most budgets go to generating new leads and attracting new customers (upper-funnel). The most effective channel here is believed to be social media ads (more than a half of marketers think so) and remarketing. Another 36% go to converting prospects into actual customers, 16% to upsells, and, lastly, 12% of marketing budgets are generally dedicated to customer retention. 

So, as we can see, two major trends are the increased use of programmatic technologies on all stages of marketing funnel and, as a result, a growing interest in measurement of one’s own marketing efforts.