If your paid media spend hasn’t moved to accommodate 2024 pricing and increased competition, you’re not standing still; you’re moving backwards. Essentially if you’re not increasing spend this year, you’re not leaving money on the table; you’re losing it. There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Your flat year-on-year media spend will be worth substantially less in 2024 than it was last year.
Ad spending will spike in 2024 across digital, traditional and total media. The last time all three metrics grew at once was in 2021, after the collapse driven by the pandemic.
The majority of this spend will come from retail advertising.
While ad spend increases, competition becomes fierce, and CPC rises.
To make budgeting even more difficult, companies in APAC are commonly facing:
- Higher inflation rates
- Classic marketing conundrum of being asked to do more with less (often less headcount and budget)
- Pressure to use AI and other new technologies
- A lack of measurement made worse by third-party cookie deprecation
Maximise your return
With higher CPCs predicted for 2024 and maximum competition, it’s more important than ever to improve efficiency across paid media to get the best ROI.
Improve cost per acquisition
It’s unlikely your paid campaigns are currently working at their best. With benchmarks, improved data collection and analysis, review your existing ads to understand current performance. There’s often a lot of potential to improve existing paid media setups.
See how we optimised budget and decreased cost per conversion 21% for Smokeball.
Decrease sales cycle lengths
Work on decreasing your sales cycle length. This is now more important than ever. With Google deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome, Google will look at ‘Topics’ to serve ads in 2024. Google will only look at topics from the last three weeks. After three weeks, a single topic will be deleted, meaning advertisers with longer buying cycles need to rebuild that equity regularly. Meaning additional costs to convert a user.
Use our 70-20-10 framework
Use our 70-20-10 framework to maximise your ROI. That’s 70 percent doing what you already know works, spend 20 percent of time/budget on growth initiatives and 10 percent on test and learn innovations. This framework means you’re still doing what you know works, while making time for growth and innovation, including innovations in AI to improve efficiency across ads.
Need some tips? Use Google Ads AI-powered components and learn how advertisers can still drive performance after third-party cookie deprecation.
Social media ad spending to increase in 2024
It’s not just Google Ads and search campaigns that are set to increase exponentially either. Social media ad spending is expected to grow 13.5% in 2024.
With digital media spending increasing across platforms, you need to look at your spending and your competition across all channels. Track where your best leads come from. Ask yourself:
- Which marketing platforms generate leads that turn into high-value customers?
- How did these platforms perform over time – were there changes in efficacy?
- How did the lifetime value of customers acquired match up to the cost of running the campaigns?
Understanding more about your customers and how they’re acquired allows for more insightful decision-making when it comes to budget allocation.
See how we increased return on ad spend 5231% for RewardPay by defining the best paid media channels.
Sometimes you just need a bigger budget
Even with the most efficient campaigns, the best measurement and reporting, a low CPC and a high CTR, you still just need a bigger budget to compete.
If your budget hasn’t increased since 2023, it’s time to get serious about spend. The more data you have to back up an ask for more media budget, the better your chance of getting buy-in. Use the stats above to explain what’s being left on the table.
Need help lowering your cost per conversion, measuring your performance, and more? Speak to an expert today.
