The global online advertising market has taken up a rapid pace after the pandemic Coronarvius and the Australian advertising industry is no exception. According to a report by the IAB Australia online advertising expenditure report, the total advertising expenditure increased 9.1% YOY; despite being strong, there was a slowdown in growth rates of 36% reported in 2021. As Australia’s central bank hikes rates by 25 basis points, there would be an increase in the inflation rate, which would drastically affect advertising spend.
As per a report by IAB Australia, the online advertising expenditure for the first quarter of 2023 reached $3.426bn, showing a decrease in expenses for the same period in 2022. All categories saw year-on-year growth, with display ads growing 7.7% ($5.5bn), search ads growing by 14% and video ads increasing 12% year on year to reach $3.3bn. Despite the slow forecast for online advertising amidst the looming recession in Australia, the increase in ad spending in display ads, search ads and video ads shows positive signs for online advertisers as the market spend reached $ 14.2 billion in 2022. In this blog, let us discuss what it's in store for advertisers when targeting audiences in Australia to generate quality leads, increase conversion rate, etc. You can read our blog on ‘Ad spending for the US market in 2023’ and ‘Digital ad spending forecast for the UK market in 2023’ to see what plan & strategies to work on to maximize the return on ad spend when advertising in recession. The below image from IAB Australia shows the total advertising expenditure by calendar year ($million) for 2021 & 2022.
Online ad spending forecast for Australia
With the increase in the consumer price index to 5.6%, there are chances that the impact of the recession would lead to less spending by consumers. However, despite the recession at the corner, the Australian ad industry is expected to grow by 3.2% for the year 2023. This provides Australian advertising agencies with the opportunity to work on strategic marketing and grab the user's attention to click on their ad.
With high chances of the users spending less in recession, as an Australian advertising agency, it is essential to work on having a plan to maximize advertising ROI. As you have worked on SEO marketing strategies in the recession, similarly, it is essential to draft a strategy to run ads at the right time to target the relevant users. To run ads amidst the recession, you must focus on writing engaging ad copies, ad descriptions, etc. As you focus on running holiday ads at the times of festivals, similarly, you can provide offers & discounts to users that create a sense of urgency among the target audience to take the desired action. The Australian ads agency must conduct a PPC audit to determine the essential PPC metrics that need to be optimized to improve the performance of the PPC campaign. You can also outsource PPC to India so that the PPC consultants provide you with the best offshore digital marketing services and help you achieve advertising goals like form fill-ups, building brand awareness, lead generation, etc.
Best strategies for running effective PPC campaigns in Australia
1. Build remarketing audiences - The best strategy for running effective PPC campaigns in Australia is to focus on building remarketing audiences. As an advertising agency running PPC campaigns in Australia and advertising at any time, like at times of Coronavirus, holiday ads at times of the festive season, during recession, etc., it is always crucial to focus on remarketing audiences.
When you have loyal customers associated with your brand, they are likely to choose your business for the keywords or search terms entered. You need to ensure that your core product or services best suit the client's requirement so that they do not have a second thought in choosing your product offerings. As in email marketing, you run email campaigns and provide attractive offers to the target audience so that they take the desired action on the landing page. Similarly, it is vital; that you run remarketing campaigns to ensure that these users always choose your brand name above others.
You can connect Google Ads with Google Analytics to determine where the users are spending their time and work on ad personalization to ensure that these users click on your ad. It is of utmost importance here that you need to focus on content marketing and hire content specialists so that you have great product descriptions to display to the users. Some of the points that you need to focus on when running remarketing campaigns are:
a. Work on audience segmentation.
b. Building brand awareness.
c. Focus on responsive ads.
d. Focus on ad scheduling.
2. Advertise on social media platforms - One of the essential ways to maximize advertising return on investment during a recession is to leverage social media platforms. With nearly 4.9 billion people being active on social media platforms, advertisers need to focus on including these social networks in their marketing strategy to get in touch with a large number of users. When you have such a vast number of users present on these platforms, you have a high chance of luring them into making clicks on your paid ads.
Running paid ad campaigns on social media platforms is essential as this helps in generating leads to your landing page. It is essential to keep updating the ads on social media platforms to engage users' interest in your business. To do so, you need to work on LinkedIn Ads optimization, Facebook Ads optimization, YouTube Ads optimization, etc. Whether you are running Facebook remarketing Ads, Twitter Ads, etc., it is essential to inform the users about your brand name. To do so, it is essential that you focus on building brand awareness on social media platforms.
As social media is a place for like-minded people, you can target users who are prospective customers of your business and lure them into taking the desired action on the landing page. You need to ask the users to like, comment, share and subscribe to your business to boost business page visibility and increase brand awareness. It also helps in peer-to-peer marketing as the users that are satisfied with your product or services are likely to promote it to their friends and family. For SEO campaigns , as you focus on availing white label SEO services so that the SEO professionals assist you with local SEO , e-commerce SEO, detox & penalty removal , etc. In the same way, you can outsource PPC services so that the PPC experts help you with PPC keyword research , PPC reports , etc., and then you can use these data to optimize the performance of the PPC campaign . You can also outsource social media marketing services and leave the work to the social media marketing professionals that help you achieve the desired result.
3. Optimize landing pages - The essential point to run effective PPC campaigns in Australia is to focus on optimizing landing pages. When advertising in Australia, whether you are running paid ad campaigns in Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, etc., as an advertising agency, you need to ensure that your landing pages are relevant to the ad description. With the impatient users in today's era, if the users do not find the ad relevant, then the bounce rate of the website increases. When you have a high bounce rate of your website , the user's trust in your brand decreases.
Landing pages are the first impression that the users have about your product or service offerings. So, when running Australian ads, it is essential to ensure that your ads grab the user's attention by clicking on your ad. After the users reach the landing page, it is vital that they either take the desired action or spend time on the page and navigate through different sections on the landing page to take the desired action. The more the users spend time on the page, the higher are the chances of them taking the desired action, which ultimately increases the conversion rate
As in search engine optimization , you outsource SEO services so that the SEO professionals work on plan & strategy for link building , video SEO , guest posting , backlink analysis , etc. In the same way, you can outsource PPC services so that the PPC consultants work on PPC campaign analysis to improve the performance of PPC campaigns. Some of the essential points that you can focus on when optimizing the landing pages are listed below.
a. focus on topic - As an Australian advertising agency, you need to ensure that you focus on the topic that the users are searching for. As you focus on ad relevance for the keywords or search terms entered, it is vital that you focus on optimizing the final URL so that the users see the relevant page after clicking on the ad.
b. Improve page loading speed - To optimize the landing pages, you need to improve the page loading speed . The better the page loading speed, the better the chances of users taking the desired action.
c. Test & measure - It is essential to continuously test & measure the performance of the landing page to analyze if any changes are required to be done. As for SEO campaigns, you conduct an SEO audit to determine the necessary changes that need to be done. Similarly, you can conduct a PPC audit or outsource PPC audit services so that the PPC experts provide you with information on PPC metrics to improve the performance of PPC campaigns.
d. Have a strong call to action - You need to ensure that you have a strong call to action to create a sense of urgency among the target audience to take the desired action.
4. Perform ad scheduling - Another best strategy to run effective PPC campaigns is to perform ad scheduling. When you perform ad scheduling when advertising in Australia, you ensure that your PPC ads appear to the relevant target audience at the right time. It is essential for businesses that target users all across the country.
As Australia is the world’s sixth-largest country, it is vital that you get in touch with the relevant audience at the right time. With three time zones active in the country , it is essential that your PPC ads appear to the relevant users at the right time. E.g. you are one of the top advertising agencies in Australia and have advertising agencies in Sydney, Perth, etc. So, due to differences in time zones, it is essential to run local service ads that appear to the relevant users at the right time. As you focus on bid adjustment , demographic targeting , etc. In the same way, it is quite essential that you do ad scheduling so that none of the relevant target audiences in Australia are left untouched.
Even as a Google Ads advertising agency located in a part of the world and willing to run Google Ads, Microsoft Ads , Facebook Ads , LinkedIn Ads , Instagram Ads , etc. in Australia, it is essential to perform ad scheduling. This ensures that you have relevant impression share for your ads and your ad budget does not get wasted on irrelevant clicks . As you ensure that in SEO campaigns, you have the minimum number of users performing window shopping to have a higher conversion rate. In the same way, you must ensure that the most relevant users click on your ads. The advertising agency in Adelaide, an advertising agency in Sydney, or in any other location in Australia are aware of this fact and works PPC plan & strategy accordingly to target relevant users. If you are keen on advertising in Australia, you can hire offshore PPC experts from an offshore digital marketing company to use their professional expertise in maximizing your advertising return.
5. Monitor campaign performance - The next essential point for running effective PPC campaigns is to monitor the performance of PPC campaigns. Be it any form of advertising like running PPC ad campaigns, social media marketing, running email marketing campaigns , focusing on content marketing, etc. it is vital to monitor the performance of these campaigns continuously.
PPC ad campaigns require money to be paid to search engines for every click received on the ad. Whether you are adverting on search engines like Google, Bing, social media platforms, etc., it is vital to ensure that your advertising ROI yields the best result. Once you analyze the performance of the ad campaign, you can prepare a data-driven PPC report that highlights the performance of the essential metrics. As you outsource SEO keyword research services to a white label SEO company, similarly, you can outsource PPC audit services, outsource PPC keyword research services , etc., to a white label PPC company so that the professionals can help you improve the performance of PPC campaigns.
6. Add negative keywords - The next tip that you need to focus on in your advertising strategy is to include negative keywords . When you add negative keywords to your ad campaign, you inform the advertising platform to trigger your ads for these search queries. This helps your ads to appear to the relevant users with high chances of taking the desired action.
As in an SEO campaign, you perform a backlink audit to determine which links to disavow from your website to enhance the performance of the SEO campaign. In the same way, you can prepare a keyword list to trigger your ads to irrelevant users. When you prepare a negative keyword list, it helps your ads to appear to the relevant prospects and helps boost the conversion rate. You can also add different ad extensions to your ad campaigns, like structured snippet extension, call extension , site link extension, etc., to give users brief information about your business's product or services.
7. Refine ad copy - Ad copies are an essential part of PPC campaigns that provide information about the ad and are designed to encourage prospects to take action on the landing page and move down the sales funnel.
As there are multiple changes that keep happening in the digital marketing world, so it is essential that you focus on PPC trends and avoid the PPC myths to maximize the results of your ad campaign. You need to write engaging ad copies so that the target audience are engaged with your ads and click on them for the search terms entered. Some of the points that you can focus on when refining the ad copies are listed below:
a. Provide the users with statistics in headlines.
b. Create unique, keyword - rich display URLs
c. A/b test your ad copy.
8. Optimize your PPC budget - When running paid ad campaigns in any country, optimizing the PPC budget is essential and Australia is no exception to it. The more you focus on optimizing the budget, the better returns you can have with your advertising spend.
When you optimize the ad budget you have quality leads for your ads at a low budget. Properly implementing the PPC budget requires a plan & strategy. When the execution is correct you have a lower cost per click, reduced average cost per click, reduced click-through rate, etc. This helps save your ad budget and this can be spent on other advertising goals like building brand awareness, form fill-ups, etc.
a. Specify your campaign goals
b. Focus on keyword match types like exact match, broad match and phrase match
c.Focus on geotargeting.
d. Leverage Google Display Network
The big picture: Australia is among the top 10 advertising countries in the world
The sheer dominance of the Western country in digital advertising expenditure continues, with China being the top and the US taking the third position for 2023. The image below from Emarketer shows that Canada is at the 4th position, with Australia taking third. Though this rank position will continue to vary in the future, the present scenario shows that the Australian advertising spend has achieved a position in the top 5 list worldwide. So, advertising agencies must focus on including the Australian market to run paid ads. It is essential as online marketing has grown in the country and the users look for products or services digitally. You can run e-commerce PPC ads, search ads, display ads, video ads , mobile ads , etc., to target local users and increase online sales for your business.
Conclusion
Running paid ads provides advertisers with the opportunity to target users all locally and globally. There may be users that are looking for products or services locally and you can consider running local service ads for these users. As in e-commerce SEO campaigns, you focus on optimizing your website so that the relevant users choose your brand name. Similarly, when running e-commerce PPC ads, you have users present locally as well as globally and you can target them to increase traffic to your website.
When running paid ad campaigns for Australia, it is essential to work on a plan & strategy to target the relevant users. Although the forecast for Australia is predicted to be on the downside, the growth in the actual ad spend could increase. With a proper plan & strategy, you can achieve the desired results with your advertising budget. As you outsource SEO services so that the SEO professionals work on SEO copywriting , SEO analytics , etc., to improve the performance of your SEO campaigns. Similarly, you can outsource PPC services to a white label digital marketing company with expertise in optimizing video ads , optimizing mobile ads, optimizing search ads , etc., so that the PPC professionals provide you with the best results with paid ad campaigns.
References:
. MAGNA - Australia’s advertising economy to grow 5% in 2023
. Online advertising growth slows but market reaches total spend of $14 billion