Emerging trends in the world of Paid Media.

There are two key emerging trends in the Paid Media industry that we’re adopting here at Fountain.

The first one is optimising for profit, rather than just optimising for sales, revenue or leads. In recent years, there’s been a huge shift in the paid media industry towards value-based bidding, particularly with Google. This works for businesses where you wouldn’t traditionally assign a value to a lead or a sale. We use this to tell Google Ads which conversions are more valuable to your business. The challenge in doing this, is that it’s extremely focused on revenue, and there’s been a big push towards optimising all campaigns for revenue.

The danger of this is that, ultimately, you might be focusing on products or selling particular lines or services that aren’t as profitable as others. Therefore, optimising for profit allows us to understand each individual business and then effectively look at what’s impacting your bottom line – rather than just generating leads and sales, which, in the long run, might not be helping your business.

The second key trend is incrementality testing, which may sound very jargon heavy. To grow a business, it’s quite common to invest in branding activity – no matter which industry you’re in, look at how you can get your brand out to more people. However, what can be tricky is how you measure the impact on the bottom line. How do you know how many extra sales and how much extra profit is generated by that activity? Incrementality testing is an exciting way to do that. It helps you to understand which channels and which campaigns that you are running directly impact sales revenue and profitability.

Overall, we have some exciting things that we’re working on here at Fountain.