Top Digital Advertising Trends for 2025

The overall digital advertising landscape is changing at breakneck speed, fueled by major advertising platforms such as Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Google and TikTok. There is no doubt that the sector has become more complicated with each passing year and as we move into 2025, advertisers are struggling to keep up with the ever-changing trends. At the same time, they also want a good return on their investment and better insights in campaigns not only for the short term, but also for the long term – not to mention that the campaign is conversions and increases qualified traffic.

Exponential growth in the digital advertising sector can be seen over five years, with revenues from the US $270 billion in 2023 and projected to grow to $450 billion by 2028. Reaching consumers online is more critical than ever. As we head into another new year, here are some anticipated digital advertising trends to watch in 2025 that address many of these challenges.

The growing importance of Amazon Ads and AMC and Amazon DSP

It’s no secret that Amazon has quickly become a dominant force in the digital advertising space, its advertising business overcome competitors including Meta and Alphabet. In Q1 2024, Amazon’s advertising revenue reached $11.8 billionan increase of 24% year on year. This growth was largely driven by the expansion of Prime Video ads and the proliferation of sponsored product ads.

The company’s analytics platform, Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), helps advertisers perform advanced analytics and build audiences. Along with ensuring data privacy, AMC allows marketers to create custom audience lists using engagement records, conversion events and segment information. By providing richer insights by connecting signals from Amazon Ads and third-party providers, AMC provides a deep and holistic view of customer journeys across Amazon Ads media and channels, quantifying advertising impact both online and offline.

With its assets, AMC will become increasingly essential for marketers to refine their strategies, target audiences, drive personalization and optimize campaigns in the customer journey, making better decisions based on data to improve ROI .

However, there is more to the story as we enter 2025. Many marketing professionals believe that Amazon advertising is only for Amazon, but the company is also hoping to capture advertising expenses beyond. Amazon.comincluding where other players such as Tradedesk, Google’s DV3600, and others are. Therefore, the importance of Amazon is growing. The key to achieving this goal is Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP). Amazon Prime video ads are only accessible through Amazon DSP, so marketers today have no choice but to use the platform. As Amazon Prime Video ads become more attractive to marketers, their use of Amazon DSP will increase.

Once Amazon DSP gains regular users, the investment in the platform should increase as its tools and quality develop. Recently, the Amazon Demand Platform (DSP) has been updated to include new frequency controls and reporting to simplify frequency management.

The New Cookieless World – How To Explore Alternative Methods To Get Metrics

The advertising landscape is undergoing significant change as the use of cookies, which has long been a basis for tracking user behavior and measuring ad performance, has been phased out by the main advertising platforms such as Google and Meta. This will be a significant challenge for advertisers and agencies in obtaining accurate and unbiased conversion data.

Therefore, in 2025, advertisers will need to explore alternative methods to obtain comprehensive metrics across all advertising platforms. One approach is to leverage third-party measurement solutions, such as Market Mix Modeling (MMM), or incrementality testing. These tools can provide valuable insights into ad performance and ROI without relying on cookies.

Additionally, advertisers need to rely on unified conversion data from third-party measurement tools to inform their budget allocation across advertising platforms. This involves consolidating data from different measurement solutions into a single source, enabling accurate and consistent assessment of performance and ROI – providing a holistic view of the customer journey.

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Shifting Focus from ROAS to lifetime ROAS

Return on ad spend (ROAS) is traditionally considered the gold standard for measuring the financial return of advertising campaigns. Its primary focus is on short-term revenue, however, it does not consider either customer lifetime value (LTV) or the acquisition of new users, while indiscriminately mixing new and existing customer conversions in their ROAS calculations. This narrow focus may please clients with immediate results, but may overlook opportunities.

In contrast, Lifetime ROSE is emerging as a more holistic metric that assesses the value of new user acquisition and long-term customer engagement and profitability. We estimate the total revenue that a new customer can generate throughout their relationship through advertising efforts, Lifetime ROAS offers a much more comprehensive view of the advertising campaign, allowing marketers to predict the long-term impact of their efforts to make more strategic decisions and drive not only immediate profits, but also long-term growth.

Calculating lifetime ROAS is now a viable option for marketers, as they can match ad conversion data with actual purchase or revenue data from e-commerce or CRM platforms like Shopify and Salesforce.

Rise of black box advertising campaigns – the good, the bad and what advertisers can do about it

With the rise of machine learning and AI-driven ad campaigns, such as Google’s Performance Max shopping campaigns and Meta’s Advantage+, much of campaign optimization is handed over to algorithms. As such, marketers can lose direct control over individual ad placements, and targeting decisions, with platforms recommending or even automating several key aspects.

Marketers feel they are working in a “black box” because they do not have full transparency into how these platforms make decisions regarding ad delivery, budget allocation, audience targeting and performance measurement – ​​limiting their ability to make fully informed optimizations.

For example, if you are only running a Google PMax campaign, advertisers cannot see the whole picture, such as the breakdown by Search, Display, and more.

In addition, PMax can provide information that shows that the campaign is getting an abundance of conversions and leads, not to mention a lower cost per click. On the backend, marketing professionals can’t get the customers they want or need. Understanding which advertising channels and keywords are most effective at acquiring desired customers is critical – but not the analytics that PMax provides.

Leveraging AI-driven campaigns like PMax to extend reach is undoubtedly beneficial. However, it is even more critical for marketers to effectively manage traditional campaign types such as branded and unbranded search, display, YouTube, and more, while consistently analyzing and understanding customer segments. customers attracted by each campaign.

Proper management of traditional campaign types, combined with the use of advertising management tools integrated with CRM systems or e-commerce platforms, provides deeper insight. These tools allow access to data on the attributes of converted customers and their impact on revenue, enabling advanced analysis and calculations. This approach allows marketers to evaluate campaign performance, gain a better understanding of customer behavior, and identify specific elements that drive revenue growth. Ultimately, this leads to optimized customer acquisition strategies and improved lifetime ROAS.

Trends may come and go as business and technology evolve, of course, but what never goes out of style is the importance of staying agile, data-driven and innovative in an increasingly complex advertising world.

Mitsunaga Kikuchi is the founder and CEO of Shirofune, the digital advertising management tool that automates ad campaigns through an easy-to-use interface for management, budgeting, monitoring and analytics.

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