Looking to the future: Members of team Embryo give their 2024 marketing predictions

George Noon, Head of PPC

Bing to grow its search engine market share

‘Google has actively increased the cost-per-clicks (CPCs) of keywords from 2-10%. In 2023, Google’s VP Jerry Dischler openly admitted this in court, claiming that the move was to ensure their revenue targets were met.

However, this decision has greatly questioned the integrity and competitive nature that they have always prescribed to keyword bidding.

In the PPC world, have seen continuous CPC rises on Google and, as a result, brands have struggled to produce similar results in their market.

Combine all of the above with Bing’s AI innovations, which supersedes anything Google’s Bard has been able to produce, and I forecast an increase in Bing’s market share.

The extent to which this change is felt depends on how well Bing can position itself as the default browser for phones, tablets, and other electronic devices.

If CPCs become even cheaper on Bing, there will be a demand shift from advertisers, and Bing will need to support this influx of additional ad spend by furthering its efforts to increase the number of active users.’

Harriet Tuite, Head of Paid Social

Consistent Investment in Meta but a Steady Rise in Secondary Social Channels

‘Meta will continue to be a powerhouse in 2024. We’ll see consistent investment as brands look to capitalise on 2023’s improved performance, thanks to Meta’s development of server-side tracking (Conversions API) and AI-led audience targeting (Advantage+).

To push paid social performance further, we’ll see brands welcoming additional social channels into their channel mix, e.g., Pinterest, TikTok, and Reddit.

Although less advanced in their advertising offering, these channels are much more invested in seeing advertisers succeed. For example, regardless of your spending levels, on Pinterest, you get a dedicated account manager who can give you ad-level recommendations along with industry-level recommendations and access to tools.

With Meta, speaking to a human who isn’t just reading from a script is like drawing blood from a stone.

Adding more social channels into the mix will drive brand awareness and visibility, but also bring its problems around attribution and tracking. Brands and agencies will, therefore, have to shift towards more of an overall marketing return on investment – such as Marketing Efficiency Ratio – to measure success, rather than segmenting out individual channel performance.

This approach will allow more top-of-funnel investment and emphasise the importance of digital channels, such as PPC and Paid Social, working together to achieve one shared goal.’

Jess Atkinson, Head of Organic

Change in attitude to AI content and increased importance in core web vitals

‘Google recently updated their guidelines to say that, essentially, they don’t care if your content is generated by a human or a machine, as long as it’s fit for purpose and, quote, “created for people”.

However, after back-to-back Core Web Vitals updates, many case studies have surfaced from eager SEOs who have tried to rank solely AI-generated content and experienced huge dips in visibility after the most recent update.

It’s extremely rare for Core updates to happen so close together (we barely had room to breathe!). Call me a sceptic, but I believe the reason for the back-to-back updates is Google making an error in their initial rollout and trying to right the wrongs of so many innocent websites being punished with ranking visibility hits.

Despite all that, we must remember that artificial intelligence in search is an incredibly new thing. It took Google many years to get on top of quality control for content. Still, hopefully, 2024 will bring some stability and clarity about how AI can be properly utilised for website content.

My advice? Use AI as a crutch and do not give it full control.

My second prediction relates to Core Web Vitals. Despite Google claiming that Core Web Vitals isn’t as important as we were led to believe, this doesn’t fully wash with what’s to come; in March 2024, a Core Web Vitals metric called “First Input Delay” will be replaced by “Interaction to Next Paint”.

This means Google will be more intricately measuring how fast and responsive your website is when a user wants to navigate through and rewarding or punishing visibility accordingly.

This new metric could lead to a renewed focus on page experience, as Google is diving deeper to score you not only on your initial page load but also on how quick it is to navigate from one page to another once you’re on the website.

My recommendation would be to ensure you’re doing all you can to ensure your website not only loads quickly from the search results but navigates quickly, too. You never know – it could be the one metric that helps you stand head and shoulders above the competition!’

Amy Leach, Organic Lead

Voice Search to Take Centre Stage

‘Whenever predictions for the next year roll around, the topic of voice search is almost always on the list.

There is no doubt that the prevalence of voice search has increased, particularly with Siri, Alexa, Amazon’s Echo Dot and Google Home (to name just a few) becoming more and more popular. Every year, we hear that this is the year that voice search takes over – after all, studies show that, worldwide, there are 4.2 billion voice assistants in use as of 2023, and this number is predicted to reach 8.4 billion by 2024.

However, Google is already rewarding content that targets long-tail, user-centric key phrases that people want the answers to, which lines up well with the requirements of voice search. Voice search is often a little more conversational than what we might type into Google, but the intent is the same, and that’s something that search engines are getting cleverer at determining.

The increase in voice search has been happening slowly but surely for some years now, but, when combined with all of the updates Google has brought in to help user-friendly content thrive in 2023, it seems to me that voice search won’t be the biggest adjustment marketers will have to make.’

Matthew Butchart, PPC Account Manager

AI to continue to show its value

‘ChatGPT, Midjourney, and  other tools are starting to leave the “playbox” phase, and with businesses using AI more and more, we’re going to start seeing two outcomes:

1. A great deal of “vendor trash”! Endless packages of ChatGPT prompts or AI-driven services (that aren’t as powerful) flooding the market.
2. Perhaps not quite in 2024, but maybe. I suspect we’ll start seeing some very significant use cases or stories about departments “revolutionising” things in a groundbreaking manner.

As these emerge, they’ll drive a bit of a gold rush across many industries and niches (not just PPC or digital marketing). This will be because increasingly more businesses will scramble to apply those use cases to their workflows.

Further, I think we’ll also start to see the impact and genuine value AI can have on the workforce. As my favourite serial-red-shirt-wearer Tom Scott said earlier this year on YouTube, we’re very likely to be at the start of a truly world-altering change in the way we use technology.

Tom points out that the last time a world-altering change occurred on this potential scale was the launch of the internet. I’ve started using the subscriber model of ChatGPT 4, and while I haven’t thrown anything too challenging at it yet, some of the new beta tools that are being given to subscribed users are extremely powerful.

I remember in the Summer of 2022, I enjoyed making weird, warped (but fairly accurate) images on Dall-e Mini by asking it to visualise things like “Boris Johnson on a unicycle” and getting funny results. Now, just over a year later, I’m taking photos of whiteboards and turning them into slides, instantly.

The technology is moving incredibly fast and, while it is showing value, we are already seeing some of the worst outcomes manifesting, with celebrity and politician “deep fakes” testing the waters and making the news recently (Tom Hanks has had to release an announcement that he isn’t endorsing a dental product in digital ads).

Tom Scott predicts we’re at the bottom of an exponential growth chart, and I’m seeing more and more evidence that he’s right.’

Molly Cross, Content Writer

Generative AI and ‘Original Creative Thought’

‘It’s not exactly new news that Generative AI is here, and likely to stay. ChatGPT, HARPA, and even in-built AI tools are now part-and-parcel of all-around content generation – whether we like it or not – producing in-depth outlines, heading ideations, and even full-length pieces of copy.

But, I think discussions on the ‘value’ of AI-driven copy will continue into next year, with AI continuing to learn to mimic, learn, and create solid attempts.

It’s a little like the old-school ad agencies of years ago – think Mad Men. Someone would have first come up with a kernel of an idea and then pushed it to the team to refine and research it into a fully formed concept. At the moment, we have to manually feed AI existing information, such as tone of voice, demographics, and intent, to get something usable out of it.

What 2024 will tell us is whether AI will fully be able to understand behavioural biases and psychological triggers that fuel copy – or if it can simply come up with more humanistic creative vehicles, such as wordplay, entirely on its own. In 2024 I imagine the learning models for AI are going to start handling more creative concepts and will get more competent at producing short-form copy that gets the job done. Arguments as to where the “real” credit of an entirely “AI-generated” concept and execution will also continue, as ChatGPT and co continue to “scrape” human copy and content to build upon.

In a nutshell, I think the topic of creative ownership and “real” copywriting will be a big point of contention.’