3 Big Shifts Ahead for Digital Marketing in 2023

This article first appeared in LinkedIn Pulse on 1/29/2023.
3 Big Shifts Ahead for Digital Marketing in 2023

Digital Marketers have their work cut out for them in 2023. Along with their day-to-day responsibilities, there are three big ‘moving targets’ that we’ll need to keep an eye on and prepare to incorporate into our daily routines. 

1. GA4

Google’s new ground-up analytics platform will literally replace Universal analytics at the end of June 2023. Be warned, this is not an upgrade. It’s a new, privacy focused platform that will replace the previous version. The differences are so significant that migrating historical data from Universal Analytics won’t be possible. The tools are just too different. If you haven’t already, get started now with GA4 to see your web data on both platforms.

Google is continually adding to GA4. In fact, with the recent announcement sunsetting Google Optimize, they suggested that a similar feature will be built into GA4 in the future. Based on the current iteration of GA4, that may be well into the future, but the platform is evolving.

“First-party data will be critical in the post 3rd party cookie world. But many small to mid-sized businesses don’t have enough, and will be required to license that data through those that do.“

And consider the need for education – not just for the marketing teams but also those they share the data with. GA4 uses different nomenclature, metrics and reporting that don’t always align with those used in Universal Analytics.

2. Cookie Clean Up

Although complete deprecation of the 3rd party cookie won’t occur until 2024, agencies are already preparing for a ‘cookieless future.’ 

As of this writing, we still see success with programmatic advertising using 3rd party cookies. But we know those days are numbered. It’s time to start testing additional channels to replace the inevitable traffic loss from 3rd party cookie-based advertising. 

First-party data will be critical in the post 3rd party cookie world. But many small to mid-sized businesses don’t have enough, and will be required to license that data through those that do. We already do this through Facebook and LinkedIn advertising. But we’ll need to do more, because no one solution seems to provide the scale that 3rd party cookies do. 

3. The AI Effect

Digital marketing has been using AI for years. But the recent release of ChatGPT seems to be taking the marketing world by storm. The ease by which this tool can spin optimized content (as a single, small example) threatens to inundate the Internet with an enormous quantity of inauthentic material. And we’ve already seen instances where the content produced by ChatGPT has resulted in misogynistic and sometimes wholly inaccurate information.

There are tremendous uses for a product like ChatGPT that will positively impact marketing. While Google doesn’t want AI-generated copy explicitly written for search rankings, is there hurt to having a tool like this to help write better email copy?

Like any new(er) innovation, it will have its positives and negatives. 2023 will be a big year to see how smaller, faster AI tools will integrate with existing marketing tools to deliver better tools.

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2023 will be a year of change and preparing for change. Which, from a digital marketing perspective, isn’t really anything new. But one thing is for sure, the pace of changes will continue to accelerate throughout 2023.