Setting a trend-line for 2023

What happened in 2022?

By the end of the Corona crisis, we saw a stable trend for eCommerce (mostly talking about wholesale brands and less about single/several goodie online store pages) which was obvious and easy to predict as well as a boost of delivery/mobility services. This example shows us how you can predict some of the trends according to environmental factors, such as lockdowns, transportation, and movement restrictions and limitations. At the same time, the tour industry got hit super heavy, due to the very same factors. No magic here – all were written in black and white. Many of the offer’s verticals changed their position throughout the year, for example, dating – dropped down due to the same physical restrictions, while iGaming grew on a huge scale for the same reason.

How can you measure the trends according to the data you have? Well, the classic approach is here for you – analyze internal and external environmental factors and their weight upon every offer’s vertical you measure.

And what about the creative part? 20-21 – been moved from deep fakes and mislead to branding creatives back and forth, until the regulations took part and restricted most of the aggressive approaches from the majority of the ad networks. Still, there is a huge room for improvement. Know or at least – try to understand the audience behind the traffic and add you will find many keys for the creative part. For example – on entertainment websites (sports streaming, TV/series, etc) – you most likely find the 24-35 y.o. The mostly male audience there and the perfect time frame (regarding the geo you advertise for) will be early evening (between 8 and 10 pm). The best creative approach here is either branded setup with a value to it or a slight clickbait with the same value. Here you can go with iGaming, eCom, social, and entertainment products.

Bored people equals creative minds. That’s what happened in the late 21, and early 22 when a huge portion of Asian countries got locked down for good. Local social and entertainment apps exploded the market (and they keep growing even now). People poured loads of “homemade content” into the network, and devs created dozens of TikTok-like apps to support it. Depending on the amount of investments involved in the product some grew drastically, and others faded a bit. The best example we have here is Chingari, a social video platform for creators (which appeared after TikTok was eventually blocked in India) and grew from a small startup to a huge WW-known brand! They even released their token (GARI) into the exchange.

What should we expect in 2023?

As for mentioned verticals, we believe that the APAC region market will stabilize for Social and Entertainment products due to their similarity and burnout. Nevertheless, those types of apps will remain and grow audiences and become recognizable far beyond their origin region. It is safe to say that IN retains its leadership as one of the fastest-growing markets for the vertical. The creative approach should be simple and eye-catching – a pretty lady with a smartphone, doing a selfie/content, or a short “virus” video grabbing attention from the first seconds (as a pre-roll).

Wholesale brands are the bread and butter for industry professionals who are into eCommerce! Being an affiliate for AliExpress or LAZADA, means a stable income, drastically increasing with each sale they make up. And nothing could possibly stop that growth. We observed a blast-off for those big brands as soon as they had managed to tune in their affiliate dashboards and tracking. Since all those wholesale brands are “wholesale”, you can easily find the most relevant goods for your audience (and take it to a front promo page), which makes ANY type of traffic work. CTA creatives with discounts, best deals, and merchant promos are the best to use here. You can also go with a slightly misleading in order to attract traffic to the store. The top geos here by far are VN, ID, MY, SG, TH, and PH. In the near future, we hope to see LATAM countries on this list as well.

iGaming products were always there in the industry and showed some stable growth for the past 3-4 years. Regarding the outer circumstances, politics, and mass behaviors – gamblers will gamble! For some nations, it’s a part of the culture to make a bet on a favorite team or drop some coins into the slot machine physically or virtually. Therefore, we are more than sure that Gambling and Betting will steadily roll into 2023 and bring good numbers for the market. Aside from this – many countries are softening their regulations towards iGaming, allowing regulated brands to operate without any issues. More States in the US have shown increasing concern for the industry as well as opening up fresh audiences and untouched markets. Prepare your ad sets! We spoke many times about gambling and betting, so you can get some info in our articles here and here. The best regions we see are – APAC, LATAM, MENA, and CIS.

Delivery and Mobility services are not something new to the industry but have shown great growth due pandemic and after it. We are always gonna look for some food/grocery delivery, a taxi, or a car rental! Or maybe some bicycle or scooter to ride from home to your workplace? There is nothing to add here – just bring your best deals onto the creative assets and aim all your ad campaigns for the right time frames. Any geo, any ad format.

Creative ideas? All according to your traffic source, whether it’s an entertainment website or streaming – you can always find the right approach. For example: “Don’t let hunger stop your winning streak” – for a gaming website, “Long movie requires a good supply” – for a movie streaming website, “GOHOME is your promo code for our TAXI service – only today” – best approach for any tech website or forum where you can schedule a campaign on a home return from work users.

Tools and Utilities both with VPNs are always there in the game and we can’t see any drastic incensement or decreasement in it throughout the past few years. The only thing that changed was the ad policy regarding creative components. Misleading approaches and super scary landing pages are no longer available to be promoted with for a vast majority of the ad networks, so we need to move around those terms carefully. Also, copyright is prohibited. Nevertheless, even slightly scary approaches work fine with Util apps and the lack of a landing page could be easily covered with any click-based ad format with a creative ad set to it. Historically, the best regions for these verticals are NA, MENA, LATAM, and partially APAC, but the EU shouldn’t be counted out as well.

Summary

To sum things up, next year is going to be challenging as always and we are more than sure that regardless of how hard you may predict and analyze things – different factors could come into play and mess up all the strats. The bottom line is this – mix up your verticals and ad activities! If you’re a product owner, try to localize and diversify for several geos / regions to secure the business in general, if you’re an affiliate or a media buyer – you can navigate fast and smoothly around as many verticals as you wish. And if you run an agency – grow your buyer’s expertise so they could jump from one source to another in no time and get all the juice from it.

Good luck and may the coin be with you in the upcoming 2023!

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