It’s impossible to talk about modern marketing without mentioning such strong trends as the use of artificial intelligence. AI is changing paid advertising while also introducing new opportunities for marketers. Experts predict that AI and machine learning will generate up to $2.6 trillion in value by solving problems associated with sales and marketing over the next three years.
AI and PPC
You may have noticed that technology develops at a rapid pace, so relatively new technologies are especially promising. Although artificial intelligence gained momentum not so long ago, it has already proven to be extremely useful in different areas, including marketing. If you want to succeed, you should keep up with the development process. This way, you’ll be able to keep your marketing efforts as effective as possible.
AI, machine learning, and big data are still relatively young concepts so human professionals are still actively involved in many processes. The potential of data can only be used if people know what they do and have clear objectives. Besides, businesses should keep in mind the importance of high-quality personalization for modern consumers while also maintaining a certain level of transparency.
One of the biggest benefits of AI for marketing is an opportunity to automate many processes that take a lot of time when performed manually. Thanks to AI-powered solutions, marketers can improve the efficiency of numerous processes. According to research, automation alone can increase global productivity by 1.4% annually.
How to Use AI to Improve Your PPC Advertising
Here are some of the best examples of the capabilities of AI:
Autonomous adjustment of PPC bids
When AI controls your ads, you can tweak your campaigns by making minor changes to the code to make your PPC campaigns more effective. For instance, you can use AI to adjust PPC bids autonomously. This way, you won’t bid too low for ads that enable you to acquire quality leads, and you will also improve your ROI by eliminating overbidding.
You can build your own AI algorithm to manage your bids, but in this case, you need to find an experienced software development company and be ready to invest a lot of money into the development process. Fortunately, there are many tools, including Google Ads and solutions from Bing, which can be used for free. Amazon also has its hourly bidding algorithm, which enables marketers to automatically adjust their bids according to the dynamics of the market.
When using automation, you should keep in mind that there are different levels and that automated bidding may have some disadvantages. For instance, Google Ads enables you to choose between Enhanced CPC and such fully automated strategies as vCPM, Target ROAS, Maximize Clicks, Target CPA, and Maximize Conversions.
Enhanced CPC is different from the rest of the strategies because in this case, the algorithm simply makes adjustments to keyword bids that are set manually. Fully automated strategies require more attention. You should always monitor their performance to make sure that you stay within your budget and the ROI meets your expectations. Solutions that are considered optimal by Google may not always resonate with your business goals.
Improved retargeting
You can use various AI-powered analytics and call tracking software to see the connection between the leads generated by your offline efforts and specific campaigns or even keywords. By analyzing the data on your offline conversions, you can improve your retargeting efforts.
Proper targeting is crucial for the success of your campaign. First, you don’t want to repel customers who already want to do business with you by annoying them with excessive marketing materials. Secondly, there’s no need to spend your PPC budget on customers who have already made a purchase and are unlikely to buy from you again soon.
Predicting consumers’ behavior
One of the most promising disciplines related to AI is machine learning. AI algorithms can learn from historical data, considering your audience’s demographics, purchase habits, web activity, device usage, etc. This way, algorithms can detect the connection between campaigns and keywords, and therefore predict what search queries will most likely generate conversions. Moreover, machines can do it much faster than humans.
Pausing ads with poor performance
You don’t want to keep bidding on ads that demonstrate poor performance and don’t deliver the desired ROI. Therefore, you should be able to quickly evaluate the performance of your ads and pause them if they don’t perform well enough. Similarly, you should reconsider your strategy if your bids don’t turn into clicks. Such a situation can damage your quality score, and you should keep it high to minimize the cost per conversion.
Creative assistance
While AI has proven to demonstrate a much better performance when dealing with various repetitive tasks, creativity still remains a challenge for algorithms. Machines still cannot replace humans when it comes to creativity but they can assist marketers. For instance, Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) from Google prove that AI can help marketers create a better PPC ad copy.
You can provide up to 15 headlines, and Google will show RSAs that correspond to the users’ search queries. Google can create thousands of RSAs based on your headlines, enabling you to maximize the results that you get from your investments. As AI technology develops and evolves, marketers will get even more opportunities to use AI for creative tasks.
Many companies are also starting to experiment with AI-powered chatbots to make their PPC campaigns more engaging. Thanks to AI-powered tools, you can increase conversions and reduce your bounce rates by providing high-quality assistance. Besides, you can use chatbots to get more information about your users from their conversations.
Wrapping Up
The concept of AI appeared not so long ago but it has already demonstrated its tremendous potential in different areas, and marketing is no exception. Various AI-powered tools enable you to improve the efficiency of your marketing efforts and maximize the ROI. Thanks to AI, marketers can automate bidding, improve targeting, and predict users’ behavior. Moreover, some AI solutions can already assist marketers with creative tasks.
