PayPerClick

Google Ads Automation and AI

Google Ads Automation and AI – the only way is forward

Well, it would be amiss of us to NOT to touch one of the most talked about topic of 2023 (no its not Chat.gpt) and explore how automation and AI are impacting the digital marketing landscape. At PayPerClick, we are seeing a lot of changes and essentially, we feel we are all in some way guinea pigs, transitioning along with the platforms as they continue to roll out and refine the new world order of Automation and AI. Some of it is gleeful relief that many long hours of repetitive tasks are replaced with auto generated solutions and others we desperately cling to how things used to work, as we no longer have many levers to pull when automated bidding or PMAX fail to deliver results.

The problem is that when automated campaigns don’t perform as well as expected, marketers resist their adoption, BUT WE MUST MOVE FORWARD.

This is the decade of automation

Automation continues to become more and more important for improving performance, cost efficiency, and keeping up with the competition. As marketers we need to be not only automating routine processes but also assisting algorithms and machines with their learning by providing accurate and relevant data for your business objectives.

Nearly all PPC is automated in some way, shape, or form. But modern automation (especially Google’s Performance Max) has its limitations. The lack of media ad spending and performance transparency is becoming increasingly prevalent.

The importance of the audience and messaging

This is where knowing your audience and messaging and offers become more important. As those controls and transparency go away, the best defence is a good offense. Messaging and offers crafted specifically for your audience will drastically outperform a “guess and check” approach.
As PPC marketers we will move away from being constant lever-pullers, and our focus should be all the more on other aspects of marketing: Messaging. Brand strategy. Creative. The interaction of other channels with paid media.

The importance of keywords continues to diminish

Keywords in their current state aren’t obsolete but are becoming less of a focused priority. They’ve been revitalised as something different. Broad match is much closer to “intent match.” Phrase and exact match are closer to language match but far from what they used to be.

Cognitive biases that influence decision-making

Google’s PMAX campaign is designed to touch all different stages of the buying cycle, moving away from Search campaigns that focused on direct intent and looking to focus on multichannel using behaviour science triggers in the decision-making process.

A few years back Think With Google released this “Messy Middle” diagram that shows the way people make decisions is messy and getting messier. Google reported “we know that what happens between trigger and purchase decision-making is not linear. In the center of the model lies the messy middle — a complex space between triggers and purchase, where customers are won and lost. Cognitive biases shape their shopping behavior and influence why they choose one product over another.”

Read More: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/consumer-journey/navigating-purchase-behavior-and-decision-making/

 

 

The Importance of signals for machine learning

Smart Bidding combined with attribution technology helps to determine the best options for your campaign across all Google inventory and to determine bids on the auctions that have the highest probability of meeting your business goals in real time. Machine learning is enhanced when you add audience signals to your Performance Max campaign.

Google also says “the algorithm uses audience signals to deeply understand your audience’s intent, preferences & context to widen its reach to new audiences”.

Audience signals are set up in performance max campaigns, display ad campaigns, video campaigns, and discovery campaigns. In addition to this, Google Ads’ algorithm uses audience signals in all automated bidding strategies even if you do not give them specifically under the audience signals option.

Read the WordStream cheat sheet here: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2022/09/21/google-ads-audience-targeting-cheat-sheet

 

Google Ads Audience Targeting Cheat Sheet by WordStream

 

In a nutshell – we are the midst of a major transition, and we need to embrace and trust that the tech platforms will continue to improve, along performance. We are hoping for more stability and consistency in performance. We know that the more information we feed the beast the better it can perform for us. At PayPerClick, we continue to work every account individually and transition at the pace that provides the best outcomes to the client.