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There is much to do about artificial intelligence in today’s marketing world. It’s impossible to have a conversation about the latest trends without discussing AI-driven automation.
When it comes to uncovering those juicy insights that marketers thrive on to adjust and improve their strategies, AI is unbeatable. Its ability to comb every inch of your marketing data in a single instant makes it not just an important tool, but a necessary one.
Yet, AI is a broad term that encompasses many forms. Each variation of this smart technology is capable of different levels of automation.
To fully understand what it brings to the table, you must look at artificial intelligence in marketing examples.
This discussion will look at some of these AI examples to demonstrate the different applications of this technology in PPC marketing.
Let’s get started.
AI has invaded every aspect of marketing. You’d be hard-pressed to find a marketing activity that wasn’t somehow influenced by intelligence or “smart” tools.
The appeal of AI is that it can automate tasks that, while necessary, are incredibly time-consuming. By handing the workload off to a machine, you free up valuable resources that you can allocate to other projects.
This section will look at some of the popular and effective interactions of AI in the marketing world.
You want to be able to service customer requests and questions. However, if you’re receiving hundreds or thousands of inquiries each day, this can be a costly task to perform manually, especially if you want to be available to customers 24/7.
While you still need human customer service representatives for some requests, many questions are repetitive or easy to answer. In these cases, responses can be taught to a Chatbot.
This form of AI studies customer complaints, questions and other requests and is smart enough to answer most of these inputs.
It gives the illusion of a real person responding to the customer’s question, but is more efficient and available at all hours.
AI tools have manifested themselves in many different forms in the PPC marketing space.
Smart campaigns allow newer marketers to create effective campaigns out the gate, even with their limited experience. Instead of manually setting every option and control, smart campaigns rely on AI to determine bidding strategies, audience targeting, keyword selections and more.
All that’s required are some basic inputs by the campaign owner. The smart campaign AI does the rest. These campaigns use responsive and dynamic ads to automate a good portion of ad creation.
You’re still responsible for entering ad headlines and descriptions. The AI doesn’t write your copy for you. What it does is combines your headlines and descriptions to create the best ads possible based on performance data. Over time, it learns the best ads for each audience segment, time, device type, location, etc.
This saves you lots of time from having to test ads yourself. The system does it for you, as long as you have historical data for the AI to use.
One of the most powerful marketing strategies to use is retargeting. This is the act of remarketing to users that have visited your site in the past. Perhaps they abandoned their cart before making a purchase. Or, they did convert and you want to encourage additional business from them.
Similar to responsive ads, it’s a process that relies on humans to create ad components. Then, AI determines the best products, services, offers and other details to re-engage audiences and encourage a return visit.
AI is adept at sorting content based on who the individual person is. This is crucial when retargeting specific individuals who have interacted with your site.
Retargeting messages have to be personalized to be effective.
Discounts are an effective tool for drawing in more business. Yet, they can have some unintended adverse effects as well.
For one, you may deter customers who feel that a discounted product designates a lower quality item. Other potential consumers may think that a discounted product is not very exclusive.
Second, when you discount an item, you may lose revenue from customers that would otherwise have paid full price.
Dynamic pricing aims to remove this problem by using AI to send discounts only to the customers it determines wouldn’t convert otherwise. The system is even intelligent enough to send different levels of discounts to users.
With this AI tool, you can test multiple promotion levels simultaneously.
Marketing is a fluid process, which means your strategies are never set in stone. They are constantly changing and adapting to meet the latest marketing environment.
The tricky part is knowing when and how to adjust your strategies. Timing is a critical factor here. Some changes pose a risk to your campaigns, while others are valuable opportunities.
If you adapt too late to a potential risk, you may experience a dip in performance. The longer you take to realize and adapt for opportunistic changes, the less value you extract.
Can you imagine having the foresight to invest in companies like Apple or Microsoft ages ago?
With AI, you’ll have this level of predictive analytics to capitalize on powerful opportunities before they reach this high level of significance. Meanwhile, you’ll be removing investments in keywords, channels and other strategies that are failing to provide returns.
Predictive analytics is the process of using past and present data to evaluate how likely or unlikely certain events are from happening in the future. This part of the data science field uses machine learning, predictive modeling, data mining and other techniques.
Essentially, predictive analytics (with the help of AI) allows businesses to detect insights that make better decisions in the ever-changing marketing environment.
Marketers are often rich with data, but poor in actionable insights.
The holy grail of data analysis is the ability to transform your overflowing data coffers into actionable steps to take to improve your marketing and ROI.
Actionable insights are data-born actions that a marketer can take to produce meaningful and valuable changes to their strategies. They make you reassess your current status and give you pathways to push forward to achieving your goals.
Often, insights reveal hidden opportunities and risks that you wouldn’t usually be able to detect with raw data alone. That’s why you want to be rich with data and insights.
Insights are found through analyzing raw data and applying statistical techniques to acquire evidence behind these data-driven decisions.
However, digging through all of this raw data for insights is the classic needle in a haystack scenario.
You have lots of data available to you, but not all of it is important. Non-insightful data may be things you already know about your campaigns. It can also be data that simply isn’t relevant to your marketing goals.
You need sophisticated AI algorithms to bring needle-like insights to the surface of the haystack.
What makes an insight actionable will largely depend on your campaign goals and which metrics you are trying to optimize. You can take several steps to ensure that you’re acquiring the right insights from your data.
Your first step is to decide how you’ll define your marketing success. You’ll also determine the metrics that are crucial to your goals. These elements will guide your entire analysis and allow you to decipher relevant from irrelevant data.
In other words, it gives you direction and purpose when making marketing-related decisions.
Once you have your heading, you need to gather the relevant data. You’ll want to look at the metrics that you’ve established are critical performance factors. However, you may also want to gather tertiary data that may influence these metrics, even though they are not directly related to your goals.
For instance, if you’re running a PPC campaign to maximize your conversions, then you mainly want to look at conversion-related metrics (total conversions, cost per conversion, etc.).
Yet, it may be good also to include data like your impressions and clicks. After all, a dip in conversion metrics could be caused by fewer clicks or ad impressions.
Ultimately, you’re trying to answer two questions:
Then, it’s a matter of analyzing the differences between the past and present to find ways to learn from past mistakes and capitalize on current opportunities.
After acquiring all the data, it needs to be organized. Unorganized data is stressful to work with and highly chaotic. When the information isn’t properly arranged, it can quickly lead to fatigue and poor decision-making.
When you organize your data correctly, it helps you make sense of this mayhem. Your goal should be to reduce the complexity of the information you need to analyze.
Sometimes, complex data is a sign that you’re including too much irrelevant data in your analysis. This is causing unnecessary noise that distracts you from your actionable insights.
Ideally, you want to keep your analysis as simple as possible. By removing these unneeded components, it’s easier to discover your insights.
While marketers need to be very number-driven business professionals, they also should be storytellers. Specifically, you want to tell the narrative behind what all your metrics and data are saying.
Market research insights are stories about your target audience. They can tell you about their buying habits, preferences and more. Using language, visuals and compelling storytelling, you can absorb the lessons from these stories and convey them to others.
This will give you a detailed view of your account, the audience and how they engage with your products, services and marketing messages.
Telling the narrative of your data is also a must-have skill when you need to report marketing results to others.
For example, you may need to inform clients, managers, team members or other individuals about what’s happening within your PPC campaigns. Without adequate data storytelling, they won’t be able to engage with the actionable insights in the same way that you do.
When you organized your data, you removed a lot of irrelevant data, but some may remain. Metrics you thought were pertinent to your analysis may turn out to be unwanted noise. Thus, it’s a good time to again cut out anything that isn’t relevant to your analysis goal.
This will help tell your data narrative because unnecessary information will make your story more complicated than it needs to be. Just like a writer removing fluff or irrelevant passages from a novel, you need to do the same with your data to tell the story properly.
Take the time to review your whole narrative through the eyes of a client, stakeholder or another party that may not be as familiar with the data as you. Think about what conclusion you want them to reach by viewing the insights.
With this perspective in mind, start removing parts that don’t support that end conclusion. You should also summarize any parts of the narrative that are overly complex. If possible, try to boil the information down to a single number that is easy to comprehend.
You should end up with a clear and concise story that demonstrates the actionable insights and opportunities available to your marketing strategy.
Thanks to your data storytelling, you’ve effectively conveyed the insight to yourself and others. Now you need to reframe that insight into action.
This is the most crucial step of the process. It’s the point where you consider how you can apply the insight to improve your marketing.
Think critically about what the insight tells you and how you can reframe this information as ideas or opportunities within your marketing campaigns.
It’s about figuring out what the next step is. How do you use the insight to your advantage? How do you act on it?
Also, ask yourself, “Should we act on this?”
So far, we’ve looked at examples of general marketing insights. These actionable insights are direct and meaningful next steps that can be taken after analyzing your data.
Actionable insights in PPC are the same, except they provide opportunities or areas of improvement for your Google Ads campaigns specifically.
To recap, data is raw and unprocessed information. Your campaign received 1,000 clicks — that’s raw data because there’s no context. Are there more clicks or fewer clicks than in the past? What’s the total cost of these clicks?
Answering these questions (and many more) begins the process of converting raw data into insights. PPC actionable insights are created when you’re able to reach data-driven conclusions that inspire action and decisions to improve your PPC campaigns.
With actionable insights, you may be able to determine which keywords drive the best results, which times throughout the day are best for your ads, where your budget is actually being spent and so much more.
Here’s one example:
You can create such visualization with ChartExpo. This visualization library is available for Excel and Google Sheets.
The above radar chart visualization helps depict insights found in a PPC campaign. You can see that conversions and cost per conversion data are being distributed across the different days of the week.
With this chart, you can obtain a few valuable insights:
These insights lead to interesting discoveries. You can check why there are fewer conversions some days than others. You may also want to investigate periods where the cost per conversion is highest.
Then, you can turn these discoveries into actions.
For instance, you decide that paying elevated conversion costs drains your budget too quickly. In response, you decide to pause campaigns on Mondays to help preserve your budget.
Timing is crucial when turning data into actionable insight. Insights have a shelf-life that determines how actionable they are. The longer it takes you to reach the action stage, the less value the insight has.
Let’s say that you missed that spike in conversion costs for weeks. That’s all time when you were overspending on conversions and wasting ad spend.
This is where artificial intelligence in marketing examples shine.
The above example is just one simple analysis, but there are thousands of other possible ways to look at your data. You may not look at the right combination in time to make the most of the insights.
AI’s incredible processing power can analyze all of these possible combinations to find any unusual or noteworthy occurrences in the data.
AI works best when it compliments human intelligence. While AI is phenomenal for analyzing your data and returning actionable insights, it does have limitations. It doesn’t have the years of marketing expertise that you possess.
The best scenario is to use AI to automate mundane, time-consuming tasks. If you can hand these parts of the process off to AI, you can put all of your time and energy into high-priority projects.
This is much-needed in the PPC marketing space because campaigns generate ever-expanding data volumes, which means analysis becomes increasingly complex. Manually extracting insights is too slow and tedious. It just isn’t feasible in the Digital Age.
It’s the classic Aesop fable, “The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs.” Artificial Intelligence is the goose and actionable insights are the golden eggs. As long as you keep using AI and feeding it with quality data, it will continue to provide golden eggs.
In the highly competitive space of PPC marketing, you don’t want to miss out on valuable insights because you lack the ability to extract and act on them faster than the competition.
It’s not enough to just set and forget your campaigns. You have to manage them and make corrections based on actionable insights.
Again, timing is vital. Without the help of AI, the process takes too long and you miss out on extracting insights fast enough. You need AI to handle the complex and overwhelming nature of your PPC data.
That’s why PPC Signal exists.
PPC Signal is a powerful campaign management solution that empowers your data analysis with AI. The PPC Signal system monitors all of your account data and looks for patterns and anomalies.
These are the unusual behaviors in your data that lead to actionable insights. With PPC Signal, you can leave all data collection, cleaning and analysis to the AI.
It auto-detects potential insights and presents them to you in a convenient signal. Essentially, it provides actionable insights as a service.
When you first access your PPC Signal dashboard, you’re shown all of your active campaign signals.
You can think of these signals as alerts for your campaigns informing you of the most significant changes currently affecting your strategies.
Active signals can be filtered by metric type, location, time of day, campaign and other options. This allows you to hone in on the most impactful areas of your account. You don’t have to sift through less irrelevant insights; you can get right to the good stuff!
Here is an example:
In this scenario, the marketer is choosing to filter signals by wasted spend. Finding wasted spending is crucial because you want to pause or remove these parts of your campaigns. Otherwise, they’ll hurt your budget and ROI.
Each signal is packaged with all of the relevant information you need. You can see what’s happening, how significant the change is, when it started, what areas are being affected and more.
You don’t have to go hunting for these details yourself. PPC Signal provides the complete picture.
When you want to investigate a signal further, you can click the Explore button.
This will show you a detailed view of the data and zoom in on the data chart. This allows you to see how the data has changed each day.
You can even add other metrics to this chart to see how different areas of your account affect or influence the change. Also, you can click to view the data as a table, which you can export to your spreadsheets.
PPC Signal is an excellent example of artificial intelligence in marketing because it achieves that perfect blend between human and machine involvement.
The PPC Signal automates the discovery and processing of actionable insights, so you only work with fully-vetted, finished insights.
Then it’s up to you, the marketer, to decide which signals to resolve first and what changes need to be made to mitigate presented risks or seize available opportunities.
That’s how AI should work in marketing!
Data can be both a boon and a burden to your business. ChartExpo is best library to visualize data in Excel and Google Sheets.
When you have the AI tools to convert raw data into actionable insights, you’ll never fail. You’ll always know when and how to change your strategies to produce better results.
Without artificial intelligence, however, having too much data can be an overwhelming nightmare. You won’t have the ability to extract insights efficiently.
Not only will this create stress and headaches for you and your team, but the insights you do acquire will be basic and less impactful.
There are many examples of artificial intelligence in marketing — chatbots, smart campaigns, etc. When it comes to managing your Google Ads account, PPC Signal stands out as an AI solution.
When you will generate PPC reports , you will realize PPC campaigns create data at a constant and rapid rate. AI tools, like PPC Signal, are necessary for staying above all these changes and zeroing out the ones that actually matter.
PPC Signal is always monitoring your campaigns and the AI algorithms are powerful enough to analyze even the most robust Google Ads account.
It’s the perfect fit for solving the struggles of a PPC manager.
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