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The power and impact of PPC marketing through Google Ads are undeniable.
When you can strategically place ad messages on Google’s ad channels, the rewards speak for themselves:
All of these benefits seem pretty great, right? Unfortunately, receiving all of these rewards traditionally requires in-depth data analysis.
While Google Ads offers some controls for your campaigns, data analysis is still incredibly time-consuming, confusing and complex.
This discussion will focus on how you can remove the tedium of managing a Google Ads account by introducing an AI automated solution to your PPC marketing strategy.
Without any more delay, let’s get started.
Data serves a lot of purposes in digital marketing and PPC. It is one of your most valuable and actionable resources.
There are far more than two reasons why you need to interact with your data and extract actionable insights. That said, two of the most significant reasons why you should involve yourself with data analysis are:
Marketing has always required a deep understanding of the customer. That has not changed.
What has changed is the amount of available background information you have on your target audience.
Every single interaction your brand shares with a customer adds another piece to the puzzle. In the Digital Age, customers interact a lot.
The more pieces you’re able to collect and arrange properly, the deeper your understanding of that individual.
This allows you to deliver a personalized experience to each individual. Not only do customers expect experiences catered to their unique wants, needs and attitudes, but it also dramatically improves your PPC marketing performance.
When you can deliver the right messages and experiences to the right audiences, you generate more conversions and higher lifetime customer value.
That’s more money in your company’s bank, which translates to a higher PPC budget!
The other constant in PPC marketing is heavy doses of decision-making.
Every marketing responsibility involves lots of decision-making. It doesn’t matter if you’re brainstorming new ad creatives, refining your audience targeting, managing your PPC budget or otherwise.
There are always lots of options that must be identified, evaluated and decided upon.
The many decisions that PPC marketers need to make daily have several negative consequences:
Injecting data into your PPC decision-making can resolve a lot of these negative consequences. Often, data removes the guesswork from your decisions.
With the correct application of PPC data, some decisions can even be automated. This drastically speeds up the process and makes it easier to prioritize choices.
AI has many applications in the world. When this smart technology is directly applied to PPC campaigns, it can help you create better advertising strategies.
The benefits of AI technology are such that they do not simply solve a problem. AI reinvents how you approach PPC marketing.
To understand this, here are 4 advantages behind why AI and automation are the future of PPC marketing.
Efficiency is about getting more done with the time that you’re given. Marketers love being efficient because they have so many responsibilities and never enough time.
When you can implement AI to automate certain PPC tasks, it saves lots of time and resources. This time can then be spent elsewhere, thereby achieving greater efficiency.
You can save time on both ordinary and routine tasks, as well as more complicated ones. Ideally, you want to automate the responsibilities that don’t require human input and are incredibly time-consuming or complex.
For instance, monitoring your campaigns is a 24/7 endeavor because the data is constantly changing. However, marketers don’t have 24 hours to monitor their campaigns and identify changes.
Thus, it is the perfect job for automation!
These types of necessary but arduous tasks are everyday occurrences in PPC marketing. In a later section of this guide, we’ll breakdown automatable tasks versus non-automatable.
As we’ve discussed, decisions in your PPC marketing campaigns need to be precise and accurate. Wrong decisions can spell disaster for your campaigns!
AI technology can help you analyze your data to uncover ways to improve performance. These hidden opportunities can help you improve audience targeting, select more profitable keywords, strengthen ad copy and so much more.
AI is also an excellent tool when testing new campaign components. Traditionally, marketers needed to test and track their changes manually.
Smart automation, on the other hand, can forecast the impact of changes in real-time. This better guarantees that you always make the right choices in improving campaign performance.
Most components of digital marketing don’t have the direct cost element that PPC has. Your budget in Google Ads needs to be monitored and managed closely.
At all times, you need to know where your budget is going and the results of that spending.
When anomalies and other irregularities happen, it can burn through your budget at an unexpected rate. If you aren’t careful, you can end up losing money in PPC marketing.
AI protects you from:
In other words, AI helps you optimize your spending so that you are always maximizing your results!
With this combination of saving time, improving performance and optimizing ad spend, AI offers an ocean full of value.
Again, it’s not about resolving a PPC marketing pain point. It’s an entirely new approach to how to manage campaigns.
This extremely valuable approach creates a competitive advantage for managers that begin implementing these strategies sooner rather than later.
When you have automated PPC solutions, you move faster, spend less and perform better than competitors that continue to “wait and see” with AI.
The reverse is true if you are in the latter category. The longer you wait to implement AI solutions, the more your competitors capitalize on your lack of efficiency and efficacy.
One of the reasons that marketers adopt this “wait and see” mentality is fear. They are afraid of automating too much and giving up complete control of their campaigns.
How can machine learning and AI replace decades of marketing experience and know-how?
In some instances, it can’t. Some tasks should be automated and some should not be automated. Let’s look at examples of both.
As mentioned earlier, spotting anomalies and unusual changes in Google Ads account data is your chief responsibility as a PPC manager. It’s what you’re paid to do!
However, you can’t monitor and analyze performance around the clock, especially not on your own. Even if you could, it would be an inefficient use of your resources.
That’s where AI comes in!
Machines don’t have to sleep and they don’t tire. This means you can rely on AI for 24/7 account monitoring.
When noteworthy changes occur in your campaigns, the system notifies you. This allows you to stay on top of all of the most significant shifts, without spending hours monitoring the data yourself.
You want to stretch your budget to its limits, while still ensuring profitable results.
The problem is that keyword performance is always changing, which means you should also adjust your bids constantly.
When you have thousands of keywords in your Google Ads account, manually adjusting these bids just isn’t plausible. Plus, it’s rarely a perfect science. Instead, you’re primarily guessing at how best to alter your keyword bids.
By automating this task, you save significant amounts of time that would otherwise be spent juggling your bids.
AI is also much better at maximizing the potential of your budget. It can calculate optimal bids based on each keyword’s real-time performance.
One of the ways that Google Ads provides control to users is through automated smart bidding options. With these tools, you set a conversion-based bidding strategy, and then Google Ads’ proprietary AI optimizes your bids to achieve that goal.
For instance, if you set to optimize bids for “Target CPA,” the AI will aggressively bid when it identifies auctions at your targeted cost-per-acquisition level.
The real power of automated bidding is that AI can effortlessly consider dimensions like device type, locations, time of day, language and other contextual clues.
This allows the system to align your ads to the perfect audience. A human brain just isn’t capable of that level of real-time analysis.
Keywords are your primary means of targeting in PPC marketing. Keywords are your bread and butter. If your keyword selection isn’t optimized, your overall ad strategy will suffer.
As a PPC manager, you need to know when keywords are under and overperforming. When a keyword is performing better than expected, it can be an excellent opportunity for your account.
Keywords also dictate costs. Some keywords are more expensive than others. When you aren’t carefully watching CPC values, you may be accidentally overpaying for keywords that aren’t very actionable for your brand.
This is another tedious, time-consuming process that needs to be done as frequently as possible.
AI can effectively manage these changes and help you select the best possible keywords at any given time.
Much of PPC management deals with making minor adjustments to your campaigns to achieve better results. In this respect, PPC is very much a data-rich science.
That said, creativity is still a crucial element when it comes to developing ad copy. Your ad messages have to accomplish a lot in a very tiny amount of character space.
Ads need to:
Often, the slightest change in ad copy can make a huge difference. Marketers often A/B test different variations of their ad copy to see which wording performs best with audiences.
Google Ads’ responsive search ads feature is another smart tool that aims to simplify PPC marketing. When you create a responsive search ad, Google Ads asks that you supply multiple headlines and descriptions.
Then, it creates different combinations of these ad assets. It tests how each unique combination performs and with what types of audiences. This is essentially automated A/B testing that yields much deeper insights!
AI is indeed paving the way towards a new, automated future of PPC marketing, but it isn’t always the answer. There are plenty of PPC-related tasks that still require a human marketer.
AI’s real power is in removing the tedious, time-consuming tasks from a marketer’s to-do list. This leaves more time and energy for the following tasks that AI should not automate.
Automation is great for real-time bid adjustments, but it shouldn’t control your entire budget. You always want to be in control of how much money you’re dedicating to advertising.
Budget is a key performance factor. If you don’t commit enough money to your PPC strategy, your ads may not continue to run throughout the day or month.
The size of your budget will also control how much you can reasonably spend on a click and how many products or services you can advertise at once.
To avoid possible budget problems, always pay close attention to where your money is being spent.
Although you can automate budget based on some rules but this may get fail if rules are not met respectively and you won’t be able to have a control on your campaigns’ budget. You also want to measure how quickly your budget is being utilized. If you’re spending too rapidly, you won’t have ad money left to finish out the month.
AI is brilliant, but it still struggles when it comes to mimicking language.
If you rely on AI to automatically create ad and landing page copy, you need to be extremely wary of this. You may end up with ads or landing pages with silly errors that will detract from performance and damage the user experience.
For this reason, it’s always best to create copy and content yourself. Even as AI becomes more sophisticated, humans will still be more creative and more capable of creating engaging, compelling ad copy.
You know your customers very well, which means you know the offers, features and most engaging language to use. Leverage that knowledge to create the best possible messages and landing page experiences!
AI is not always perfect and shouldn’t be trusted with 100% confidence.
You still want to keep an eye on areas of your campaigns that you’ve automated. Use your better judgment to recognize when automated changes are not best for your goals.
Remember, the ability to serve someone a specific ad, at a particular location, at the exact perfect time is incredibly difficult, even for AI. There are times that your AI may jump to inaccurate conclusions because it doesn’t have enough quality data to analyze.
Take advantage of PPC reports to review automated changes within your Google Ads account.
Now that we’ve discussed what can be automated and why AI is so valuable for PPC, it’s time to look at how Google Ads provides control through automation.
Some of these features have been mentioned throughout this guide and will be quickly recapped in this section.
The responsive search ads feature automatically creates different ad messages based on the headlines and descriptions that you submit.
This means that this feature does not create new messages from scratch, but uses different copy samples that you’ve supplied.
You can also pin certain components to ensure that they are always included in the ads.
The AI then tests how different combinations perform. It even takes into account things like device type, location and timing to decide the best ads.
Responsive search ads have been shown to increase clickthrough rates for better performance.
Another previously-mentioned AI feature is Google’s Smart Bidding.
Instead of manually adjusting your bids, smart bidding does it for you. As a PPC manager, you just have to select one of several conversion-focused goals such as:
This is not just a convenience feature. Smart Bidding’s AI can typically achieve better results for two reasons. First, it can make bid adjustments at the time of auction. This means you’re using the latest data signals to make some of the smartest bids possible.
Second, Smart Bidding’s AI has access to data signals that advertisers can’t see. This means that the Smart Bidding system can make optimization decisions based on data that advertisers don’t even have access to.
Smart Search Campaigns bring together many of Google Ads other AI-driven features. It is ideal for newer marketers that are not familiar with PPC management.
Smart Search Campaigns automate almost the entire campaign creation and management process.
Not only do these campaigns use smart bidding and automated ad creation, but they also automate ad extensions, keywords and some targeting settings.
With simplified reports and easy-to-use dashboards, you can quickly monitor performance and make certain adjustments.
Smart Search Campaigns limit many of the ways how Google Ads provides control to users. Thus, it is not an ideal choice for experienced marketers who want to manage their campaigns very closely.
While Google Ads provides some control and AI features, marketers typically want more. One of the best PPC management solutions is PPC Signal when it comes to AI-driven tools for improving your campaigns.
This section will look at what PPC Signal is and how you can use it to bring your Google Ads account performance to the next level.
PPC Signal is an automated management solution for PPC marketing. It automatically monitors your Google Ads account and detects any abnormal changes in performance.
The system then notifies you of the most significant changes in a very straightforward, simple-to-use tool.
Here’s what you may see when you access PPC Signal:
You can filter the available signals by account, campaigns, ad groups, keywords, device type, geo-location, hour-of-day, metric, signal quality and signal type.
This allows you to get straight to the changes that matter most to you and your strategies. For example, if you only wanted to see signals regarding clicks:
Every signal includes all of the essential information you need. What areas are affected? Is the change positive or negative? When did it start? How significant is the change?
When a signal grabs your attention, you can choose to click Explore to see more details.
After you click Explore, you can see a detailed visualization of the trend.
From this screen, you have a few exciting features to utilize. First, you can add additional data to the visualization. This helps you see how the selected signal may be affecting other areas.
For example, you can click to visualize conversion data alongside the clicks.
In this Explore menu, these two control options are also very noteworthy:
The left button allows you to export the data to Excel, Google Sheets, your analytics tool or anywhere else.
The right button displays the signal data as a table, instead of this chart view.
Pressing the button again returns you to the chart view.
All of these features help you investigate each signal and decide on a response. If you still aren’t sure how to act on the data, PPC Signal recommends an action for you.
With this function, the AI brain of PPC Signal suggests the best action to take. You can take this recommendation or choose your own method for resolving the signal.
This feature helps you answer each signal quickly and efficiently!
The PPC Signal system is hugely beneficial to marketers for several reasons. This section will outline some of the reasons why PPC Signal is a must-have for Google Ads users.
Change detection is always on a PPC manager’s to-do list. PPC data is highly dynamic. If you aren’t paying attention to changes, you’re failing to identify valuable opportunities and potentially damaging risks.
The problem is that change detection requires that you routinely check in on your campaigns. You can’t always be at the helm watching for these opportunities or risks.
With PPC Signal, you don’t have to because the tool does it for you! The simple truth is that AI is more competent and faster at detecting noteworthy changes. Plus, it is always on!
No change in your Google Ads account will go unnoticed with PPC Signal!
Insights are what every marketer hopes to extract from their data. Insights are also what every data analytics tool promises to users.
However, not all insights are the same level of quality. Some tools only offer unverified or unfinished insights. This means that the marketer has to take extra steps to test each “insight” before you can use the information.
PPC Signal always supplies high-quality, fully-vetted insights. Every signal answers:
You have all of the information you need to analyze the change in one easy-to-unpack signal.
With complete, vetted signals to help guide your PPC management, you always have something to do.
This removes a lot of the tedious guesswork and decision-making that can drastically slow down your management process.
Whenever you have active signals in your PPC Signal dashboard, you have something to investigate.
This makes it simple and easy to improve your Google Ads account consistently.
The bottom line is that PPC Signal saves you time, reduces wasted spend and increases your profits.
The tool offers a simple solution to the complicated process of PPC campaign management.
PPC Signal allows you to make better use of your time. Thus, you can commit all of your focus and attention to the most critical tasks on your list.
When you optimize your time, it’s easier to optimize performance. PPC Signal even simplifies it further by offering a list of improvements for your campaigns.
You always have a next-move to reduce costs and increase performance!
Google Ads provides control options for all users. Some PPC marketers are wary of automation and AI because they fear that they’ll be giving up too much control in their accounts.
The reality is that you need to be taking advantage of automation. It provides many benefits that will power your PPC strategies to success!
If you ignore AI’s power, it becomes a competitive advantage for competitors that are utilizing automation technology.
The real concern facing marketers is what you automate.
Thanks to this how-to guide, you have a clear outline of what should and should not be automated. You also have the perfect tool to bring your campaigns into the automated future: PPC Signal.
With PPC Signal, you can manage your Google Ads account more efficiently and with far greater results than if you continue to rely on manual processes.
That’s the power of AI that you can’t ignore!
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