From trends to tactics, these AI resources will help marketers and advertisers unlock the full potential of this transformative technology.
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Search engine marketing is constantly changing. Adwords went through a major overhaul last year, rebranding as Google Ads in the process. As Google introduces new tools and features, advertisers must change their PPC strategies and adapt. That makes it hard to keep up with new ways of approaching SEM every year.
One big shift has been an increased interest in PPC automation technology. But PPC automation tools aren’t just the latest trend. They’re a solution that can help advertisers follow the future of paid search without having to reinvent their strategy time after time. More businesses are investing in PPC automation technology than ever before. We take a deep dive into why it will soon be essential for all search engine advertisers.
Most advertisers today know that it’s possible to automate certain SEM tasks using Google Ads or third party tools. But few realize the true scope of possibilities with PPC management tools. Here are some of the applications of PPC automation technology today:
Bid management is probably the most valuable feature of PPC automation technology. Setting the right bids for individual keywords is a huge undertaking that requires constant adjustments. Your ideal cost-per-click (CPC) can change based on a number of factors, including business goals, demand, competition, and other market changes. Managing bids manually is basically impossible when dealing with larger accounts.
Google Ads offers automated bidding features for search and shopping advertisers. Choose Smart Bidding for your campaigns and Google will automatically calculate bids for you at the keyword, ad group, or campaign level.
They offer 5 different automated bid strategies to choose from based on your specific business goals:
Google PPC automation technology can analyze important data in real-time, including device, language, operating system, time-of-day, and other factors. It then uses machine learning technology to set the right bids to maximize your goals.
Third party PPC automation tools are another option to make bid management even more precise. For example, QuanticMind can factor all important business data into bid calculations, such as internal metrics, LTV data, and historical performance. By fully utilizing your relevant data to calculate CPC, it ensures you only spend the minimum necessary budget to reach your business goals.
Creating targeted ad copy is one aspect of PPC management that needs human input. In order to drive clicks and conversions, you need to come up with a unique headline and subheadline that speaks to your target audience. But manually creating ad copy becomes a challenge for businesses with large or quickly changing inventory. Automating the process can save time and help you identify the most effective ad copy for your products.
IF functions allow you to insert or change an ad message when certain conditions are met. You can use this Google Ads feature to automatically tailor your ads to be more relevant to your audience. For example, when showing ads to people who’ve abandoned their shopping cart, you can use an IF modifier to increase a discount, encouraging them to finally convert. Here’s what it would look like:
Google AdWords scripts are an option to make automatic changes to your account using JavaScript code. There are lots of ways to use scripts for bidding, reporting, alerts, and more. But you can also use scripts to automatically create ads from product information stored in Google Sheets.
Dynamic Search Ads are a special Google Ads type that can automatically create ads for you based on your website content. With this option, Google crawls your website, then matches your landing pages to closely related search terms. When someone’s search query is relevant to your product or service, Google Ads will dynamically create an ad with a relevant headline. Google now allows you to expand your dynamic search ads to provide deeper messaging that focuses on what consumers care about most:
Advertisers can further rely on automation to optimize their ad creative as well as create it. Google Ads’ option to automatically rotate different ad versions and identify which is most effective is a good example of this.
It’s also possible to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to generate effective ads. Google’s AI PPC management solution automatically suggests ways to improve ad copy based on prior campaign performance. Ad suggestions are made based on headlines, descriptions, extensions, and information found on landing pages:
Identifying performance issues and quickly fixing them is one of the most important aspects of a PPC manager’s job. But it’s impossible to monitor accounts 24/7. Some issues are bound to pop up that you can’t address quickly enough to avoid some campaign performance issues.
Automation can help with this by detecting issues and pausing problem campaigns or ad groups when necessary. It’s possible to do this using AdWords scripts. You can create a script to regularly analyze an account’s performance then email the manager if it differs from expectations by a set percentage.
PPC automation technology like QuanticMind offers an even more sophisticated solution for this. The technology infrastructure looks for data issues by comparing key metrics to forecasted performance, such as cost, revenue, clicks and CPC. If necessary, it will automatically pause bidding until the issue is resolved or corrected.
Accurate PPC forecasting is essential for securing necessary budget for your campaigns. And knowing how potential strategy changes can impact performance allows you to better allocate budget spend. Creating accurate forecasts is no easy task, though. You could do it manually using spreadsheet data, but it’s time-consuming and gets outdated quickly. Accurate forecasting requires you to constantly update your projections with the latest market and competitive data.
PPC management tools can help with this. Google Ads can help you automatically create performance forecasts using Keyword Planner. All you have to do is upload your keyword terms and it generates a detailed report of potential clicks, impressions, cost, and more.
Bid automation software can also help you automatically create accurate performance forecasts. QuanticMind, for example, creates reports predicting performance up to 100 days in the future. This automatically incorporates all relevant information, including historical performance, seasonality, and bid landscape data. Using PPC automation technology to create forecasting reports helps ensure they’re always up-to-date. Then you can make informed bidding decisions based on the latest data insights.
Most new PPC technologies are designed to address a few problems with your advertising strategy. PPC automation technology is different because it does more than address a pain point. It reinvents how we approach search engine advertising today.
The benefits of PPC automation tools are many, but ultimately it boils down to how it helps you achieve business goals. Here’s why automation is the future of paid search:
There’s no denying that all worthwhile marketing automation tools help you save time. PPC automation technology can save time on both mundane tasks and complicated ones. Anomaly detection and alerts help you spend less time monitoring performance. Bid automation helps you identify performance-enhancing opportunities and act on them. Ad creation technology saves you time creating and testing ad copy. The list goes on.
PPC automation tools are the future of paid search, but not at the expense of marketing managers and their teams. Automation serves as a strong supplement to their efforts, freeing up more time and manpower to focus on new growth and optimization opportunities.
Automation helps you make more precise and accurate campaign decisions based on your unique business goals. And when you use machine learning technology to analyze your business data, it can uncover novel connections to improve audience targeting and performance.
Automated forecasts is another example of how automation can drive insights to improve campaign performance. Most advertisers must rely on experimentation and monitoring results to know how their targeting and bid decisions will perform. Real-time, data-driven forecasting can help you project how various strategy changes might impact performance down the road. This ensures you always make smart decisions to improve campaign efficacy overall.
Anomaly detection can help you stop problems in their tracks before they have the chance to hurt your campaign performance. This ensures you’re never spending budget when you have issues with campaigns, ad groups, keywords or targeting.
More efficient bidding can also help you reduce wasted ad spend immensely. Advanced bid optimization technology uses algorithms that consider the value of each keyword in meeting your set advertising goals. This ensures you only spend the minimum necessary amount bidding on keywords to meet business goals overall.
A combination of saving time, improving campaign performance, and reducing wasted ad spend provide unique opportunities to pursue new growth initiatives. Instead of focusing your energy on maintaining campaigns, PPC automation technology allows you to spend more time and money exploring new audience targeting, ad types, or marketing platforms.
As more and more advertisers start using PPC management tools, it will become necessary to invest in them to keep up with the competition. It doesn’t matter even if you have a whole team of data scientists working to find PPC performance opportunities. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies have more computing power to derive quick insights and improve performance. Taking advantage of AI PPC management tools will soon be necessary to stay competitive and scale your strategy overall.
Technologies go in and out of style, even in the world of PPC. Advertisers are already using automated rules and scripts less and less thanks to the features of AI PPC management and automation.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that five years from now everyone will be using dynamic search ads and Smart Campaigns in Adwords. AI PPC management tools are also changing fast, so advertisers can expect many new and better ways to use automation in the near future. What remains true is that automation is the future of paid search, no matter how it evolves in the long run.