February 2024
The Paid Media & Online Advertising industry has seen the growth and impact of AI evolve over the years, specifically in the Google Ads space. From manually bidding for individual keywords, to leveraging Google Smart Bidding based on business goals, online advertising has had some upgrades.
2023 aka “The Year of AI Evolution,” taught us many lessons at an unprecedented pace, with no sign of slowing down. This is especially true for advertising as more platforms integrate AI technology in new ways.
Here are 5 ways you can quickly harness the power of AI:
We have learned that prompts for tools like ChatGPT shape the output significantly. The same lesson can be applied to advertising: The more detailed information you provide agency teams of business objectives and how success is measured, the stronger the advertising platform’s output. Information such as revenue goals or the value of a new customer are prompts that can be used to fuel AI-driven campaigns.
For marketers looking to increase sales, leads, or revenue, Google Smart Bidding is a strategic AI tool that uses an ad buying strategy to optimize for conversions (sales or leads) or conversion value in the auction rather than bidding on individual keywords. What makes it “smart” is using various data signals and inputs to inform real time bidding, which leads to enhanced performance. Sharing essential information around business goals and measurement of success enables SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to leverage specific AI capabilities.
When it comes to online behavior, audiences have moved to consuming more visual content in feeds. To adjust, advertisers can use campaign types like Google’s Demand Gen, which offers engaging visual ad format options to capture new audiences for your brand or service, in placements like social feeds.
To overcome the barrier of the time and money needed to produce creative assets, ad platforms have incorporated generative AI capabilities. AI prompted video, images and text can be added or created within the platform(s) such as Google Ads, Meta, Amazon, Stack Adapt and more.
While AI can make creating new assets easier and less expensive, advertisers still need creative direction and synchronicity with branding. Integration of marketing, advertising, branding and strategy are foundational for brands. Having creative direction that aligns with business goals and strategies enables these tools to be more powerful.
As mentioned earlier, AI is only as strong as the data it has access to. Integrating strategy across content, SEO and paid media has been a desired state for years and is now tables stakes. Google and other ad platforms understand: the greater the cohesion across ad assets and web content, the greater the ad relevance and results.
For example, you can input a website URL in Google Ads and Google’s Generative AI will provide creative suggestions and assets by pulling information and imagery from the website, showcasing how closely website content and SEO work alongside paid efforts.
Google, other ad platforms and AI tools use feedback to strengthen their offerings and ad solutions. Apply a similar feedback strategy with a “test and learn” approach to advertising. With the continued integration and evolution of AI technology in paid media platforms, campaign types and ad formats are consistently being updated, upgraded and created. If you tested something in 2022, try testing it again this year. More likely than not, there is further advancement in the advertising platform.
Carving out time and budget to test AI tools is key to enhancing your ad campaigns. A rule of thumb for budgeting for testing is the 80/20 rule. Use 80% of your budget for ongoing tactics and 20% for testing new tactics.
Google Ads and other platforms include AI powered campaigns that utilize ad placements across their properties. For example, Google Demand Gen campaigns provide ad placements available across Google Discover Feed, YouTube In-Feed, YouTube Shorts and Gmail. Rather than buying the media placements in individual siloed campaigns, AI evolves a “mixed media model” in real time across available placements. Placements are focused on showing at the right place, at the right time, to the right audience.
This doesn’t take away from the work needed from your SME. That time is now reallocated to more strategic thinking, testing and exploring growth opportunities. While less time is needed for more granular campaign management tasks, AI advancements provide opportunity to reallocate time in advancing the strategy. This enables the quality enhancement of our output more than ever before.
2023 was a big year for AI and it’s only going to continue to evolve in 2024.
If you need assistance with a paid media campaign or ways to best utilize AI to meet your goals, we’d love to help.
