Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms are mainstreaming in a way that was never before possible, and these changes are having a significant influence on the way in which marketers need to approach search advertising.
In addition to AdWords itself incorporating AI into its framework, new opportunities are arising that can give marketers an edge over their competitors, or automate lower-level tasks, freeing up more time for strategy.
Here are four ways you can start taking advantage of AI to make the most of your AdWords campaigns.
Automated bidding
Automated machine learning as a solution to the decision of what price to bid on paid advertising is becoming an increasingly popular option as the necessary technologies become available to more firms.
Bidding too low means missing out on opportunities to reach leads, while bidding too high means sacrificing ROI.
Google’s internal automated bidding, on top of being identical to what everybody else is using, doesn’t have access to the information it needs in order to maximize your ROI. Reaching that goal also requires knowing consumer trends, purchase behavior, seasonality, demographics, customer lifetime value, and more.
A successful automated bidding model must:
- Estimate the price elasticity of each ad by using statistical inference based on previous bids
- Factor in the actual value expected by a click from each individual ad based on previous clicks
- Iterate in response to new data
- Recognize changes in the bidding landscape or the performance of visits and adapt quickly, rather than falsely assuming past performance will predict future performance in all circumstances.
There are, however, some things to look out for:
- Models that don’t know what’s happening on your site will make bad