how exactly is AI benefitting PPC?
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an exciting development that seems to be cropping up in all areas of Digital Marketing, and why wouldn’t it? The prospect of AI automation taking care of the repetitive daily tasks, (and in some cases better than before due to the complex algorithms) freeing up time to focus on strategy, testing and their clients is an enticing prospect.
So how exactly is AI benefitting PPC?
- Machine learning tools help marketers identify the bids that are going to drive the most traffic.
- AI has the ability to predict the click-through-rate (CTR) of future ads and the impact it will have on quality scores.
- The ability to use historic data to predict the likelihood of a conversion.
What’s next for AI?
AI is rapidly evolving and changing the way in which we use vast amounts of data to generate a predicted outcome, particularly within PPC. The problem currently is a lack of mimicking human thinking in the process, such as reasoning and language processing.
“The current challenge with AI in PPC is the lack of the human thought process. Cognitive AI takes on that challenge by utilizing big data and turn it into meaningful insight by introducing the human thought process. This further enhances the efficiency of the PPC campaigns and improve business outcomes.”
The current AI landscape
An expert from the field of AI could argue that paid search agencies don’t use AI at all. In the vast majority of the cases where paid search agencies are using AI it has been around bidding algorithms.
Which in reality is simply “machine learning” a subset of AI where a computer uses a dataset to iterate and progressively improve on a specific task as opposed to “deep learning” where computers are programed to learn in the same way humans do.
In the case of bidding it is usually used to either change bids based on position where a machine learning algorithm will iterate towards the most profitable position. Or alternatively portfolio based bidding where sets of relevant keywords will be grouped based on common attributes and an algorithm will iterate towards a defined goal, prioritising the lowest cost conversions first.
Overall the current landscape has not changed much over the last decade looking back when the early machine learning based bid platforms were released and its years, probably decades away from the first fully automated AI driven agency where robots will replace humans.
So where should advertisers and agencies be focusing their efforts to make their media buying more effective? The answer is automation.
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