“The future of marketing is about the future of experiences.”
-Nikos Acuna, Partner and AI Global Practice Lead at Davis and Partners Worldwide
In an exceedingly digital world, online advertising has become a crucial aspect of any business’s marketing strategy. Amidst a truly wide jungle of marketing and advertising gimmicks, Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one of the most effective ways to drive targeted traffic to your website.
However, running a successful PPC ad campaign requires constant monitoring, testing, and optimization. This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes into play.
Arguably the most revolutionary and disruptive technology that our generation is witnessing, AI is still in its nascent stages. Many jobs and processes across industries have been automated with the popularization of AI tools and software and the field of marketing and advertising is no exception.
By leveraging the power of AI, you can significantly improve the performance of your PPC ad campaigns. In this blog, we will discuss the top 7 ways AI can boost your PPC campaign, but let’s begin with the most basic information.
What is PPC?
PPC or Pay-Per-Click advertising is a digital marketing model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked. It is a form of search engine advertising where advertisers bid on specific keywords relevant to their business. A typical example of PPC advertising is Google Ads. When you search for a specific keyword on Google, the top results are usually ads.
For example, let’s say you own a coffee shop in New York. You could bid on keywords like “coffee shop New York” or “best coffee shop in New York” to reach your target audience. When someone searches for these keywords on Google, your ad will appear at the top of the search results page.
Similarly, if you search for “best SEO practices,” you might see ads for companies that offer SEO services.
7 Ways AI Can Supercharge Your PPC Campaign:
1. Ad Creation and Optimization:
One of the most time-consuming aspects of running a PPC ad campaign is creating and optimizing ad copy. With AI, you can automate this process and create an ad copy that resonates perfectly with your target audience.
AI-powered tools like Adext use machine learning algorithms to analyze your ad performance and create optimized ad copies. Adext can optimize ad headlines, descriptions, images, and even landing pages to ensure maximum click-through rates (CTRs).
This effectively reduces the human effort to simply ideating fresh ideas and supervising the trends floating amongst the public that will help the a resonate more deeply with the audience.
2. Keyword Research:
Keyword research is critical to the success of any PPC ad campaign. You need to identify the right keywords to target to reach your target audience. AI tools are proving to be a breakthrough success in this, you can streamline the keyword research process and identify high-converting keywords quickly.
Tools like Google Keyword Plannerand SEMrush use AI algorithms to analyze search volumes, competition, and trends to identify the best keywords for your PPC campaign. Apart from these, there are many AI powered tools available for free on the internet that digital marketers and advertisers can use to enhance their content.
3. Ad Targeting:
Ad targeting is another crucial aspect of PPC advertising. You need to ensure that your ads are reaching the right audience to get maximum ROI.
AI-powered tools like AdRoll use machine learning algorithms to analyze user behavior and identify the right audience to target. AdRoll can target users based on demographics, interests, and even their browsing history to ensure that your ads are reaching the right audience.
AI can help you target the right audience with your PPC ads. By analyzing user data from various sources, including search behavior, social media activity, and online purchases, AI tools can identify the audience most likely to engage with your ads. This allows you to create highly targeted ads that are more likely to convert.
4. Bid Management:
Bid management is also an important step in the process of PPC advertising. You need to ensure that you are bidding the right amount to get maximum ROI.
AI-powered tools like Kenshoo, Wordstream, Optmyzr, etc. can automate the bidding process and adjust your bids in real-time based on user behavior.
All these tools have different packages that you can explore as per your campaign budget. Using these tools to centralize your PPC bid campaigns will not only help you keep a clear track of your budget but also help you generate profitable revenue through best visibility.
5. Ad Performance Monitoring:
Ad performance monitoring is crucial to the success of any PPC ad campaign. You need to monitor your ad performance regularly to identify any issues and make necessary changes.
AI-powered tools like AdEspresso can automate the ad monitoring process and alert you if there are any issues with your ads. These tools use various performance metrics to generate the result about how your PPC campaign is faring in real time. You can get a detailed analysis of what is working for you and what is not and use that knowledge to make improvements.
6. Campaign Optimization:
Optimization is required for the success of any PPC ad campaign. You need to constantly optimize your campaign to improve its performance. AI-powered tools like Wordstream, Jasper.ai, etc. can automate the campaign optimization process and identify areas for improvement.
These AI tools help you generate better content that will make your campaign stand out from the rest. You can use the best SEO practices to continuously improve your campaign content and win hearts through your ad copies.
7. A/B Testing:
A/B testing is another significant aspect of PPC advertising. You need to test different ad variations to identify the best performing ad. This aspect of testing a PPC ad campaign has become effortless too through AI-powered tools like Adalyz.
You can automate the A/B testing process and identify the best-performing ad variation quickly. This way you are backed by data to put your best foot forward and impress your audience with what works best for them as consumers.
Digital marketing and advertising go hand in hand. To succeed in digital marketing, you need to use multiple advertising channels to reach your target audience. Therefore, in addition to these advantages of using AI that will help you boost your PPC performance, here are some SEO and SEM tips that can further enhance your efforts at visibility and outreach.
SEM and SEO Tips for a successful PPC ad campaign:
To achieve success with your PPC campaigns, it’s important to follow best SEM practices and SEO practices. Here are some additional best practices to consider:
1. Use Ad Extensions: Ad extensions are additional pieces of information that can be added to your ads to provide more context and encourage users to click. Examples of ad extensions include sitelink extensions, callout extensions, and structured snippets.
2. Use Negative Keywords: Negative keywords are words and phrases that you don’t want your ads to show for. By using negative keywords, you can prevent your ads from appearing for irrelevant searches, which can save you money and improve your click-through rate.
3. Use Remarketing: Remarketing allows you to target users who have already interacted with your website or ads. By targeting users who are already familiar with your brand, you can improve the chances of conversion.
4. Optimize Landing Pages: Your landing pages play a critical role in the success of your PPC campaigns. Be sure to optimize your landing pages to ensure they are relevant to your ads, easy to navigate, and encourage users to take action.
Impact of AI on PPC Advertising
It is instinctual to fear the unknown and the new, and while many do fear that AI is here to steal their jobs, what we are overlooking in this Tsunami of AI powered services is that, the ultimate goal of this tech is to elevate the human experience and lifestyle.
In his recent hearing at the US Senate, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, agreed that while AI might end up adversely affecting a lot of jobs, “there will be far greater jobs on the other side of this”.
“The jobs will get better,” he said. “I think it’s important to think of GPT as a tool not a creature … GPT 4 and tools like it are good at doing tasks, not jobs. GPT 4 will, I think, entirely automate away some jobs and it will create new ones that we believe will be much better.”
As marketers, it will do you good to remember that while AI tools serve as a great Vehicle to success, humans are still needed in the Driving seat.
On this note, we need to acknowledge that while PPC ads do generate valuable traffic and lead generation for businesses, there are other channels of advertising that are equally effective in brand promotion, lead generation, and expanding brand outreach.
1. Social Media Advertising: Social media advertising allows you to target users based on their interests, behavior, and demographics. Popular social media advertising platforms include Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.
2. Email Marketing: Email marketing allows you to communicate with your customers directly via email. By creating targeted email campaigns, you can promote your products and services, nurture leads, and drive conversions.
3. Content Marketing: Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable content to attract and engage your target audience. Examples of content marketing include blog posts, videos, and infographics.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO involves optimizing your website to improve your search engine ranking and drive organic traffic. By optimizing your website for relevant keywords and improving your content, you can improve your visibility in search engine results pages.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, AI can significantly improve the performance of your PPC campaigns. Tom Kershaw, CTO of Travelport, in an article for IBM, explained, "AI is so important because it lets us scale the internet. It lets even a small publisher or a regional app have access to the same intelligence, the same creativity as a super large behemoth and that is a critical function to the way the internet works and the way society works."
By automating various aspects of your PPC ad campaign, you can save time and improve your ROI. However, it’s important to remember that AI is not a replacement for human expertise. While AI can automate many aspects of your marketing and advertising campaigns, it’s still important to monitor performance and make necessary adjustments to ensure success.
