AI and Digital Advertising

The incorporation of AI into our professional and personal lives is becoming unavoidable. Ad platforms are investing heavily in automation and machine learning, heralding the end of familiar manual controls. While the technology is new and constantly evolving, there are clear opportunities where AI-powered tools can be leveraged for better digital advertising performance.

When utilized correctly, AI can dramatically level up campaign optimization and your ability to scale up asset production. Digital advertising systems, strategies, and methodologies will soon become more reliant on two general areas: data and creative.

Utilizing Better Data

Data collection and metric optimization are essential to driving digital advertising performance. The better data sets you maintain, the more informed campaign decisions you can make. Now, machine learning can assist your campaigns by continuously reading data sets to inform each bid in real-time. Without having to manually manage campaigns, advertisers can focus on feeding the machine better information for campaign optimization. As we always say at Adpearance — good data in equals good performance out.

A current example is Google Smart Bidding strategies. Automated bid strategies like Smart Bidding analyze more data faster than will ever be humanly possible. When structured correctly, Google algorithms read both historic and real-time data points to determine the likelihood of a user’s intent to perform key actions like call, chat, and form-fill conversions.

We know that despite attempts to formulate marketing funnels, buyer’s journeys aren’t typically the same every single time. Some people visit a website multiple times before converting. Some people do thorough research before making a purchase decision. Some people act on impulse. While it feels impossible to map out every possible scenario, we understand some of the common touchpoints that lead up to the ultimate decision. Configuring tracking for all these different touchpoints to feed a system creates a more robust picture for optimization. 

To put this simply, a system with smarter data is smarter at optimizing. The key is to set up machine learning systems with in-depth data collection strategies that prioritize what is most important to your business. You could prioritize page views metrics to achieve a 200% increase in views of a specific landing page but it’s more lucrative to work toward a 200% increase in leads or sales. 

Advertisers should implement advanced tracking system integrations to dynamically track website calls, forms, and chats that take place on the website. Then integrate CRM data that can layer in additional information about user behavior that led to a sale. Google can identify net-new users who have similar interests, search history, or behavior who are just as likely to convert as the people you’re selling to today.

Generating More Creative, Faster

Effective content management is challenging. Time, effort, and energy investments are required to generate a robust content and creative asset suite. While AI tech lacks the perspective on how users interact with ads and doesn’t account for brand compliance, newer developments create opportunities to produce content with fewer resources. Already today, we have innovations like:

AI-generated Imagery

Concepts like Photoshop Generative Fill and AI-created headshots set the precedent that you don’t need to be a creative designer to produce or edit pictures.

AI-generated Writing

ChatGPT-generated pieces of writing are disrupting the education system. And while students are being accused of turning in work that isn’t their own, marketers can leverage tools like these to spin up the foundational text for ad copy, social media posts, video scripts, and more, then having a human editor refine for quality, accuracy, uniqueness, and optimized for your specific keywords or messaging.

AI-generated Audio

Why stop at just writing? Some AI tools can take in only a few sound bytes and can produce human-sounding audio content for programmatic audio ads.

AI creative is at it’s beginning stages. We don’t recommend solely relying on AI creative, but it assists us in some capacities today and the technology is only going to continue to improve.

Curious About How AI Can Boost Your Ad Performance?

Get in touch to learn how shifting from a manual advertising approach to AI-optimized campaigns can benefit your business and free up bandwidth to focus on other revenue-driving opportunities. We’re happy to review your marketing mix and produce a free digital analysis with recommendations and competitive insights specific to your market.