The Impact of AI on PPC

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been steadily making its way into the core of advertising platforms for decades. Fast forward nearly 20 years after the launch of Google Ads and it’s evident that businesses and advertisers alike are starting to contemplate the potential benefits and downsides of integrating AI into their daily operations.

While some of these AI solutions may seem enticing, the market’s overall acceptance remains cautiously optimistic.  In theory, automation sounds great.  The idea of leveraging more user signals and algorithms to enhance your campaign’s targeting sounds enticing.  However, with more automation, there is some concern over the loss of control for advertisers.  But also, this begs the question of whether or not automation will deliver the best results for your campaign.  Depending on the industry and your client, it may make sense to leverage these features further.  Yet, in other cases, it may not.  Until the proper learning and testing occurs for these new features, consumers may be hesitant to adopt the new technology as the new standard.  Yet, despite this reluctance, these new features should not be overlooked and should be viewed as an opportunity to explore new boundaries for better performance. With the ever-expanding sophisticated capabilities that AI continues to present each day, it’s safe to say that AI is not going away any time soon.  These new features will continue to grow and improve as we move forward, so it may be in your best interest to explore them further and evaluate them as a potential opportunity to improve your current results.

AI in PPC Today

Driven by advanced machine learning and intricate algorithms, modern advertising platforms offer a comprehensive range of AI-driven capabilities, allowing marketers to redirect their focus from repetitive tasks to higher-level priorities. Google’s automated bidding strategies, for instance, not only adjust bid amounts in real-time but will proactively identify and bid more competitively in auctions that are more likely to result in a click or conversion, depending on the goals and objectives for any given campaign.

Automated bidding strategies represent just one facet of the contemporary AI capabilities within PPC today. Across the entire Google Ads platform, numerous AI-backed features are routinely employed by advertisers. In addition to smart bidding, these features include audience targeting, dynamic search ads, automated ad assets, and performance-max campaigns, all of which harness artificial intelligence and machine learning to streamline processes and deliver precisely targeted advertisements. Together, these AI-powered features offer advertisers a powerful toolkit to help simplify the complexities of online advertising.

What’s Next?

With AI-powered features continuing to expand, advertisers can anticipate increasingly robust and sophisticated improvements in the functionality of these new features.  As we look ahead into the future, here is what we can expect to see:

AI-Generated Search Ads

With the growth of ChatGPT in 2023, search engines are looking for more and more ways to incorporate AI capabilities into their search functions to enhance the user experience. Earlier this year, Google introduced a new feature that is currently in the experimental phase and can only be used (at this time) through Search Labs, which is called Search Generative Experience.  With SGE, the overall goal is to make searching easier, more conversational, and simpler for users to get the information they need.  Depending on the user’s search, Google would pair relevant content (organic and paid) with their AI-generated search results to offer solutions that fit their needs.  With this feature, users will be able to ask follow-up questions to their initial prompts, where context will be carried over from each question to the next, which could really enhance the user’s experience when searching on Google.  It is still a little unclear how advertisers will be able to incorporate this feature within their ad campaigns but as they continue to test and get feedback on the product, we can only expect to see it grow and improve as they start to roll it out into the SERPs for all users to access.

All Good Things In Moderation

While artificial intelligence has the potential to significantly boost productivity and make our lives easier, the future of AI will continue to hinge on the improvements in functionality for these AI features, as well as the market acceptance to deploy these features confidently.  Automation features should not be implemented and trusted blindly but instead, they should be explored further to unveil new and missed opportunities for account growth. Although there may be some reluctance to give up control, we believe it’s imperative to perform the proper testing of these features to truly understand and evaluate the effectiveness that automation can have on your overall performance.