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AI has transformed paid search. Automation frees up time and helps level the playing field, but how can you stand out when everyone has access to the same technology? The answer lies in harnessing first-party data, high-quality assets, and a continuous test-and-learn culture.
How can advertisers prepare for the future of paid search optimisation?
Automated solutions have made it easier for advertisers of all types and sizes to optimise and scale their marketing performance.
Underpinned by AI technology, Google Ads tools and features can process vast amounts of data and respond to complex consumer signals. With bidding, placement, and assets adjusted automatically, it now takes less time and fewer resources to reach prospective customers with the most relevant ads.
With so many previously manual tasks now covered by automation and available to all, advertisers need to find other ways to ensure a competitive edge.
1. Harness your data for performance and privacy
By connecting your first-party data to Google’s AI solutions, you can unlock greater value and reach your business goals. The more high-quality data you feed in, the more automation has to work with — and ultimately, the better the outcome.
When it comes to bidding, first-party data is a game-changer. Sophisticated advertisers are shifting from bidding strategies optimised for cost-per-click towards strategies based on volume or value, aiming to drive more leads and sales.
By feeding in first-party data about your most valuable users, AI can help you to both connect with them and find new, similar customers. This will be more crucial than ever for performance in a privacy-centric web without third-party cookies.
Likewise, if you provide enough information about your products and margins, your campaigns can be automatically optimised to ensure they focus on the most profitable items.
Use the time you would have spent on tasks such as manual bid adjustments in the past to capture the right data throughout the entire consumer journey and feed it into your Google Ads bidding strategy.
2. Invest in the quality of your assets throughout the customer journey
Using automated ad formats and Smart Bidding frees up time to focus on your assets — whether that’s your ads, your app, or your entire website.
Putting time and resources into your creatives, messaging, and user experience (UX) is a powerful differentiator, because human creativity and ingenuity is what makes campaigns stand out. To get ahead, ensure you’re not only investing in high-quality copy and visuals but feeding enough assets into the algorithm so that automated campaign types can discover what works best.
It’s just as important that the consumer journey — from clicking on an ad to a conversion — is as seamless as possible. That means ensuring your website and app are mobile-friendly, with fast loading times and efficient checkout routes that will help turn ad clicks into high-value, returning customers.
Automation will help drive high-quality traffic to your website, but ultimately it’s the investment you put into your messaging and UX that will ensure those users are converted.
Smart Bidding
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3. Embrace a test-and-learn culture
For advertisers, investing in a test-and-learn culture across their campaigns is one of the most effective uses of the time saved by leveraging automation.
You’ll gain invaluable insights by regularly generating robust hypotheses based on your campaign’s KPIs and rigorously testing them. Use these learnings to refine your marketing strategies, landing pages, and UX.
The Insights page is a valuable tool for spotting market trends and analysing campaign performance. It provides the ideal foundation for crafting informed hypotheses that can then be turned into A/B tests to evaluate landing pages, CTAs, and more.
For instance, the Insights page might reveal an uplift in Search interest within your category — a prime opportunity for growth. Based on this observation, you can use the drafts and experiments page to test revised campaigns or bid strategies. Or, if you’re looking to test different creatives, ad variations allow you to run side-by-side tests.
Be ready for the future of paid search
Focused on data, creativity, and testing, these strategies will enable you to gain a deeper understanding of your most valuable customers, create more effective ads, and get more from your advertising budget.
By embracing these approaches, you can gain a competitive edge today and help position yourself for long-term success in search advertising.