The Future of AI in Performance Marketing.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital marketing, artificial intelligence (AI) continues to shape strategies across major platforms. As we move into 2024, it’s essential for marketers to stay ahead of the curve by understanding the pivotal AI developments on platforms such as Meta , LinkedIn , and TikTok , as well as general advancements in paid search and ad creation assistance.

Here’s a concise overview of the significant AI trends and tools that will define the performance marketing sphere in the coming year:

Meta's AI Innovations

• Sandbox: A must for smaller brands lacking extensive creative resources, Meta's Sandbox allows for the generation of text variations, creation of backgrounds, and outcropping of images to better suit specific placements.
• Advantage+: Meta continues to invest heavily in AI, focusing on providing marketers with enhanced control over age and location targeting, alongside the ability to exclude certain placements. Advantage+ campaigns act as the overarching campaign but the features of this are built on a few Advantage+ product areas, which can be selected independently or bundled into a full campaign:

1. Audience: AI predictive audience generation, based on conversion signal and other audience input data.
2. Placements: feed placement/app network delivery mechanisms based on generative learning for which placements and order of placements deliver the best results for individual users.
3. Creative: AI based creative enhancements, including image effects/adjustments and text variation/suggestions. This has seen strong initial adoption, and early tests have shown promising results in driving better performance for brand partners.

So far, Meta have announced an average of 32% increased return on ad spend when using Advantage+ shopping campaigns and a 5-times increase in reach when using Advantage custom audiences. This commitment to AI demonstrates Meta’s ambition to refine and advance its advertising capabilities.

LinkedIn’s AI-Driven Features

• Predictive Audiences: Tailored to meet specific business goals, this tool maximises campaign effectiveness by leveraging highly qualified behavioural data, serving as an ideal replacement for Lookalike Audiences (LAL's).
• AI-Generated Landing Pages: This innovative feature considers the target audience, objectives, and ad text to enhance storytelling and conversion rates, addressing tracking limitations while keeping users within the platform.
• Accelerate (Beta): LinkedIn’s Accelerate product is an automated B2B marketing campaign creation experience, which is being beta-tested in the US. It will recommend an end-to-end campaign and automatic optimisations to reach the right B2B audience with engaging creatives. It will use AI to analyse your website, your company’s LinkedIn Page and your account’s prior LinkedIn ads to recommend a campaign. Using this customer data, it then builds creatives and an audience, allowing you to adjust copy, images and refine targeting parameters, by adding inclusion and exclusions, like geography.

?TikTok’s Creative AI Solutions

• Creative Assistant: Many smaller brands are hesitant to invest time in the platform, due to lack of creative resources, so TikTok is using AI to make the process more effective for brands of all sizes. Their new AI-powered virtual assistant is designed to intelligently collaborate with brands, using prompts supplied by the user, to create responses on best practices, creative ideas, and scriptwriting, tailored to enhance brand presence on the platform.
• AI-Created Content: As AI continues to cause hesitancy, 62% of consumers say they trust content less if they know it was created by AI. This emphasizes the importance of labelling AI-generated content to maintain trust and authenticity.
• Video Editor: Features AI-driven tools such as text-to-speech and auto-captioning, alongside a BETA feature which collects insights on comments to gauge audience sentiment. This can then be compared with different industries, for clearer understanding of trends and topics.

?Google’s AI Advancements

• Ad Creation Assistance: Based on feedback that campaign creation can get quite tricky, Google is introducing a conversational AI feature to streamline campaign creation, generating keywords, headlines, descriptions, and images based on the provided landing page. This doesn’t completely take away the human element of creativity, however, it can help campaign creation become more efficient, allowing for more time spent making optimisations, and for campaign management.
• Image Generation for Performance Max: Google stated that advertisers who used Performance Max achieve on average 18% more conversions at a similar cost-per-acquisition. However, one of the major obstacles is not having enough or any assets to use. With generative AI, Google aims to simplify asset creation, enabling advertisers to produce unique images that enhance ad visibility and performance. By providing Google with your website, AI will suggest new unique images which help your ad stand out across multiple formats and platforms. These features lower the barrier to entry for smaller companies with lower budgets or design capabilities.
• AI-Powered Privacy Signals: As third-party cookies are phased out of Chrome, Google is testing new privacy-preserving technologies to ensure continued relevance and measurement accuracy in ad targeting.

These AI developments underscore a transformative period in performance marketing, where technology not only optimises campaign efficiency but also introduces new avenues for creativity and engagement. As brands navigate these changes, staying informed and adaptable will be key to leveraging AI for performance marketing success in 2024 and beyond.

If you want advice on how best to utilise AI in your performance marketing strategy then get in touch with us at [email protected] or contact us via our website.

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