Marketing: When Digital Becomes Humans

Is the sky really falling? It sure seems to be. 

Announcements about Artificial Intelligence (AI) are gradually increasing importance in Google Ads that has led many Pay-Per-Click (PPC) agencies to walk the thin line of being confused, scared, and ducking for cover. 

After all, Google is by far the biggest player in PPC advertising. And yes: AI, and specifically machine learning (ML), are merging together to transform the landscape of PPC. 

But no: this does not mean that machines can take over from us humans. In fact, the best results may happen when machines and humans work together. 

There are some ways to future-proof your role as a PPC expert. However, the current changes do require you to reevaluate and refocus your strategies, and this contemporary structured blog will tell you exactly how it can be done through a road map. 

When Google introduced AdWords in 2000 everything was done manually. Over time, Google layered more and more and more automation into the process. 

From 2002 until 2012, first as a Product Specialist and then as the Ad-words evangelists the word about this new form of advertising- people have witnessed from inside the company that invented online advertising as know it today. 

In 2016, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced we would soon be living in an “AI-first world,” and that Google was going to become an “AI-first company”. 

Since then, machine intelligence has driven the changes that have produced a replacement generation of AdWords. Which was rechristened Google Ads in July 2018. 

The push towards AI has many, perhaps most, PPC agencies and professionals wondering: what does this mean for me? Is “the AI-first” Google going to put me out of work? Will the things I’ve been doing to make account successful, such as optimization and reporting, be handled by machines? 

Who Needs PPC

PPC angst is even stronger because numerous digital marketers are fairly young, towards the start of their work lives. They may have thirty years of their careers left, and, in that case, what does the AI push mean for them? If you believe Google’s official pronouncements, machines will be doing everything long before it’s time to retire. 

In this rapidly changing environment, the half-understood “artificial intelligence” jargon being thrown around only increases confusion. 

The media, seeing a trend, is now extensively covering this new, “disruptive” technology. Media dramatization of AI always seems to come down to the image of a beautiful humanoid robot-like Alicia Vikander in the movie EX-Machines taking over from us poor humans. 

However, the story of what’s really happening is considerably less sexy- and less frightening. Machine learning is great at figuring out correlations within masses of data: indeed, it’s a lot better at finding patterns in large data sets than we humans are.

What this really means is we are seeing the increasing automation of the highly repetitive, boring, and tedious tasks of pulling data from reports and signals within the noise. This is where Machines, rather than people excel. 

Human Driven Marketing

Marketing, however, remains fundamentally human field: communicating with other people, telling them what you can offer, and inspiring them to act. 

Intuition and creativity are at the foundation of much of our human intelligence. We have done pretty well as a species for quite a long time, and machines are not going to suddenly become better than humans at communication or creative intuition. 

Yes, machine learning has a substantial impact on PPC marketing. This has been true for some time and will be more so in the future. 

At the instant, however, it appears that we’re at an AI inflection point, which suggests it’s more important than ever to separate fact from paranoid fiction and find out what’s really going on? 

What’s Happening with Google Ads 

If it is pushing towards becoming an AI-first company? Then what’s happening with Google Ads? A few years ago Google’s annual marketing event at which new products were launched, someone gave food for thought saying “in the past, you had to worry about which ads to write for which audiences. 

But now, our machine learning is smart enough that you can just submit fifty different ad variations, and the system will figure it out which is the right one to show to each individual user. 

Here the speaker conducted an example of a user who was looking for hotels. Google would already know if that specific user responds better to ads for cheap or five-star hotels, or prefers results featuring a spread of various sorts of accommodations. 

The system then delivers the hotel ads the user will be most likely to click on. Since Google makes money from every click on an ad, there is a strong incentive to show the most clickable ads to every user every time a search happens. 

Hotels, of course, benefit too, because if the ads connect better with users, the rate of bookings per click-the conversion rate-is likely to be higher too. 

In the last year, this process has intensified with the introduction of Google’s new “smart” features: smart bidding, smart campaigns, smart shopping. “Smart” is essentially just Google’s new nomenclature for love or money that’s machine learning-driven. 

Now, instead of being told that the machine will figure out which ads to show, as was the case a few years ago. PPC professionals are being told: “Tell us how much money you’re willing to spend, give us the site you want to drive the customer to and let us handle everything else.” 

Are we still Puppets? 

The increase in how much Google is in a position to automate scares many PPC professionals. In the past, it was the job of the agency to figure out targeting, keywords, audiences and the process of bidding: how much the client should be willing to pay for each click.

You would also need to determine negative keywords, adjustments to bids, and much of what Google now automatically handles in its "smart" campaigns. Although these are important decisions, many are a function of math and statistics, making this PPC element a prier point of automation.

PPC pros, who are able to think and develop a road map , will look in the mirror and ask what kind of PPC pro they really want to be. 

From the perspective of Google, the change is quite true. There is an absolute shift toward greater automation. But what this really means is unrelated to the messages the media tends to promote AI. When the media are talking about artificial intelligence, it is generally not in the digital marketing context.

Innovations in Machine Learning are Leading Towards

Machines won't make the PPC professional’s job obsolete. However, the arrival of machine learning and its ability to automate key tasks will change the character of the role.

The value a PPC professional can bring forward is going to be tied on to their ability to be creatively strategic. Those who can see the big picture, fully understand the marketplace and the business they are operating in and will win the day as a position to attach PPC to the overall growth of the entire digital marketing program of their organization.

Machines can crunch data, spot patterns and execute tactical routine tasks much faster than we ever could. But they can not make the job a strategic one! That is where the presence of humans emerges.