The State of AI
The adoption of AI has more than doubled since 2017. Companies seeing the highest financial returns from AI are investing more in AI, engaging in advanced practices, and doing better in the tight AI talent market. Especially in a consumer climate where 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations and 62% of consumers are willing to use AI for a better buying experience – using AI sounds to us like a no-brainer… literally. So what is the state of AI today you may ask?
Where NC Empowers AI
To start, let’s cover some of the basic functions and platforms where Net Conversion empowers AI in our strategy.
Data Aggregation with Conversionomics: Net Conversion’s proprietary data extraction and transformation platform, allowing us to connect to any data source, process complex data sets and export for near real-time reporting.
Media Partner Platforms: Media Partners such as Google and Meta have been leveraging AI for years whether through machine learning or automated real-time bidding optimization.
Dashboards: With the help of Converisonmics, our analysts are able to flatten data sets to create various visualization tools to uncover insights more efficiently and more segmented than ever before.
Dynamic Creative & Creative Optimization: AI technology has allowed us to automate all sorts of creatives (native, display, video, audio, etc.) for our campaigns. AI’s creative power to automate images and video is something marketers are increasingly leveraging in their content and campaigns.
Alerts, Scripts & Anomaly Detection: Our team prioritizes what is important for our partners’ business which means we try to set up processes that can decrease the time our analyst spends on monitoring performance allowing them to spend more time improving it.
Performance Forecasts: As part of our media planning, our team uses multiple tools to help create performance forecasts (such as Keyword Planner) to generate detailed reports of KPIs. Using these forecasts allows us to make strategic shifts as needed to ensure we are reaching our partners goals within each phase of the funnel.
The extent of our AI utilization does not end there, and neither should yours! Now we are going to get into all the different ways that Google, in specific, uses AI as a tool within its platforms, and how you can take advantage of it.
Smart Bidding Tools: Smart Bidding uses machine learning algorithms to optimize bids in real-time for each ad auction based on factors like the likelihood of conversion, value of conversion, and target cost per acquisition (CPA).
AI-First Search: Google redesigned its search interface, prioritizing AI to enhance user experience. This feature is still in the process of rolling out across all devices, in the meantime you can opt-in for the new layout that places AI results front and center.
Performance Max: Google Performance Max uses AI to optimize ad campaigns in real-time by analyzing vast amounts of data and predicting which ad combinations will perform best for each individual user. The AI system uses machine learning algorithms to continuously learn from past performance data and adapt to changing user behavior, ultimately delivering more effective advertising results. We’re not done yet! But I promise, we are close. Meta has several AI features of their own that are worth leveraging in your campaigns if you find your business utilizing their platform.
We’re not done yet! But I promise, we are close. Meta has several AI features of their own that are worth leveraging in your campaigns if you find your business utilizing their platform.
Meta’s Advantage+: Meta’s proprietary platform uses AI to automatically generate multiple ads based on the marketer’s specific KPIs or goals. It can test different versions of potential ads to identify the most effective and includes the option to automatically alter text and images. Sound a lot like PMax? You’re not wrong.
Creative Focus: A big draw of Advantage+ is its Creative option, which eliminates the manual steps of ad creation and can automate up to 150 creative combinations at once, automatically adjusting the assets for each person who views your ad. You can even target specific KPIs using the traffic, leads, engagement, sales and app promotion objectives.
Your knowledge of your customers and your business are key factors in guiding AI to success and improving your cross-channel bid strategy. AI utilization within Net Conversion can be optimized further if analysts add conversion values and use value-based bidding, provide audience signals, consolidate their campaign structure, provide a range of high-quality creative assets, switch to data-driven attribution, and share more advanced inputs (such as new customer acquisition value). By providing your AI tools with comprehensive resources, it will in turn provide you with the best results.
NC Guardrails For AI
This section will cover all the different ways that NC remains in control of the AI that we utilize, but first, let’s talk about why AI is important for your omni-channel strategy. First of all, using AI can help reduce the time it takes to compile data and gather insights by as much as 30%, and campaigns which are powered by AI data perform 20% better on average. If that’s not enough for you, there is more in store.
Not only does AI generate an increased return for the companies that leverage it, but it does so in a more seamless way than the traditional method. AI integration helps to tie together insights across several different channels, and uniquely recommend holistic optimizations based on recorded data, rather than being broken up by channel. Furthermore, when advertising on multiple channels, AI and machine learning can also help with ad placement, getting your ad on the channel and context that fits it best, in turn generating more return on the same assets.
The reality is that AI is not as daunting or as “new” as most of our partners think. AI has been growing with us since we’ve been working in the industry, allowing the solution that we need most in today’s evolving world – the gift of time to analyze and work on what actually matters to our partners.
Key Takeaways on How NC will work with AI and not rely on it.
- AI Marketing: Enhanced Audience-First strategy with dynamic creative, performance forecasts & planning and audience recommendations
- NC Guardrail: Creative and Ad continuous testing, Campaign & Audience Performance Deep Dives and Media Platform Testing
- AI Analytics: Budget Alert Detection, Conversionomics, Bid Automation, Automated Dashboards & Slides
- NC Guardrail: Proactive Internal Home Bases with Budgets, Testing and Automation logs to ensure continuous improvements based on historical data and learnings.
