SERPs just aren’t what they used to be, right?
The role of AI in marketing, specifically digital marketing, is evolving faster than any of us can really predict, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of paid advertising. Over the last 12-18 months, we’ve seen a defined shift in how advertising platforms, particularly Google, are doubling down on AI driven automation and how it fuels the machine that delivers our ads. With this impacting how campaigns are managed, optimised, and measured, a key question emerges: how much control can we, and our clients, actually retain? And, if the answer isn’t to our liking, what options are available to us to regain that autonomy and stay ahead of the competition in this new playing field?
Performance Max is the (old) new kid on the block
The expansion and integration of Performance Max campaigns, though at times divisive, has been one of the more overt changes in recent years. These campaigns promise “smarter” bidding, a wider reach, and greater efficiency on spend by allowing Google’s AI software to decide where and how your ads appear across the breadth of its network. While there are benefits to this approach (a streamlined setup for those less confident, a greater reach across placements not previously thought of), it comes at the cost of visibility and, to hit that buzzword again, control.
Traditional cornerstones of paid advertising (keyword targeting, device-level bidding, audience segmentation, etc) have been de-prioritised or removed entirely when using Performance Max. This requires a shift in thinking when it comes to how we structure and analyse campaigns and performance. Whereas “our” role used to be more focused on the manual optimisation of individual elements, it now involves steering the strategy from a higher level, as well as interpreting Google’s automations and stepping in to avoid them driving full speed ahead down roads we want to steer well clear of.
Taking the tools from our hands
There’s no question that AI has brought positive changes to the world of PPC. Smart bidding algorithms, for example, can optimise in real time based on hundreds of signals that manual bidding could never hope to match in terms of speed and output. Creative recommendations and image combination suggestions are speeding up testing without the requirement for extensive design sessions to arrive at poor-performing variations. Our manual work is vastly reduced.
This increase in output, however, does come with the risk of introducing blind spots. Performance is harder to trace back to specific origin points, channels, or actions. Attribution models can feel more like a finger in the air “best guess” than a scientific insight. In a number of cases, it’s often unclear why the algorithm has made a certain decision, and that’s regardless of whether the outcome is positive or negative. This makes both scaling and problem-solving far more difficult when we want to get our hands back onto those tools.
For Nuts Group, one of our clients in the automotive industry, we’ve seen instances where AI has improved efficiency, particularly when it comes to those creative recommendations. Yet we’ve also seen situations where spend was funnelled into underperforming campaigns or audiences without clear explanations. For a client where return on investment is critical, maintaining that human oversight and veto remains a critical part of the strategy.
CPCs are growing, SERPs are shrinking
One consequence of AI introduction that we’ll all have felt is the rise of cost per click. As Google introduces more AI features into the SERP (such as AI overviews), the available space for traditional text and shopping ads is rapidly shrinking. Less real estate on the SERP equals increased competition for the remaining slots, which means costs are being driven up in a race to the top.
We’ve observed this shift in our work with Nuts Group, where previously stable CPCs have seen another sharp hike across key campaigns due to new, aggressive competition in the market. The downside? This inflation is not, as is the case here, always matched by an increase in search or conversion intent, so brands are now needing to spend more year on year simply to maintain the same visibility, let alone talk about scaling. This is a trend that is forcing brands, the smart ones at least, to become more selective, strategic and (possibly most importantly) creative with their media spend, and the channels they spend it on – now every click matters more than it ever has.
For Nuts Group, we’ve changed our approach significantly to counter these aggressive competitors. Paid Social has become a larger piece of our approach, where we can use our stronger brand identity and offering to present a more rounded impression versus others in the market. By hitting users earlier in the journey, we can look to stop that race to the top of the SERP becoming a race to the bottom when it comes to returns.
Author: William Sharp, Account Manager, Door4
This is part one, in a two-part series. Read part two now: Reclaiming Performance: Smarter Paid Media strategies for an AI-first landscape.
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