Trends in Technology

Understanding PPC automation and How Technology is Aiding It

February 16, 2018 by Bobby J Davidson
Read similar articles in: Industry Stories

PPC Pay Per ClickThanks to automation, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing is undergoing drastic changes today. PPC specialists are using automation to free themselves from mundane tasks of setting it up to focus on higher-value activities. Here is about PPC automation and how technology is aiding it!

Today, automation and advancements in technology are helping search marketing to become more effective for businesses and less tiresome for those carrying it out. To help improve their performance, advertising services such as Facebook Ads and Google AdWords have provided advertisers with several automation tools in the past few years.

Over the past couple of years, there has been a surge in the number of networks requiring management. Additionally, using these platforms is becoming more complicated each day. In such times, search engine marketers need automation or they will find it extremely difficult to focus on things really valued by clients in an agency.

However, by enabling automation, agencies can lower the pressure on PPC account managers—allowing them to manage their accounts efficiently and free-up time for higher-value activities that cannot be performed by machines yet. To provide you with some inspiration to move to automation, here are some of the ways PPC automation can help you and your clients.

Automated Bid Management

A time-consuming activity, managing your bids manually can make it virtually impossible for you to supervise across larger accounts. For this reason, employing a machine to manage your bids is a more logical and profitable way to manage bids. When it comes to automated bid management, you have a few different options available to you—with some methods being more advanced than the others.

The most basic way you can use automation for managing your bids today are using advertising platforms such as Google AdWords at the keyword, ad group, or campaign level. As part of Google’s smart bidding service, a set of conversion-based bid strategies use avant-garde machine learning to modify bids based on a plethora of real-time signals including language, device, operating system, remarketing list and time of day. The interface includes the following smart bidding strategies.

Target CPA Bidding

With this bidding strategy, you can set bids for unlimited conversions at a predetermined target cost per acquisition (CPA).

Target ROAS

Based on ROAS or target return-on-ad-spend, this bidding strategy targets more revenue or conversion value.

Enhanced CPC

This bidding strategy automatically increases your maximum CPC bid by searching ad auctions most likely to result in conversions.

Max Conversions

This bidding strategy finds an optimal CPC bid automatically by leveraging historical data and appraising contextual signals.

While the aforementioned- strategies are a good option for standard AdWords users, they don’t have the customization and control offered by automation methods such as AdWords scripts. By allowing you to interact with external data and automate common procedures, AdWords scripts help save a lot of your valuable time. A few free scripts are available to you to change bids automatically. In fact, some agencies are saving their PPC account managers a lot of time by creating scripts that automatically alter bids for each product group based on a target return on investment (ROI) figure.

The Impact of Automation on Pay-per-click Campaigns

Every PPC specialist has been talking about automation ever since ad networks Facebook Ads and Google AdWords introduced their rules for automation. Thanks to automation, many mundane tasks such as modifying bids, scheduling ads, or halting low performing campaigns can now be carried out automatically. This is the reason more and more PPC specialists are seeing automation as an inherent part of their work life.

By automating mundane tasks, PPC experts have allowed themselves to focus on higher-value activities. This in turn has benefited their agency as well their clients. PPC automation is still in its infancy and is far from being perfect. Only through trial and error are search marketing agencies able to find which tasks to automate and which ones to handle manually. The PPC world is still getting used to automation and they are many important tasks that PPC experts need to perform manually.

However, improvements in artificial intelligence and the advent of technologies such as big data and machine learning have the potential to change both automation and the search marketing field. To benefit from the advancements in technology and automation, PPC experts must keep themselves aware of the latest developments in machine learning, artificial intelligence and automation in addition to what’s transpiring in their area of expertise.

The Purposes PPC Automation Can Serve

PPC automation can help PPC experts and agencies to save both time and money. Following are some of the things PPC automation can be used for:

Reporting

PPC automation can be used to automate reporting including reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs), and metrics.

Alerts

PPC automation can be set up for low-performing keyword, ad groups and campaigns.

Repetitive Tasks

This is something we have already touched on. With PPC automation, agencies can automate the mundane or repetitive tasks—saving valuable time and effort.

Advanced Optimizations

PPC automation allows PPC specialists to halt performing campaigns and optimize for custom metrics

There are many ways of automating Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing to achieve the above purposes including AdWords scripts, AdWords API, and enterprise cross-channel bid platforms. Some of these methods have been discussed above.

Final Word!

PPC automation is changing not just search engine marketing, but also the digital landscape. There are many potential benefits of making the switch to PPC automation and some of them have been mentioned above. If you want to know more about how to transition to automated Pay-per-click marketing or how PPC automation can help you, then get in touch with us today!

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