AI is the talk of the town right now. With many companies releasing their own unique AI tools in a rush to 'be the first'.

While many of these tools are amazing, how can we best apply what is out there right now to our PPC campaigns?

Let's take a look at the options and how to best use them to scale and refine your campaigns:

Smart bidding

Smart Bidding is a powerful feature that allows you to optimise your bidding strategies and achieve your campaign goals more efficiently. By leveraging machine learning algorithms and real-time data analysis, Smart Bidding automates the process of adjusting bids for each auction, maximising the chances of driving new leads at a cost-effective rate.

AI-powered Smart Bidding takes into account a multitude of signals such as user demographics, device type, time of day, location, and historical performance data to make real-time bidding decisions. It continuously learns and adapts to user behaviour patterns, identifying the most promising opportunities for conversions and adjusting bids accordingly. This level of automation and optimisation is nearly impossible to achieve manually, making Smart Bidding an indispensable tool for performance marketing.

With Google and Bing's Smart Bidding options, you can choose from a variety of strategies, including maximising conversions, target return on ad spend (ROAS), or cost per acquisition (CPA). By aligning bidding strategies with specific campaign objectives, you can achieve your desired performance outcomes more effectively. Smart Bidding not only saves time and resources but also allows you to focus on other critical aspects of their campaigns while the AI algorithms continuously optimise bids for maximum impact.

Platforms: Google ads, Bing ads, Meta ads (Facebook & Instagram), LinkedIn ads, most social media platforms

Content generation

AI content generation has become a go-to practice in performance marketing. By utilising tools such as ChatGPT or Jasper, you can create and optimise content at scale, enhance personalisation and drive engagement. By using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms, AI can generate text, images and even videos that are tailored to meet the needs of your target audience.

One of the main benefits of AI-generated content is its ability to save time and resources. By utilising tools on the market today,  you can automate the creation of landing page copy, ad copy, CTAs, ad extensions such as structured snippets, automated emails and more.

The most powerful way of managing this content is using HubSpot - HubSpot's Marketing Hub incorporates AI tools like Smart Content and predictive lead scoring to personalise content, automate marketing workflows, and improve lead generation and conversion rates.

Platforms: ChatGPT, Jasper, Copysmith

Lookalike audiences

Essentially, lookalike audiences are people similar to those that have engaged with your business in some way - whether it's being an active customer, a cold leads or even having just visited certain pages on your website in the past, ad platforms such as Google, Bing, Meta and others can use the data they have to build a lookalike audience from your CRM or analytics data.

These audiences are built using AI to look for similar behaviour patterns, demographic information and interests depending on the data the platform has available to them. For something like Google which tracks billions of searchers daily or Facebook which has billions of its own users login on a monthly basis, using AI in this way can be a powerful way of building audiences you might never have gotten in front of without it.

Of course, this tool is only as useful as the data you feed into it. Having a robust and flexible CRM system is essential for building the best lookalike audiences - for this purpose, we recommend HubSpot which has its own build-in audience building tools and can integrate with all of the major digital advertising platforms to create lookalike audiences.

Platforms: Google display ads, Bing display ads, Meta ads (Facebook & Instagram), LinkedIn ads, most social media platforms

Display audiences and placements

If you've ever used Google display ads, you'll know that there are a huge number of targeting options available to you: in-market, affinity, demographic and more. Many of these use AI to build these audiences, take in-market for example - by looking at consumer behaviour in real-time, Google's algorithm can predict when someone is searching for a particular type of product, allowing you to target them in a bottom-of-the-funnel mindset.

The same can be said for placement topics - by entering your relevant keywords or specific topics you wish to appear for, Google's AI combines with your bidding strategy (see above) and responsive ad assets to put the right message in front of the right people at the right time based on your overarching objective.

Make sure to make the most of these features by experimenting with different audience types, responsive ads with as many useful assets as possible, and utilising smart bidding with properly set up goals.

Platforms: Google display ads, Bing display ads, Meta ads (Facebook & Instagram), LinkedIn ads, most social media platforms

Other tools

While there are many many AI tools we could talk about, this guide should help you look at how you are using AI in your performance campaigns.

Other tools we haven't mentioned include:

• Adobe Sensei (AI platform that offers a wide range of AI-powered features, including content personalisation, predictive analytics, and customer journey optimisation, enhancing performance marketing across multiple channels)

• Optimizely (experimentation and personalisation platform that uses AI to test different variations of campaigns, websites, and user experiences, helping you optimise your strategies based on data-driven insights)

• IBM Watson Marketing (Utilises AI to provide predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and content optimisation, enabling you to deliver personalised experiences and optimise campaign performance)

Over to you

Use the box below to subscribe to our emails and we'll keep you updated on the latest AI tools and how to best use them in digital marketing.