By Ciara Brady on 13 Nov 2019
Wolfgang Bites: Watch - Using AI To Power Retail Sales
Wolfgang Bites: Read - Using AI To Power Retail Sales
In this weeks Wolfgang Bites Al & Beth talk about how we can use AI to feed the machine and power retail sales.
Al: So Beth, there's a lot of talk in digital marketing circles about the AI era of the Internet. How far are we into this now?
Beth: Yeah, absolutely. At the Google Marketing Live events earlier this year, Google made it very clear that the future of their ad platform is moving towards AI powered automated campaign types that deliver ads across multiple Google properties. It's no longer just about keyword targeting and search. Google recognise that customer journeys are going to be much longer, much more complex, and that automation is what's going to help advertisers reach the right users, on the right channel and at the right time.
Al: Wow. What does this mean for the nature of the day to day work of us digital marketers?
Beth: Well it's brilliant for Google, but it's actually becoming really difficult for marketers to add value to campaigns as Google are continuing to take more and more control away from us in the Google ads platform. Take Smart Shopping Campaigns for example. All you have to do is give Google your campaign objective on your budget and they decide when and where to best show your ads, and to which users. It's not just smart campaigns where we're losing control, we're even losing control on regular search campaigns. Take Daily Budget for example, your daily budget actually no longer means daily budget. As Google can spend up to twice as much as the budget you give them, if they feel you're missing out on some high opportunity auctions.
Al: Okay. The kind of work that we've been doing over the years has now been taken away. We're losing control. What are we going to do to add value in this new AI era?
Beth: Yeah, so while we’re losing a lot of control, there are ways we can influence and drive the machine and make it work harder for us.
- Firstly, Google is really, really good at driving revenue, but it doesn't necessarily know what products drive profit on a website.By taking business insights and layering these onto smart campaigns, we can actually help Google to drive revenue in the most profitable areas for businesses.
- Secondly, Google definitely don't want you spending your ad dollars on Facebook. However, by integrating the Google machine with the Facebook machine and creating a consistent journey for users across platforms, we can actually drive incremental sales to an integrated approach.
- Thirdly, we know that the bigger the data, the better the machine. Google absolutely loves data and loves volume. One way we can very easily increase volume in our accounts, is to increase the ad spend. However, we think a much more effective way of driving volume in an account without you spending a penny more is simply just by tracking more conversions accurately. Conversions like in store sales for example, as this is giving Google a lot more data to effectively optimise with.
Al: You're a digital marketer Beth and you're not going to be doing things in the future like Bid Ops, moving budget around and even setting campaign types. How do you feel about the new type of work you're going to be doing going forward?
Beth: I'm not worried at all about the future of our role as marketers. AI essentially is just freeing up our time to work on much more interesting, much more exciting things like strategy and integrated approaches to campaigns.
Al: Brilliant. So the future is bright.
Beth: It is.
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