If there’s one thing that Google Marketing Live made clear when it comes to Smart Bidding, there’s no doubt that technology is growing to understand: user wants, marketer goals, and the journeys a customer takes. These powerful, AI-driven algorithms are being utilized to gather contextual signals about the conditions in which to bid and serve the right ad campaign asset. As our CEO Udayan Bose said in his recent webinar recapping the event, “Google will help you to find the highest-value customers.”
The Changing Seasons
As marketers and analysts, we love rules. Smart Bidding will now have a more human understanding of a business’ needs with the introduction of seasonality. This functionality creates customization for busy (and slow) seasons. Introducing these applications makes it easier for Marketing Managers to oversee campaigns, with a strong opportunity to improve efficiency. In this way, a marketer’s job shifts their expertise from execution to insight. By being an expert on the data these Smart Bidding campaigns uncover, you can point the power of AI towards revealing new findings and delivering exceptional ROI.
The Big Boost To Conversion Value
In this way, Smart Bidding improves the approach that a PPC Manager takes. When retailers gain new insights about their high-value customers and the various touch points along their journey, it enables campaigns that optimize for conversion value. Not all conversions are created equal; we find that due to these advancements in Smart Bidding, the metric Cost per Acquisition has become outmoded. Google will now make it easy to decipher user behavior when it comes to campaigns, giving you the power to reshape campaigns to deliver more high-value conversions. Pretty intuitive and cool, right?
C.R.E.A.M (Conversion Rules Everything Around Me)
Didn’t think I’d be making a Wu-Tang reference in this blog, but here we are. In the webinar, Udayan proposed the analogy of a bank identifying their high-value customers. Who’s more valuable, the person who opens a $200 savings account or the person who opens a trading account worth $2000? We agree that one answer is, “every customer is valuable and deserves a fantastic experience,” but that doesn’t mean their consumer journeys are the same. By emphasizing the understanding that store visits can play a vital role in Ecommerce, Google gave us the tools to shape campaigns for different consumer journeys.
Rethinking Attribution
All of these factors contribute to looking at how we determine attribution. The days of seeing reporting based on a user’s last click are beginning to sunset if they haven’t already. By contextually understanding where brands talk to user’s and what Smart Bidding campaigns shepherd these future customers through their unique purchase funnel, we get more insight into the psychographic nature of a consumer journey. We’ve discussed how you can implement data-driven attribution in the Reporting Modern Search Best Practices paper. This technique will assign proper value to the variety of touchpoints your customers encounter.
The world of marketing is no longer separated by digital and brick-and-mortar. Brands must keep up with the changing shifts in marketing tactics, or risk falling behind as AI becomes deeply infused across Smart Bidding. By learning about the Smart Bidding best practices, you can stay ahead of the competition.
