3 ways humans can do PPC better than machines alone

Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic in PPC but until the machines fully take over day-to-day account management, there are a few key areas where human PPC pros can still add a lot of value.

1.Use Business Data for Bid Management

Bid management can be one of the most repetitive and boring tasks of managing PPC because after a model has been built, you are left with an ongoing task executing on the plan and this may involve downloading the data, putting it into the correct format, and then running it through your formulas to determine the new bid. For machines, this might sound like the perfect dinner on a caribbean - beach sunset, but for us humans? Not so much. Repetition is dull, and as a dull task, we tend to become a bit less thorough with our analysis as time goes on.

There are four clear advantages to using the engine’s bid management systems:

1. They are free to use.
2. They are based on best-in-breed algorithms.
3. They have access to a lot of auction-time signals that advertisers don’t get (e.g. who is the user, what did they search before).
4. They can set bids in real-time based on auction time signals.

But there are several things these automated bid systems cannot do:

1. Know the context of the performance that is measured through conversion tracking (e.g. conversions were slow yesterday because there was an issue with servers in one of the data centers).
2. Understand the factors that impact the industry (e.g. a plumber with 15 vans will be better able to service a distributed customer base than one with just 3 vans).

The ideal bid management system combines the algorithms from the engines with data from your business. To this end, advertisers should calculate their own CPCs based on in-house data and then submit these bids to the engine as an Enhanced CPC, so that Google or Bing can adjust the bid up or down based on what they know about each auction.

 

2.Use Keywords to Target Shopping Ads

• A second area where PPC pros should take back some control from the machines is with managing keywords for Shopping Ads. While shopping ads are automatically targeted to relevant queries that match the product in an advertiser’s feed, there is always the option of adding negative keywords.
• In a rather extreme, yet interestingly practical way, you could actually target a specific keyword not by the inclusion of that term, but rather by exclusion of all other terms.
• This is the foundation of “Query Sculpting”, a PPC technique that deploys negative keywords to drive traffic to the desired target. And because negative keywords are much more explicit than positive keywords, they are the main tool.

3.Create Better Ad Tests

• Googler Matt Lawson has recently covered the new ways to think about A/B ad testing. Thanks to Google’s improvements in Machine Learning, there is less need to manually cull under performing ads from an account. The premise is that the worst ad in an ad group could actually perform quite well with a subset of users hitting that ad group, which means that removing a slightly losing ad could actually be counterproductive.
• But he also says “Delete stuff whenever an ad stops seeing a large fraction of the impressions and therefore generates minimal to no clicks. Then add a new ad to the mix. It’s better to have options.”

To help with cleaning up ads who are seeing a minimal share of impressions in an ad group, you could use AdWords Scripts, like some of the ones that are part of Optmyzr’s suite of tools.

courtesy:https://marketingland.com/3-ways-humans-can-ppc-better-machines-alone-233003

 

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