PPC automation - the journey from cynic to believer

In the beginning…twenty plus years in digital marketing means I have seen most things - and one thing those years have taught me is that all that glitters certainly isn’t gold!

To be frank, in the early days, I hated the progressive automation of PPC (especially the bidding aspect). There isn’t enough time in this article to explain why in detail, but it’s safe to say that I didn’t like the culture of “set and forget” that it encouraged, with some seeing it as a cost-cutting option. I also didn’t believe enough signals were available to “the machine” to trump its inability to understand different verticals and seasons, or temporary trends, making it far less effective for SMEs or campaigns without enough data.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t an ostrich sticking my head in the sand; my colleagues and I have tried and tested different tools and software, with each one reinforcing my conclusions to some degree.

So, when did my grand conversion take place and why am I now Chief Operations Officer for a marketing agency whose PPC automation score is over 80% for our 100 plus PPC clients?

The tipping point

The truth is the single moment of conversion never happened - it was a gradual development that occurred with the release of more and more sophisticated tools within PPC interfaces. But the last 12 months have seen automation grow within our business (mainly through Google Ads), alongside market forces (bid inflation) - each in their own way driving us to automate more areas of our PPC activity:

• Automated rule complexity and subtlety.
• Smart Bidding (better and works with lower levels of data).
• Scripts.
• Responsive Search Ads.
• Responsive Display Ads.
• Quality of attributive tracking.

The tipping point was reached when campaigns began to consistently outperform previous manual incarnations. It became very clear, very quickly, that the machine learning/algorithm was capable of delivering on the promise.

Results 2019

The results we have achieved speak for themselves:

• 13% higher conversion rate across all our PPC accounts.
• 10-20% reduction in CPA for non-revenue-based clients/actions.

With ever-increasing confidence in automation, we are now spending more time on:

• Client creative (text, imagery video).
• Building better audiences.
• Co-ordinating strategies with CRO and SEO.

Working with more Googles betas to deliver early advantage to our clients (Discovery campaigns - phenomenal!).