Digital ad platforms have constantly evolved to incorporate more features and new technologies. Last year was a remarkably different year in terms of the pace of progress. The recent AI boom has led to a number of new features in ad platforms, including AI-generated copy and images, AI-assisted audience targeting, and new types of automation, which promise to make advertising easier and more effective.
That promise is more of a selective truth, as it benefits certain businesses more than others. It has many implications for businesses that want to use these technologies effectively without wasting money. The key point is ensuring that AI generated assets are actually relevant to your business.
AI and machine learning are not new. They have been used in ads for many years to improve targeting, automate bidding, and select ad placements to help make the tasks of advertisers more efficient.
So-called Smart Campaigns and Advantage+ Campaigns have been invented to reduce the number of requirements for getting an ad up and running.
The newest AI features take that a step further and continue to reduce the creative inputs needed in ads. The problem is that these AI features aren’t for everyone.
Businesses that best benefit from AI:
- Generate multiple conversions per day from each campaign
- Spend enough on ads to generate those conversions
- Have a well-established online presence for AI to reference
- Have a lot of first-party data to feed AI
- Have a strong brand that AI already recognizes
- Have a strong offer that helps the ads stand out
If you don’t have those, that doesn’t mean that you can’t benefit from AI. It just means that you can’t use all of the features effectively, out of the box, without wasting ad budget generating irrelevant assets and targeting irrelevant people. There are strategies to employ that work better for businesses without a robust online presence.
AI Targeting
Meta’s Advantage+ audience takes over audience targeting. While you can add “suggestions” it will still target a very broad audience.
Creating a new campaign often requires a detailed list of keywords, audience interests, affinities, and demographics. These become inputs in Google or Meta ads to establish who you want to target. Determining these inputs can be laborious, depending on your product or service. You’d also need to understand how big your audience is and if your targeting is sufficient to reach them.
Now, Google and Meta will do a lot of the targeting for you automatically. Google will claim that targeting is already optimized for your ad campaign. For search campaigns, it will suggest keywords for you to use based on your website. On Meta, the default choice removes all targeting options (except location and age) and claims that its ad technology will automatically find your audience.
Does it sound too good to be true? Well, it kind of is. All of these new features, including the ones we’ll discuss next, require data and existing content for them to work.
The Data Requirements Have Increased
Conversion tracking and conversion-based strategies have been around for years now. If you don’t have conversions being tracked and shared with your ad platforms, your ad campaigns are likely wasting a lot of money on keywords or audiences you wouldn’t intend the campaign to spend on. Google and Meta prefer broad targeting and by default, new campaigns will target very broadly. The idea is that your campaign will be able to target many keywords you may have not thought of which could lead to a conversion. However, this also means that a person searching for swimming pools may get served an ad for your hot tub products. Ad platforms may think that it’s a close enough variant and serve those ads to test it out, all at your expense. You, as a human, know how a swimming pool and hot tub differ and represent different audiences and levels of relevance. So, what conversion tracking does is take all of the ad data and find which keywords or audiences did convert and then steer the campaign towards that.
In 2024, the new focus is on first-party data, which includes things such as highly segmented customer lists with spend data from your CRM or CDP, behavioral audience segments created from your website analytics tools, social media followers, and more. You not only need to have adequate conversion tracking, but you need to feed ad platforms as much data as you can about your customers and visitors. That means that if you aren’t getting many conversions, then some of these new AI features might hurt your ad campaigns.
Your Existing Content Feeds Generative AI
Ad platforms need enough content from your website or social channels to generate new and accurate content for your business effectively.
How can you tell if your website is ready for Generative AI? You are more likely to be ready for it if you have good SEO, a decent amount of organic traffic from both search and social, and a comprehensive website.
Your website should describe the many areas of your business, not just the products and services. Unique value propositions, key features, benefits, or differentiators are a must for generating ad copy. Also, the tone, writing style, and use of imagery become additional reference points to generate new content based on your brand.
Your website should feature optimized landing pages for major products and services, and those pages should convert well.
If you only have a basic website, you will probably see poor results with AI-generated content in the ad platforms. You could still leverage other tools, such as ChatGPT, to help out with copywriting, but it won’t be conveniently in-platform, nor will it allow ads to constantly test out new copy automatically.
AI-Generated Assets
Yes, ad copywriting can now be automated. Google Ads, particularly search and P Max campaigns can automatically generate text assets and even select landing pages from your website to create ads. All you do is select the location you want to target and the budget and goals of the campaign.
For images, Google and Meta will generate completely new images for your campaign using generative AI. You no longer need to source stock images or rely on just product images. These platforms will create all of that for you. These platforms will even modify your product image backgrounds to make them look less bland. While all of this sounds exciting, its important to review the generated assets to ensure that they are relevant. For businesses that sell products and not services, those images that are generated will likely not be very relevant. The background generation features will still be helpful however. For service-based businesses, you may have more freedom to use the assets.
Predictions On Where Ads Are Going In 2025
The steps that Meta & Google have been taking tell us a few things. 1) AI features will continue to be added and refined to increase personalization, making campaigns more and more automated, and highly beneficial for businesses that spend a lot and get conversions. 2) Detailed targeting and reporting will get peeled back. Platforms have done this before, and it will likely get worse. Search term reports, granular audience performance data, and ad creative reports may disappear soon.
There is no incentive for ad platforms to report this level of data because advertisers will be shocked to see who and what is being targeted in these AI campaigns. In other words, control and transparency are going to take a hit. Ad platforms want to make money by being able to sell every ad inventory space possible. Granular control isn’t good for that objective. “AI” is because it lets ad platforms control your budget and creatives to target potential customers wherever they are. Performance Max campaigns are a good example of this.
Other platforms, such as Pinterest and LinkedIn, are far behind in terms of AI. They will see some challenges staying relevant; however, they have the option of continuing granular targeting and detailed reporting, which could actually work in their favor.
What Do I Do If I Am Not Ready For This
You are not ready to take advantage of AI features if you aren’t generating enough conversion data, have enough customer data, or have a website that provides enough specific information for Google or Meta to understand who you are, what you do, and what makes you special.
Startups, newer businesses, and innovators of new product or service categories may encounter challenges with this new environment as their conversion and customer data may be more sparse. B2B businesses may also see challenges, especially if their product or service gets fewer customers than the average business or their customer or prospect lists are in the hundreds instead of thousands.
So, what can you do?
- First and foremost, make sure you are tracking and gathering as much data as you can in your ad platforms and in GA4. Create new events and “key events” in GA4 beyond your purchase or customer acquisition conversion. Include events that are further upstream. If you aren’t selling as much of your product, then try and get website visitors to take other actions such as signing up for an offer, downloading a whitepaper, case study or product guide, or getting access to a webinar. The goal is to increase your data points on interested visitors to help guide ad platforms with this data instead. Not only will you feed this data directly to ad platforms, but, you’ll start to gather first party data you can use.
- Second, you need to ensure that your website includes as much information as possible. That doesn’t mean to be wordy, it just means to include all the relevant information that goes into a purchasing decision as well as describes your business.
- Third, manage your expectations. Ads aren’t magic. They are a platform for scaling and reaching audiences quickly. Your product or service is magic. In the early stages of a business, awareness efforts are needed to find the right audience. That means most of them will not convert. What you can do is continuously work on your offer and brand. Once those are in place, AI will work with you rather than against you.
