Automated Advertising – How To Set Marketing on Autopilot
Make marketing profitable again with automated advertising which is becoming steadily more popular as people recognize the value in data-driven decision making. If you don’t come from a strong analytical or data-driven background, you might not even be aware of automated advertising just yet. Whether you’ve heard of it or not, it is one of the great new frontiers of online business. Marketers that are looking to take profitability to the next level should become aware of the possibilities inherent in automated advertising.
So What is Automated Advertising?
Essentially, it is using platforms and processes to take the manual effort out of managing your advertising. It was born out of the monumental shift that we have seen to advertising via social media platforms over the last several years.
The diversity of social media channels and advertising options among those channels has made it difficult for most businesses to find ways to juggle the demands of a large-scale advertising campaign. Automated advertising can take the brunt of this work out of your hands, which is why platforms that offer it have been growing in popularity. Instead of relying on your manual decision making, the important decisions are driven by available data to minimize the effort and maximize the results of your advertising campaign.
The traditional method of online advertising means relying on a member of your team or an outsourced contractor to juggle your advertising campaigns. This means counting on a person or a small team to take in all of the available analytical data based on your historic advertising results and then make decisions about how to best allocate your funds and creative resources moving forward. This is not only time consuming and expensive, but also subject to a huge amount of human error. Automated advertising uses data analysis to maximize profits and increase the interactions with your content with little input from your end.
Automated Advertising in Action
Automated advertising is still in its infancy. Although this emerging technology is still finding its footing, there are ways that this new technology is being put into action. There are two primary categories that this technology can be broken into. Money-based and ad-based algorithms are the two ways that automated advertising is currently being realized in the marketplace.
Ad-Based Algorithms
This was the first type of automated advertising to hit the scene, and while newer technologies have emerged, the basic concept is still a useful way of automated advertising. This type of program will need to be set up where you will establish rules based on the various metrics that are typically used to monitor the performance of online advertising.
Think, for example, about the click-through rate of a given ad. You might say that if the CTR drops below a pre-set threshold, you no longer want to fund that ad. Obviously, this is a pretty rudimentary form of automation, but you can set up a variety of rules of varying degrees of complexity. Although this type of automation can reduce your workload somewhat, the more advanced type of automation that followed the development of ad-based algorithms provides much more comprehensive automation.
Monetary Based Algorithms
This is the newest of the new, and is essentially the cutting edge of automated advertising at present. There are two basic figures that are used to calculate and execute automated advertising. This is the revenue that your company brings in and the return on investment (ROI) that your advertising brings in.
So, let’s think about an example of how this might work. Maybe you have an advertising campaign set up that is promoting a given product or set of products in your web store. The monetary algorithm is going to pull all of the information about both your sales and the money that you have put into the advertising campaign and then compile several important statistics based on that data. Most important among these will be the conversion rate of each ad, and what separates that ad from any other advertisement in the campaign. Then, the algorithm will go into action. The automated platform at this point has the power to adjust the bid on the given campaign based on the performance that the system has detected based on the algorithm.
Of course, there are pitfalls to automated advertising so you'll want to bring in a marketing person to protect your investment. You can also implement targets in this type of system. For instance, you might set a given ROI threshold that you would like to hit in order to maximize the value you’re seeing for your ad dollars. The system will then pick the ads that are performing the best and boost bids in that specific area in order to hit your profitability targets. There is also the option to have similar ads generated that will capitalize on the performance characteristic of your best performing current ads in order to hit your profit targets.
In the Real World
Today, most of the automation solutions that exist will use one of these two underlying technologies. However, change is coming, and the race is on to see who can develop the most comprehensive and most profitable automation platforms. Don’t be surprised if you see options in the very near future where the best features of both of these frameworks are implemented in tandem.
When you take advantage of automation for your business, you are taking a large amount of human trial and error out of the process of advertising. Relying on data alone means that you only put your money where it is profitable, instead of sinking more funds into hopeless and unprofitable ads.
What might be more important to many marketers is that using these strategies takes almost no time compared to traditional advertising methods. The monitoring needed is a fraction of what other methods require.
On top of that, there are significant off the top savings to be enjoyed. That is because you don’t have to hire a top-tier ad professional who is able to manipulate and make the most of the online advertising space, something that was required by companies who truly wanted to dominate their sectors in the past. Automation means that successful ad campaigns can be set up, run, and maintained by just about anybody.
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Author: Hudson Piccini
Hudson Cynar, a Harvard University alumna and the owner of three prosperous enterprises, is a distinguished business consultant, author, and writer. Her expertise spans multiple business sectors, with a particular emphasis on storage containers, commercial copiers, payroll services, and medical billing software. Dedicatedly investing thousands of hours into product and service research, Hudson crafts insightful reviews to guide entrepreneurs in making informed decisions for their businesses.