When Google and the engines automate PPC tasks, you can still remain in control with "automation layering."
“Machines are better than people!”
While true in some instances, such a provocative statement conjures B-movie imagery of machines running rampant and destroying humanity foretelling a time in which great intentions actually destroy the future.
Not the case in PPC. It’s true that, in certain functions, machines ARE better than people. The brilliant minds at Google, Bing, Amazon and Facebook are in a pitched battle to drive time-saving automations to ease the burden on PPC pros. So much so, that many people in our industry understandably fear being automated into a totally different career.
Reality? The more the big engines automate, the more value a smart PPC pro can bring to the game. Over the past year, we’ve made automation standard in our platform and integrated it more closely with automations from Google so that advertisers can do two things more efficiently:
1. Advertisers can create their own automations using rules. Think of it as a simpler way to achieve what you may previously have tried doing with scripts.
2. PPC experts can take back control as the engines introduce more automation using “automation layering“. Think of it as setting your own boundaries that the engine’s automations have to stay within. E.g. better control of automated bids, close variants, budgets, etc.
1. Monitor correct implementation of your PPC strategy
PPC pros can think of themselves as the doctors of PPC and the automations created by Google as the medicine. It’s the doctor’s role to find out what ails the patient and what course of treatment might make them better. Likewise in PPC, the human expert understands the goal of the advertiser and chooses tools and automations that are most likely to help achieve the desired outcome.
Picking the right tools isn’t always as simple as it sounds. For example, advertisers may decide to test automated bidding, also called “Smart Bidding” by Google. But they may forget to take care of some of the recommended prerequisites like upgrading to a more sophisticated attribution model.
2. Monitor the automations from the engines
Once all the right tools and automations have been put into place, the PPC expert’s role shifts to that of a pilot who needs to monitor that the systems are working correctly and things are staying on course.
The PPC professional, too, needs to monitor their automations because as good as automated bidding may be at the math of predicting conversions, it’s horrible at flagging unexpected things. So automated bidding will likely do a good job of reducing CPCs when it notices a drop in conversion rate, but it won’t do anything to notify the advertiser that there is an anomaly in conversion rate or suggest what may be the root cause of the anomaly.
3. Teach the engines how to use your business data better
The third role humans will play in a PPC world where automations are everywhere is that of a teacher. Remember that many automations are driven by advances in machine learning and, as we all know, teachers are needed for learning.
So PPC experts need to use their own tools and automations to layer on top of what the engines are doing.
A cliche but easy-to-grasp example is that of bidding by weather. If you run a ski resort, you may have historical ski-lift sales data about how many lift passes you sell when the weather is sunny versus when it is snowing. Chances are that Google may not be taking this data into account when its automations decide which users to show ads to and how much to bid. So it would make perfect sense that the advertiser should help the Google system deliver better results by teaching it to do something different based on the weather.


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