You’re one of the top AdWords consultants in the game. You use your rules, you change CTA’s, you’ve got you’re extensions down to a T… And in a not so distant future: You. Are. Fucked.
Automation makes your job redundant
Every AdWords announcement in the past two years has had machine learning as it’s focal point. It seems like Google is slowly setting everything in place to automate AdWords campaigns.
Audience & keyword selection
Google already offers In Market Audiences on the Display network. It will roll out those audiences on its Search network too. Google creates these audiences based on the sites (content) people visit and the searches (queries) people use. That’s everything you need to target a search campaign. Or as Google puts it in its blogpost:
In-market audiences uses the power of machine learning to better understand purchase intent. It analyses trillions of search queries and activity across millions of websites to help figure out when people are close to buying and surface ads that will be more relevant and interesting to them.
Ad Creation
Another new feature are Automated Ad Suggestions: Small variations on existing ads that Google automatically serves. The variations experiment to find the right ad text for that audience. That’s right: These are their first small steps into automating creatives too. From their blogpost:
Ad suggestions may be automatically offered to advertisers who have ads running in any of the supported languages shown below. Ad suggestions will automatically apply 14 days after they’re created unless you proactively apply, edit, or dismiss them beforehand.
Bidding and budget
Right now it seems like Googles main weapon in the automation fight are its bidding systems. What use are AdWords scripts, API calls and rules? You’re up against millions of possible parameters that adjust bids instantly. That means you’re fighting a gun duel with a dull pocket knife. There’s no point in trying to out think that automation.
Smart Bidding is built on Google’s deep experience using machine learning to power a wide range of products, including the Google assistant, automatic album creation in Google Photos, and AlphaGo, the first computer program to ever beat a professional player at the game of Go. Smart Bidding can factor in millions of signals to determine the optimal bid, and it continually refines models of your conversion performance at different bid levels to help you get more from your marketing budget.
Our new jobs
So what will we be doing two, five or ten years from now? It seems like it’s a given that Googles and Facebooks algorithms will set-up and run campaigns. Yet there’s good news too: You will still have a job. The interplay between the ad networks and websites won’t be automated soon. Because Google and Facebook will never exchange data. So that crucial part of successful campaigns is still safe for the time being.
Seems like now is as good a time as any to start reading those strategy books!