Art or Automation - Are We Watching the Google Robots?

Google has an unquenchable thirst for automation for its flagship advertising platform, Google Ads. Barely a week goes by without an email dropping into my inbox extolling the virtues of "machine learning", AI or some other exotic infusion of data science into Google's latest tool, ad format or bidding option.

This has been a long time coming for anyone who has had the pleasure to create and manage campaigns in AdWords (the original and true name for Google Ads). Google has been chipping away at anything manual within its ads system for several years. However, recently the whispering towards the dark side of automation has become a torrent of "recommendations", good options marked "not recommended" and pre-filled tickboxes ready to trap the uninitiated and unwary.

Does automation have a dark side you might ask? Isn't Google just taking away all the heavy-lifting from campaign creation and management and therefore spreading a benevolent coating of fairy dust across your clunky "made by human" efforts? Well, in a way they are...

There are certainly some benefits to automated bidding, for example. It can save time and bring in signals to the optimisation mix that aren't available to human users of Google Ads, a kind of robot headstart, you might say or mechanised steroid injection for your campaigns.

However, most, if not all of the automated bidding options and smart features for Google Ads campaign rely on past conversion performance data and that's where the convenient lie of automation really bites.

You have to carve out a decent campaign in the first place. You need to choose the right landing pages, use your experience to choose the correct keywords and despite a move towards compulsory automation in ads, you still need to write some decent USP-laden copy to tempt in the doubters. You have to feed the machine.

Here's the art of digital marketing - all the old tropes - test and learn, experiment, search intent, the investment sweet spot, all wrapped up into a handmade formula for making sales, at a cost per acquisition that is going to make a profit for the client.

No end of tickboxes, wishful thinking, "insights", AI and machine learning is going to take you to the place, where you can switch on the Google machine, kick back and watch the backslaps and benjamins pile up.

So be careful setting up your campaigns. Don't be tempted to tick that display network box or be put off from using manual bidding. NEVER PUT ALL YOUR KEYWORDS ON BROAD (if there's one thing you take away from this article, this should be it).

Take Google's rather insistent "recommendations" with a pinch of salt, because where there is often value in some of them, there are many which will suck your budget dry and leave you without your shirt. Always remember the robot giving the advice also gets paid when you take it and that no automated system really understands your goals the way an expert does, if you brief them carefully and often.

Consult a professional, the robots aren't ready for showtime just yet.