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It is crucial for small-business owners and managers to know about PPC automation solutions. Moreover, they need some understanding about the combinations of features and functionalities that will result in optimal performance with the least possible expense.
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Automation finds uses everywhere. The concept of automation was once limited to factory assembly lines. But these days, it has expanded into all walks of life. You can find automation as a service, automation in processes, automation in industrial software, and automation as artificial intelligence. It is also in 3D printing, robotics, and drones.
According to recent estimates, the automation market amounts to $214.3 billion, with process automation forming the largest subset at $74 billion.
Like every other industry vertical, the domain of paid advertising is also keen to leverage the benefits of automation. Artificial intelligence, or AI, as an instrument for automation, has a market size of $17.6 billion. Leading technological companies worldwide, such as Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, are rigorously exploring the potential of AI. With AI, they hope to devise automated features that make campaign management a hassle-free exercise. They also wish to make the delivery of data-driven results more efficient.
Apart from these giant advertising platforms, new automation platforms are also gaining momentum. These platforms help reduce the time it takes to do an iterative task. They also help enhance performance with detailed and wide-ranging analysis, along with actionable, prescient insights.
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When it comes to small businesses using PPC automation (meaning “pay-per-click” automation), budgetary constraints play a vital role. What’s more, lack of experience and expertise may make an in-house PPC campaign underproductive. Thus, it may not yield the results that it should have. On the other hand, the third-party tools that could have produced the outcome the business needed might easily have appeared too expensive.
It is crucial, therefore, for a small business owners and managers to know what PPC automation solutions to choose. They need to understand which features they need and what combinations of features and functionalities will result in an optimal performance. Moreover, they need guidance so as not to shell out more money than they have to.
Leveraging the Ad Automation features of PPC Platforms
Advertising platforms like Google deploy several features to improve advertisers’ returns. Return on advertising spend, or ROAS, is the metric that measures this return.
One of the premier features of Google is its Smart Bidding technology. This is an automated bid strategy that considers the unique context of each of its users. It aims at improving the probability of conversions that stay within the contours of that context.
Let’s have a detailed look at Smart Bidding and how small advertisers can leverage it.
Smart Bidding
The objective of Smart Bidding, a subset of Google’s automated bid strategies, is to optimize your campaign according to your chosen strategy. There are several Smart Bidding strategies. These include targeting cost per action (CPA), targeting ROAS, maximizing conversions, maximizing conversion value, and enhancing CPC.
There are four vital benefits small businesses can derive from Smart Bidding:
1. Since Smart Bidding has the backing of advanced machine learning, it can deal with data on a vast scale. This helps it to make more accurate predictions with a wider range of parameters. Neither a single person nor even a team can compute with this accuracy when so many factors are involved.
2. Smart Bidding uses a wider range of bid optimization signals. These include signals available in manual bid adjustments, such as device, location, and more.
3. With the help of Smart Bidding strategies, a small business can set its unique performance targets with customized settings for its unique business goals.
4. Finally, Google’s Smart Bidding results in highly transparent performance reports. These reports help to explain the strategy’s performance, its issues, and more. Moreover, its alerts and notifications feature help businesses locate issues so they can be immediately fixed.
Other Tools That Help with PPC Automation
But Smart Bidding is not the only set of tools or features that help small businesses with PPC automation. There are many others. For instance, the Google Keyword Planner helps in keyword research and grouping. Also, Google Ads Scripts help manage campaigns, monitors the budget spent, and more. Its Automated Rules functionality helps carry out specific actions in bulk across campaigns, accounts, ad groups, and other levels. While dynamic ads help create headlines for automated ads, dynamic keyword insertion helps improve relevance and quality score.
But like every other automation strategy or strategy that you deploy to improve performance in general, the built-in automation features of ad platforms have some upsides and some downsides.
Merits of PPC Automation Tools
One of the most significant upsides is that these tools and features are available for free. What’s more, their machine learning algorithms help enhance performance, especially when the tools are connected directly to the campaigns and you can explore closed audience data.
Drawbacks of PPC Automation Tools
However, most small businesses lack the expertise required to leverage these tools. The Google Ads tools will only apply within its native advertising platforms, and they will not handle all the tasks involved in the advertising process.
Task-Oriented Automation Tools
There are tools that small businesses can use for specific tasks.
For instance, if you need help with competitor analysis, you can use iSpionage or SpyFu. Tools like Supermetrics and Datorama help with analytics and reporting.
Some tools help collect relevant keywords, such as Keywordtool.io, Answerthepublic, or Ubersuggest. Others, such as TrafficGuard, PPC Protect, and more, help prevent fraud. Some of the tools, including the likes of SemRush or SimilarWeb, are even more wide-ranging. Apart from offering both the SEO and PPC data, these tools help carry out many tasks.
Merits of These Tools
The upside of these tools is that there is always more than one tool catering to your task needs. By using them in combination, you can cover almost everything you need. What’s more, these tools are not limited to a single platform. And in many areas, such as keyword research or specialized marketing, these tools can perform better than most of the ad platforms’ in-built ad tools.
Drawbacks
But the strengths of these tools also prove to be their weaknesses. Since you need multiple tools for a single flow of actions, you need to move around from one to another to manage one campaign. Additionally, many of these tools come with a subscription, and you need to pay for multiple subscriptions. This puts you in danger of overspending your budget.
Most of all, since these tools are not compatible with linking to your advertising account, you cannot perform bulk actions with them. Also, you cannot use them to get insights on your account or create reports and set up alerts.
Embracing PPC Automation Platforms: Versatile, Efficient, and Accessible
As a small business owner or marketer, you would never want to go above your budget. Yet, at the same time, you want to have tools and features that are not limited to their platform so you can get the entire job done seamlessly. Moreover, it should not be complicated to use and should not require experienced professionals to run it judiciously.
For instance, 86% of the users consider that PromoNavi, one of the PPC automation platforms, helps them with data that they do not get from Google, Microsoft, or Facebook’s default features. A small business marketer needs to perform a host of routine actions each day to successfully run their campaign. Nearly 80% of users say that PromoNavi saves them working hours by performing these routine tasks.
Another enticing benefit that attracts many small business marketers to PromoNavi is that it helps them manage campaigns from a single interface. It’s a one-stop shop that meets different needs without shifting between various platforms. This is what PromoNavi is designed to be.
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An ideal PPC automation tool should be versatile, efficient, and accessible. It should cater to each phase of a PPC automation campaign with similar efficacy.
The tool should help in research. It should help uncover competitors’ PPC strategies, understand their objective and spread, and locate the effective keywords and copies they are using. For this purpose, PromoNavi has a full-fledged competitor analysis tool.
However, just keeping track of what others are doing is not enough. The tool should consistently analyze your accounts and campaigns and continually recommend improvements.
What complements this process are the monitoring alerts. With the Promonavi PPC Reporting tool, you can generate weekly and monthly automated PDF reports for your campaigns. At the same time, its alerting tools keep a check on the anomalies in your campaign. They help track the budget and track the balance to determine if you’re about to deplete it. The automated reports also help summarize what the business has been doing correctly and what it has not been doing correctly.
Final Thoughts
So, how do tools like PromoNavi help small businesses to get their campaign right? Unlike most of its competitors, it lets you automate the entire advertising process, equipping you with insights on the overall marketing performance of your brand. By paying for one subscription, you will get all the tools you need to create, run, analyze, and optimize your campaigns. In short, you do not need to use multiple platforms to get the job done.
