Crafting Personalised Customer Journeys with Smart Bidding
- Blog
- August 13, 2023
- 12:15 pm
If you’re a marketer, you know how challenging it can be to create and manage effective campaigns across different channels and touchpoints. You have to consider your audience’s preferences, behaviour, and needs, as well as your budget, goals, and competitors. And you have to do all this while constantly adapting to changing market conditions and customer expectations.
But what if there was a way to simplify and optimise your marketing efforts with the help of artificial intelligence? What if you could use data-driven insights to set the right bids for each individual auction, not just a few times a day? What if you could tailor your bids to each user’s unique search intent, context, and journey stage? Enter the realm of Smart Bidding – an ingenious approach that elevates the way we interact with customers across different channels.
In a technical nutshell, Smart Bidding is a set of automated bidding strategies that use machine learning to make more accurate predictions about how different bid amounts will affect conversions. It allows you to focus on the big picture of your marketing strategy while letting Google Ads handle the complex and tedious tasks of bid optimisation.
In this article, we’ll explain how Smart Bidding works, what benefits it can bring to your marketing performance, and how you can use it to create a personalised customer journey across different channels and touchpoints.
Unveiling Smart Bidding: The Evolution of Personalization
Remember the thrill of walking into a local bookstore and discovering that they’ve already lined up your favourite genre? Smart Bidding operates on a similar wavelength, deciphering customer preferences by harnessing the power of data. This evolution in personalization transcends mere demographics, tapping into a holistic understanding of individual tastes, behaviours, and needs.
Smart Bidding is a feature of Google Ads that offers several types of automated bidding strategies, such as:
– Maximize Clicks: Aims to garner the highest possible click count within your budget.
– Maximize Conversions: Aims to secure the most conversions possible within your budget.
– Maximize conversion value: This strategy aims to generate as much conversion value as possible within your budget.
– Target CPA (cost-per-acquisition): This strategy aims to generate conversions at or below a target cost per acquisition that you set.
– Target ROAS (return-on-ad-spend): This strategy aims to generate conversions at or above a target return on ad spend that you set.
– Target impression share: This strategy aims to show your ads on a certain percentage of eligible impressions that you choose.
Smart Bidding relies on sophisticated machine learning algorithms, drawing insights from extensive data to make accurate forecasts about the effects of diverse bid amounts on conversions. It also takes into account a wide range of signals that indicate the user’s intent and context, such as:
– Device
– Location
– Time of day
– Weekday
– Weather
– Audience list
– Remarketing list
– Language
– Browser
– Operating system
– Search query
– Ad creative
By using these signals, Smart Bidding can adjust your bids in real time for each individual auction, not just a few times a day. This allows you to tailor your bids to each user’s unique search journey and deliver the right message at the right moment.
Benefits of Smart Bidding: Channel Surfing, Perfected
Picture this: a friend who knows your passions, guiding you effortlessly through a bustling marketplace to the stalls that resonate with you. Smart Bidding emulates this friend, orchestrating an impeccable synergy between channels, be they social media, search engines, or email marketing. Each interaction complements the other, painting a consistent and captivating picture of your brand.
Smart Bidding can help you improve your marketing performance in several ways, such as:
– Saving time and resources: Smart Bidding automates the bid optimisation process, freeing up your time and resources for other strategic responsibilities like developing persuading offers, landing pages, and ad text. It’s not necessary for you to manually modify your bids based on keywords, devices, locations, or other elements. With the help of Google Ads’ reports and recommendations, you can also quickly monitor and assess the effectiveness of your campaigns.
– Increasing conversions and revenue: Smart Bidding can assist you in reaching more prospective consumers who are likely to convert while also boosting your conversion rate and value. Additionally, you may specify clear objectives for your campaigns, such as target CPA or ROAS, and allow Smart Bidding to optimise your bids in line with those objectives. To account for anticipated fluctuations in conversion rates caused by occasions or outside causes, you can also use seasonality adjustments and data exclusions.
– Enhancing customer experience: By delivering relevant and personalised ads to each user based on their search intent and context, Smart Bidding can help you create a better customer experience across different channels and touchpoints. You can also use Smart Bidding in combination with other Google Ads features, such as responsive search ads, dynamic search ads, or smart display campaigns, to create more engaging and customised ad creatives.
Using Smart Bidding to Create a Personalised Customer Journey: The Marriage of Automation and Human Touch
In an age of automation, authenticity can seem like a relic. However, Smart Bidding is an embodiment of the harmonious coexistence of data-driven precision and human-like understanding. It recognises that a customer is not just a statistic but a unique individual with multifaceted desires.
To use Smart Bidding effectively, you need to understand your customer journey and how it relates to your marketing funnel. The customer journey is the end-to-end experience a customer has with your brand or business, from the moment they become aware of their problem or need until they make a purchase decision and beyond.
The customer journey can be divided into different stages, such as:
– Awareness: The customer realises they have a problem or need that requires a solution.
– Consideration: The customer researches different options and compares them based on various criteria.
– Decision: The customer chooses the best option for them and makes a purchase.
– Loyalty: The customer becomes a repeat buyer and an advocate for your brand.
Each stage of the customer journey corresponds to a different stage of the marketing funnel, such as:
– Top of the funnel (TOFU): The goal is to attract and educate potential customers who are not yet aware of your brand or solution and generate leads.
– Middle of the funnel (MOFU): The goal is to nurture and persuade potential customers who are considering your solution and qualify leads.
– Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): The goal is to convert and delight potential customers who are ready to buy your solution and retain customers.
To create a personalised customer journey, you need to align your Smart Bidding strategy with your marketing funnel stage and use the appropriate signals and ad formats to deliver the right message at the right moment. For example:
– Maximise clicks or Target impression share methods can be used for TOFU campaigns to boost brand recognition and reach. You can also target people who are more likely to be interested in your solution based on signals such as device, location, or time of day. You may also design more relevant and diverse ad headlines and descriptions based on the user’s search query by using responsive search ads or dynamic search ads.
– For MOFU campaigns, you can use Maximise Conversions or Maximise Conversion Value strategies to increase your lead generation and nurturing. You can also use signals such as an audience list or remarketing list to target users who have already interacted with your brand or website. You can also use smart display campaigns or dynamic remarketing ads to create more personalised and dynamic ad creatives based on the user’s behaviour and preferences.
– You can use Target CPA or Target ROAS tactics for BOFU campaigns to boost sales and income. Additionally, you can target individuals who are more likely to convert by using signals such as language, browser, or operating system. Users can call you directly from your ads by using call-only ads or call extensions.
By using Smart Bidding in this way, you can create a more seamless and satisfying customer journey across different channels and touchpoints and boost your marketing performance.
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Concluding Takeaway
In a final nutshell, Smart Bidding is a powerful feature of Google Ads that has the capability of transforming the cacophony of digital marketing into a melodious composition. It neatly does this by helping you simplify and optimise your marketing efforts with the help of artificial intelligence, ultimately helping you save time and resources while increasing conversions and enhancing the customer experience. So, step into the realm of personalised customer journeys, where Smart Bidding takes the lead, and let your brand’s story unfold across channels and touchpoints, leaving an indelible mark on every heart and mind.
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