How AI-tools are impacting your campaign strategy on Instagram, Google Search and Tiktok.
The advertising tools offered by the biggest platforms are all powered by AI—and promise to increase efficacy in campaign planning. Today, we're taking a closer look to see what's hype and what's real.
Show me a company with any kind of relevance, and I’ll show you a company that employs ad managers from Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), Google (also for YouTube) and Tiktok to book their ads on the largest platforms in the digital economy. As in so many areas, AI is becoming increasingly important in this space as well, as it can now be harnessed to decide where and how your ads are displayed. Today, we’re breaking down how.
Advantage+, Performance Max (or PMax) and Shopping Ads are the names of the respective proprietary tools at Meta, Google and Tiktok—all powered by AI. The major platforms are currently pushing their AI-supported campaign variants, promising greater efficiency and better ROI (return on investment). This push is a reaction to more restrictive data regulations, including GDPR. The allure of automation lies in its supposed ability to deliver optimized results—even with data gaps present. But what do the tools really achieve and how exactly do the major internet companies envision the future of advertising with AI?
An automated future
While AI campaign tools have been on the market for several years, many marketers are only now beginning to truly grasp the possibilities. “AI will significantly expand our services for advertisers,” said Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg in Meta's earnings call for Q2 in 2024. He had just announced USD 38.3b in advertising revenue—a 22 percent increase compared to Q2 in 2023. “Advertisers used to come to us with specific target groups that they wanted to reach. Age groups, filtered by place of residence or interests,” says Zuckerberg. “Today, all they really need to do is build creatives. And in the coming years, AI will also create creatives and play them out to people in a very personalized way.”
This is Zuck’s vision for AI campaigns. Following the Metaverse collapse, artificial intelligence is an extremely important project for Meta as it comprises massive revenue potential for its major platforms in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. “In the long term, advertisers can simply give us a business goal and a budget and we'll do the rest for them,” says Zuckerberg. “We're moving towards that bit by bit. But it's going to be a big deal."
It all lies with AI
AI is already doing a lot of heavy lifting on the Meta, Google and Tiktok advertising platforms. Advantage+ and Google’s Performance Max, for example, decide automatically, depending on the target, which platform and in which format ads are displayed. The decision lies with AI whether the creative should be displayed in an Instagram story, as a feed post (with Advantage+), on YouTube, in Google Search or in Gmail (with Performance Max). In doing so, AI automatically offers the existing inventories, taking into account the budget and conversion specifications.
Meta and Google also promise that the AI will monitor campaign performance all the time, constantly optimizing to maximize results. Meta also just announced an update to Advantage+. “We're introducing new ways for companies to customize their campaigns and tell us what's important to them.” For example, marketers can now define the type of customers they are willing to up their bid for without having to create another campaign. With such information, AI should be able to make more informed decisions, albeit not entirely automatic. After all, these updates seem like an admission that AI is not yet as clever and autonomous as advertised.
Reliable data at last?
In the end, AI campaigns must work primarily to enable advertisers to discover them for themselves. One major advantage: as only basic information and suitable creatives are required to create the campaigns, AI tools are ideal for marketers with less experience. And so far, the platforms have mainly offered them for Shopping ads, but now Google is also offering users the option of targeting leads with Performance Max.
In its update for Advantage+, Meta also announced that advertisers can now also connect Google Analytics data and other data sources with Meta's campaign tool. Adobe Analytics, for example, will be available as an additional source at a later date. The company is thus tackling another data problem. In the past, there have always been discrepancies between figures in Meta's Ads Manager and Google Analytics, for example, especially after Apple significantly restricted tracking with iOS 14.5. However, the figures from the analytics tools should also be valuable for Meta in the future and further train AI. “We are at an initial point where we say: 'The system has an idea of how Meta works compared to other channels. We keep updating that so we can add more value,” Fred Leach, Meta's VP of Product, told Ad Age.
All of this goes to shows that AI-powered campaign tools like Meta's Advantage+ and Google's Performance Max will become more important for digital marketers moving forward as no one will be able to truly afford to go without an automated optimization option. They help advertisers to react quickly to changes in user behavior and continuously optimize the performance of their campaigns without having to control every aspect manually.
