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‘Set it and forget it’ Strategies (aka. “AI” powered strategies)

ARE BURNING THROUGH YOUR MARGINS  

 

Advertisers adopting campaign types like Google PMax & Meta Advantage+ are dealing with the implications of these new non-incremental ad types along with technical challenges like the ones referenced in a recent Verge article.

Advertisers for years have used segmentation as their primary strategic growth tool. The best would continually test, tweak, and optimize ongoing campaigns by segmenting efforts to align with specific objectives. Need to bring more new customers to the site? Set up some new brand awareness Meta campaigns to draw attention to your products. See an uptick in demand for a certain product? Use Google Shopping non-brand targeting to get in front of this search demand. Or need to recapture customers who abandoned the site without buying? Use Google or Meta remarketing to stay in front of these customers.

None of this is new information for ecommerce marketers, but despite it, more and more brands are being pushed into campaign types either by their agency or platform reps to move away from segmentation in favor of the efficiency of management as these campaign types truly are set and forget.

New does not always mean better. And less segmentation is almost never better.   Here’s why:

Whether the campaigns are on Google or Meta, the best advertisers use the various campaign, targeting, and creative options available to them in a strategic way to either capture existing search demand or get in front of audiences on Meta. And they do so in a way where they can measure the performance of these targeting groups so that they can optimize and grow performance. And the reason for this is each of these targeting groups has a unique level of incremental value.

 

For example, $2 spent to acquire a new customer who has never visited your site before is going to be far more valuable than $2 spent to remarket to someone who may or may not have been coming back to the site anyway. We know those customers are very different from one another and we’re willing to spend various amounts to acquire that customer depending on if they’re new or returning.

This is impossible with PMax and Meta Advantage+. These campaign types aggregate all of these targeting groups together in one campaign and leave you with the impossible task of optimizing with zero targeting performance data to work from.

 

 

The black box approaches these platforms take, like in the example above, remove your ability to segment your customers based on intent and lead to you overspending on less incremental ad types while underinvesting in the areas that are actually contributing to incremental growth.

 

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