Using AI for Digital Advertising: Boosting Efficiency and Impact

Written by Alicia Fajardo Noohi and Llana Neesmith

This article is part of a 5-part “AI in Practice” series, designed to give PR and marketing pros like you the practical advice you need to produce more efficient, strategic and creative work with the help of AI.  

AI-powered media algorithms and technologies have been around for some time in digital advertising, but they weren’t used nearly as much as we see now. In fact, close to 50% of marketing professionals in one recent survey are using AI for personalized recommendations and predictive analytics.  

The rise of AI for digital advertising has paved the way for more efficient “mixed media” campaigns that identify relevant audiences, maximize budgets and optimize themselves in real time. In this article, we’ll explore five ways you can use AI technology to advance and optimize your own digital marketing campaigns to stretch your budgets while improving performance. 

1. Optimize Ad Placements with AI-Powered Tools 

Many advertising platforms have their own AI-powered campaigns that combine your creative, uploaded datasets and campaign goals with their own platform data to serve ads where they know audiences will engage the most – across their entire available ad inventory – and maximize performance. Because they often outperform “manually optimized” campaigns, these AI-driven campaigns are becoming a staple in performance marketing.  

Examples: 

Google Ads and Microsoft Ads both offer Performance Max campaigns, which are AI-driven campaigns serving ad placements across their properties, focused on conversions. StackAdapt uses Page Context AI to determine the best publisher to run your programmatic ads on when you add keywords to your campaigns. 

If you are still managing ad placements manually, try testing automated ad placements to compare performance. And keep in mind, even if performance is similar, automated ad placements speed up campaign-building, giving you more time to focus on analyzing results and surfacing insights to inform your next round of optimizations. 

2. Amplify Audience Reach with AI-Driven Targeting 

Digital media platforms are increasingly integrating AI into their audience-targeting features, using your first-party data (collected under data compliance agreements), website interactions and consumer behaviors to expand reach to qualified audiences with even greater efficiency.  

Example: 

Meta offers Advantage+ audience targeting parameters, which allows you to launch campaigns with a broad audience and let the platform adjust your targeting as it learns who engages with your ads the most.  

We recommend testing different audience targeting strategies to identify what works best for your paid media channels. Most platforms offer insights into how different audience segments perform, which gives you insights for audience targeting across other paid media platforms.  

3. Maximize Creative Production with AI-Powered Ad Variation 

Adapting creative across hundreds or even thousands of ad placements can be a real pain point for many advertisers due to budget and content constraints. With the help of AI, most advertising platforms now adapt your creative assets automatically to fit their ad inventory. For small businesses without an agency or in-house creative team, these AI-powered platforms can even suggest basic advertising copy and imagery based on a scan of your company website.  

Leveraging these tools can save time on production for ad variation. This makes for greater creative ad testing and minimizes ad fatigue by providing multiple creative versions for your audiences.  

Example: 

Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and Outbrain can create headlines and generate images from your landing pages for you. Meta can recommend ad copy variations during campaign set-up and suggest enhancements to improve creative performance.   

While these platforms provide efficiency when it comes to generating ad creative, they should not be a replacement for you or your design team. It’s important to review copy and images to ensure they align with brand standards and accurately communicate your message.  

4. Optimize Budgets & Bidding with AI-Driven Strategies 

Many platforms leverage AI to analyze historical data, campaign performance, goal inputs, market dynamics, and consumer behavior to optimize bids and budgets, in real time, maximizing your ROI. Select the strategy that best aligns with your business objectives. When launching a campaign, allow for bidding and performance fluctuations for 2 to 4 weeks (dependent on budget and data obtained), while the campaigns are in “learning mode.” Compare AI bidding performance against traditional or manual bidding campaigns. If you’ve found that manual bidding is a winner, allow the AI tool to continue learning and test again in 4-6 months.  

Example: 

Paid media management platforms, such as SA360, offer different bidding strategies, based on your business goals.  

Test different bid strategies that work toward your business goals and measure impact. When measuring impact, the platform is an excellent reference but make note of any changes to the business as well.  

5. Plan with AI-Enhanced Media Performance Estimations  

AI can help advertisers and clients predict campaign performance during planning with forecasting tools. While these tools help with budgets, direction and benchmarks, keep in mind there are several external factors that may not be considered that impact performance, such as ad creative, other channel performance, economic changes, industry shifts, etc.

Example: 

Google Ads has Performance Planner, which takes your current performance and other factors, and projects how much more budget would be needed to attain an estimated increase in conversions.  

Periodically consult with in-platform tools like this to identify scale and growth opportunities as well as seasonal trends.  

Balance AI with Your Expertise for Maximum Advertising Success 

While AI provides many benefits in advertising including efficiency and personalization, it’s not perfect and a human element is still needed. By no means is using AI for advertising a “set it and forget it” strategy for Paid Media. It requires continuous review, optimizations and testing, especially as AI capabilities continue to evolve.  

In the meantime, implementing any or all of the five approaches above is sure to increase your advertising efficiency and performance, so work with your paid media team to be sure you are putting these insights to work to support your business goals. 

If you would like to learn more about how to use AI to advertise more efficiently, we’re always here to help. Contact us to start a conversation.