Counterintuity

There is something every marketer should be worried about with AI. All major platforms like Meta, Google, and Microsoft are leveraging AI. Especially for their big money maker… ads. According to Bloomberg News, companies using Meta’s AI technology saw an increase in their return on ad spend by 32%. And Google has Performance Max. According to them, advertisers who use it on average see an increase in their return on ad spend by 18%. But here’s what you need to know from someone who actually uses these products. They are big black boxes… They are placing your ads in places that don’t always make sense and showing them to people who aren’t always your ideal customers. Which helps the platforms fill their inventory and make more money. But that also can cause you to get a lower ROI. When Merkle turned on Performance Max for all their clients, they saw a decrease in performance. Now when we used Performance Max at our agency, NP Digital, we saw the same thing. But it was because of what Performance Max considers a good conversion versus what we consider a good conversion. With, some tweaks we were able to make Performance Max outperform the alternative of not using it. But if companies just leverage AI blindly, our data is showing that many companies are losing money. It’s going backwards… It doesn’t mean AI is bad, it just means you can’t blindly trust it. Because is AI optimizing for your goals? Or the platforms goals? Or both? By having a human element in the loop you can use AI to your advantage. Moral of the story, don’t just turn it on and trust it blindy.