Nuggets: AI-powered performance Ads

Bhavya Singh
4 min readJan 25, 2024

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How Google AI is building for AI-powered performance ads

Get ready for bite-sized wisdom! Welcome to the Nugget series, where I deliver key learnings in a quick and visually appealing way. Today we’re gearing up for a deep exploration of Google AI — buckle up! Let's learn from the AI-Powered Performance Ads Certification course by Google.

Hello beautiful fellas,
Welcome to the
Daily Product Management Show! 📺 I’m your host, Bhavya, and I’ll be bringing you fresh insights & ramblings on product management every week! 👋

Consumers are changing their minds faster than ever, and advertising needs to keep up! This opens up tons of exciting possibilities for new and creative ways to reach them.

Supporting stats

  • Performance Max Campaigns (unconstrained budget campaigns) = An average increase of 13% in total incremental conversions at a similar cost per action
  • Responsive Search ads + Broad Match + Smart Bidding = An average of 20% more conversions at a similar cost per action
  • Target CPA ➡️ Target ROAS = An average of 14% more conversion value at a similar return on ad spend

Identify your objectives

  • Identify your business objectives and marketing metrics
  • Ensure alignment across leadership
  • Create a single source of truth to measure success

Build a strong data strategy

Drive the right metrics

  • Privacy-safe data is the key to building a more sophisticated, impactful marketing strategy.
  • Your data is incredibly valuable because it’s:
    High-quality: You receive your data right from the source — your customers.
    Relevant: The data relates directly to the products you sell and the customers who buy from you.
    Unique: No other company has the same customer data as you.

Anchor a data strategy

  • The more accurate data an advertiser provides, the better trained the algorithm will be to deliver stronger results. When creating a robust first-party data strategy, root it in business objectives.
  • Offline Data = If your business involves offline sales or leads, use offline data to help optimize toward your overall objectives, not just your eCommerce goals.
  • Customer Segmentation Data = If your goal is to drive quality leads, segmenting your customers by value can help you identify even more customers like those who are already valuable.
  • Profit Margin Data = Using margin data (can be determined by basket or user) in your value bidding strategy helps you drive total profit, which matters to all organizations. Other examples of data can include gross merchandise value, incremental active accounts, lifetime value, predictive lifetime value, and 12-month profitability.

Build a robust database

Step 1: Build a robust first-party database to inform a business objective-oriented marketing strategy

  • Gather info directly from customers: Track purchases, website visits, and other interactions.
  • Connect the dots: Use technology like Google Ads and Cloud to combine this info from different platforms.
  • Make it automatic: Set up processes that keep your data flowing smoothly.

Step 2: Make sure your strategy is built to cultivate customer trust and use that trust to build relationships

  • Be upfront and transparent: Tell customers how you use their data and let them control it.
  • Make it a fair deal: Offer clear benefits for sharing their information.
  • Follow the rules: Comply with data privacy regulations.

Step 3: Develop a strategy to share first-party data across media platforms

  • Use your insights on different platforms: Target ads and personalize experiences across websites and social media.
  • Share data: Upload data manually through the Google Ads or DV360 APIs, or use Customer Match Uploader (CMU).
  • Get organized: Use cloud services to store and manage all your customer data.

Create a future-proof measurement strategy

  • Accurate conversion tracking provides the essential data needed for effective attribution, value-based bidding, and ultimately, successful online marketing campaigns.
  • As a best practice, implement the global site tag as well as Enhanced Conversions to minimize gaps when cookies aren’t available.

Activate everywhere with Google’s AI solutions

  • Make sure you have automated your Search campaigns through bidding, creatives, and targeting.
  • Add Performance Max campaigns to make sure your brand shows up consistently across all Google Ads channels and inventory.
  • Uncap budgets to fully capture the benefits of automation.
  • Use automatically applied recommendations to automatically optimize campaigns.

Test, learn, and scale

  • Test with Google Ads experiments- Use Drafts and experiments to create a small test for a location or product group before going all in on a new solution.
  • Make use of insights- Use the Insights page within Google Ads to identify trends in your markets and understand performance.

Rock on, fellow & aspiring PMs! 🚀

I’m a product manager myself, and I know how hard it can be to find good resources on the topic. That’s why I started writing this blog.

I hope you found this article helpful. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment below. And if you’d like to stay up-to-date on my latest articles, please follow me.

See you in the next one 👀
Happy PM-ing! 🚀

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Bhavya Singh
Bhavya Singh

Written by Bhavya Singh

Senior Product Manager | B2B/B2C SaaS | ISB | Hyper focussed PM on Growth & UX. https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhavyasingh | Comment on any blog for a 1:1 call