How Robots Can Outperform Humans in Search Engine Marketing

Google’s Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is probably the world’s most powerful.  Four hours after being taught how to move chess pieces (no instructions on strategy or openings), their AlphaZero chess player was not only able to beat the best human who had ever lived, but also the best machine.  AlphaZero  was described as having ‘God-like ability’, with strategies never previously dreamt of.  This powerful A.I. is also available to help you to win more and better clients, in the form of Google Ads.

Ad Creation, Not Just Optimization
It’s well known that Google’s Conversion Optimization can bring more clients for less money, as long as well-structured Google Ads/Analytics accounts are in place.  What’s less well-known is the fact that Google can actually generate most of the ads and keywords themselves. And, they sometimes outperform experienced human ad creators.  This technique is called ‘dynamic ad groups’.  Google’s A.I. scans a webpage, multiple web pages or an entire website, generates the ads and keywords, monitors visitor actions and continuously optimizes the ads and keywords in a virtuous circle.

​Astonishing Results
But does this technique really work in the real world?  In order to test the A.I., I generated a competitive dynamic ad group, which looked at an entire client website and compared it to what I had created manually.  The results were astonishing.  I noticed that the robot was outperforming me substantially, so I shifted most of the funds into the robotic ad group, away from the human-created ad group.  The account-wide return on investment (ROI) nearly quadrupled from 47% to 166%, as a result.
 

​                                              One week period ending two weeks after the A.I. budget was increased
 
Man vs. Machine
Don’t get me wrong.  Sometimes my colleagues and I beat the A.I., but not in this case.  When directly comparing the results during the same week, the man-made ad group had an excellent ROI of 144%, but that was eclipsed by the robot’s stratospheric 275% ROI.  Furthermore, the robotic cost per conversion was about 70% less, while the conversion rate was five times as great.  Maybe someday, the machines will take over from us, but in the meantime, let’s use them to make a lot of money.