Last week’s SMX Next was designed to help you overcome your search marketing challenges. One presentation was “How to embrace automation without sacrificing results,” by Joe Martinez (@MilwaukeePPC) and Michelle Morgan (@michellemsem), Co-Founders of Paid Media Pros. The session was designed to teach PPC professionals how to embrace automation for Google Ads Business-to-business campaigns without losing control of the account.
What They Showed Attendees
In this PPC track, day one time slot, Martinez and Morgan shared techniques to help you benefit from automation while leveraging what you know about the business and the market to prevent the need to sacrifice your influence over the campaign. Specifically, the team shared insight on how to:
- Understand the automation options available to you in the account
- Learn when you should (and shouldn’t) override automation
- Balance what you know vs. what machine learning knows to increase the success of your campaigns
To see the entire presentation, please click here (please note: registration is required).
Remember Your Goals and Don’t Get Distracted.
In addition to their insight on automation, Martinez and Morgan got into an interesting discussion following their presentation. George Nguyen (@geochingu), Editor for Search Engine Landmoderated the live Q & A that followed, where the two PPC experts got into a discussion regarding auto-applying recommendations from the platform. In a brief post on the Search Engine Land site, Nguyen mentions that it is essential to remember that the platform has a motivation, too, and their tactics can distract PPC marketers from their goals.
Sometimes marketers are part of the platform’s partner affiliations. The platforms use these affiliations to distract PPC professionals from the campaign’s goal of increasing client leads and sales. For example, one attendee said he was part of the Google Partner and was told to auto-apply recommendations to keep up the partner status.
However, as Nguyen writes, Martinez and Morgan do not support a blind acceptance of a platform’s “recommendations” as part of the automation strategy. Martinez says that it is essential to remember that automation should only further your goals for the client, not the platform. Automation should do what is best for the client.
To read more about what Martinez thinks about relevant PPC topics, please click here.
To be clear, Martinez isn’t saying you should reject all the platform’s recommendations. He responded in the session that some of the suggestions might be good ones, but if they don’t further that goal for increasing the client’s leads and sales, you don’t have to implement them, and he doesn’t think programs should penalize you for not auto-applying them. Morgan agreed, Nguyen writes, adding that “it’s in your best interest to get the best results, not make Google happy.”
To hear more about what Morgan thinks about PPC topics, please click here.
Are you sorry you missed the presentation and discussion? The good news is it’s not too late. SMX is presenting the entire November 9-10 program for #SMXNext, so you can watch it online whenever and wherever you want. To see Martinez and Morgan’s presentation OnDemand, as well as any of the other presentations from the entire schedule, please register here.
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