Artificial intelligence (AI) is profoundly impacting all areas of our lives. The technology is best suited for automating process-based workflows or drawing insights from large datasets. 

Performance marketing is an ideal industry to take advantage of AI. That’s because much of what we do involves using data to guide decision-making when creating campaigns. 

The results can be astounding. According to Aberdeen Group, automating marketing processes using AI generates 451% more leads. 

The organization also found that top-tier marketers are more than 65% more likely to use AI automation in marketing. This directly generates 15% more marketing revenue for these companies. 

At Open Moves, we’ve already been exploring how we can use AI to deliver similar results for our clients. We’ve also been keeping our finger on the pulse of evolving AI technologies to ensure our campaigns take full advantage of new developments. 

Digital Marketing Experts Are Rapidly Adopting AI 

With results like those listed above, it’s no surprise that marketers worldwide are racing to discover what AI can do for them. 

Raja Rajammanar, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer of Mastercard, recently said: ‘AI is probably going to be the single biggest disruptor and enabler of marketing in total. It’s a dream come true, from a marketer’s perspective.’

A survey conducted earlier this year by Influencer Marketing Hub found that 61.4% of marketers have used AI in their digital marketing activities and 54.5% believe AI will enhance their work.

And this looks set to grow—Statista predicts that the market for AI digital marketing tools will be worth over $107.5 billion in 5 years’ time.

So how do marketers use AI? Some of the most common uses include:

• Mapping the customer journey in detail
• Creating accurate customer profiles
• Developing more personalized content at scale
• Coming up with creative campaign ideas
• Performing research
• Analyzing marketing and sales data quicker and more accurately
• Making better decisions based on data analysis
• Identifying trends and using these to predict patterns
• Predicting customer behavior and suggesting appropriate responses

3 Examples of Artificial Intelligence Performance Marketing 

New AI-based performance marketing tools are constantly being released. 

This section lists three examples. We aren’t necessarily recommending these tools—instead, they help exemplify the breadth of different AI capabilities available to marketers.

PPC Ads

Purpose: PPC advertising

Albert helps performance marketers optimize their PPC ad campaigns.

It A/B tests creative elements to see which are most successful, and then automatically applies these successful elements to your campaigns. 

Platforms like Albert.ai automate the management and optimization of campaigns so you can focus on more strategic priorities. 

How does it work?

Albert integrates with Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Bing, and programmatic advertising platforms. 

You tell it what you want your ad campaign to achieve, set your budget, and upload the ad creative.

Albert then posts the ads for you and automatically collects and analyzes data from the platform on how your ad is performing. 

It uses this information to create and test new variations of your ad by adjusting certain elements. It posts these variations and collects and analyzes data on which ad performs best.

Elements from the most successful campaigns are used in new ads—and this machine learning process is repeated again and again. This means the ad changes in line with your audience’s changing tastes. 

The creative elements it tests include the images, colors, fonts, content, and relevant keywords used in an ad.

The platform can optimize ads for different audiences, channels, and devices. It can even tell you the best time to refresh your ad. 

Albert also advises you on which audience is most relevant for your campaign, which channels you should target, and the most budget-efficient way to run it. 

Why are AI PPC platforms effective?

AI PPC platforms like Albert are effective for two reasons. First, they save you time by automating all testing and analyses of your ad campaigns. They also decide what is effective and they create and launch new campaigns based on these insights. 

The second reason these platforms are effective is that ad design is subjective. A marketer may think that an ad is good but that doesn’t necessarily mean that their target audience will like it. 

The only way to ensure optimal performance is to design your ad using data on what is proven to work today. 

What are AI PPC platform use cases?

We think platforms like Albert could be useful in any industry where ads need to reflect ever-changing trends—they allow marketers to effortlessly keep up with these changes. 

In real life: Interactive Investor

Interactive Investor is a personal finance investment platform. The brand wanted to grow its new account sign-ups and reduce paid search acquisition costs. 

Interactive Investor provided a series of KPIs it wanted to achieve with its online advertising. Albert then performed real-time testing and improvements to the ad campaign to achieve them. As a result, Interactive Investor achieved an 89% share of voice across the top 10 branded search terms. 

AI is the future of PPC

We strongly believe that AI will play a pivotal role in the future of PPC ads. It allows businesses to improve many campaign areas, including:

• Perform enhanced targeting
• Develop smarter bidding strategies
• Ad copy and creative optimization
• Real-time ad campaign management
• Fraud detection and prevention
• Predictive analytics
• Voice-activated ppc advertising
• Advanced audience segmentation
• Personalization and dynamic content
• Cross-channel optimization

UX Optimization: Optimizely

Purpose: Website content, UX, and monetization

Launch date: 2010

UX optimization platforms help businesses increase sales by optimizing their website. 

Optimizely is a good example. It has three main modules that focus on content marketing, digital user experience, and website monetization. These are all accessed by their Digital Experience Platform (DXP) interface.

Each of these modules uses AI to some extent. Examples of AI-powered tasks include:

• Recommending relevant content based on user interests to convert visitors
• A/B testing new web pages
• Helping you build online experiences tailored to your visitor segments

This shouldn’t be confused with search engine optimization, which often requires more than what an app like this can offer.

Optimizely does these processes for you. 

Users are given a line of code that they paste into their website’s back end. This allows the AI to read the website’s data. 

You then set up A/B tests by choosing which web page and elements you want to compare. 

Optimizely collects data on these tests and provides recommendations on which elements you can improve to give users a better experience or to make more money.

For the targeted content feature, Optimizely will automatically track user preferences and suggest content based on this.  

A great example of this is Optimizely’s own blog. New visitors from new sources see non-personalized content, but the more they interact with the blog, the more the engine learns about them. 

The system learns what certain visitor segments are interested in. For instance, it will know what visitors from certain sources enjoy reading and will serve them related content.

Who are UX optimization platforms for?

UX platforms like Optimizely are best suited to any business with a website that uses an e-commerce element.

For these businesses, the buyer experience is critical. Website users must be able to find what they need, make payments easily, and choose upsell options. Any user experience issues in this process will cost the company revenue. 

By drawing data from thousands of user experiences, platforms like Optimizely can identify the most common issues users experience and suggest improvements.

For example, let’s say you are experiencing high levels of abandoned carts on your e-commerce website, but you can’t find the cause. By running an experiment in Optimizely you can collect data on user behavior and get suggestions on how to fix these issues. 

In real life: Sea World

One of Optimizely’s most well-known clients is SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment. They operate several attractions, including the world-famous Florida-based SeaWorld. 

The company wanted to improve conversions on its websites by making them more user-friendly. 

Here’s how they used Optimizely AI to achieve this:

• Identified points where customers left the buying process 
• Highlighted areas where users experienced frustration
• Transaction data determined which customer segments to focus on 
• A/B testing was used to validate improvements

Optimizely’s AI produced a number of useful insights for SeaWorld, including:

• Over 75% of site traffic was on a mobile device, but the site wasn’t mobile-optimized.
• Most customers left the buying process because they couldn’t find answers to common questions.
• Poor form design meant customers struggled to proceed to checkout online.
• AI-generated heat maps showed important missed cross-sells because users didn’t scroll all the way down the screen. 

Using Optimizely, SeaWorld managed to reduce customer drop-offs by 50% and users completed their purchases 40% faster. This led to millions of dollars in additional revenue.

Social Media Marketing: Hootsuite Enterprise

Purpose: Social media

Launch date: 2008

You probably recognize Hootsuite and may have even used it. The platform has been around for more than 15 years and is a great way to manage your brand across multiple social media channels.  

More recently, the platform has started introducing AI-powered tools. Two examples are OwlyWriter—an AI writer that creates posts optimized for social networks—and Hootbot, an AI chatbot that can have social media conversations on your behalf. 

But the most interesting launch for performance marketers is the insights provided by Hootsuite Enterprise. These are accessed using its built-in Iris AI tool. 

This social listening tool allows businesses to:

• Track their reputation by measuring brand loyalty. 
• Identify new trends by analyzing which topics their target audience cares most about. 
• Measure and predict the performance of social media campaigns.
• Perform competitor analyses and identify areas to improve and weaknesses that they can capitalize on. 
• Identify which influencers suit their brand and products.

How Hootsuite Enterprise works

Iris can be set up to spot certain conversations that are relevant to your brand. The tool automatically detects peaks in these conversations and explains why. This saves you tons of time analyzing data and identifying trends yourself.

Iris also helps social media managers to understand the scale of conversations that they can’t see via their own channels. Iris allows you to monitor these conversations across all social channels in real-time. 

This way, you’ll know every time someone mentions your brand or something relevant to it, even if the person isn’t speaking to you or following you on social media. 

Who are social media AI tools for?

AI tools like Hootsuite Insights would be particularly useful for industries where differentiation is tough. 

One example of this is the beverage industry. Very few companies produce a completely unique drink and instead rely on brand loyalty to attract customers—Coca-Cola is an example of a company that does this well.

A competitor like Pepsi could use Hootsuite Enterprise to analyze how their brand stacks up against Coca-Cola’s. They may find that their competitor is less popular among users of a certain age on a certain platform. They could then look at what interests these users and create a targeted campaign.

Why are social media AI tools effective?

Today, social media is a big part of most businesses’ digital marketing strategies—especially those in B2C sectors. Having the ability to zero in on what your audience cares about is critical if you want to build relationships and grow your brand.  

Instead of relying on humans to identify trends using their account’s data, platforms like Hootsuite Enterprise can gather data from across different platforms in real-time and provide a more holistic view of what interests users. 

In real life: TransLink

Translink is a public transport operator based in British Columbia, Canada. It uses social media to communicate with riders, communities, and other stakeholders. 

The company wanted to start analyzing conversations on social media and use their insights to improve its service. 

TransLink used Hootsuite’s social listening capabilities to understand, respond to, and build conversations around what public transport riders said they needed. It also gave them a voice when the company developed policies with local authorities. 

TransLink used this capability to launch several successful campaigns that were driven by social media conversations among customers. 

For example, Hootsuite revealed that many conversations about TransLink were around rider etiquette issues. TransLink launched a campaign that addressed these.

The results were impressive:

• +1,385% social engagement
• +5% brand sentiment
• +7.5% ridership

Authenticity is still key on social media

Authenticity is key on social media. The best content is based on personal experience and relationships with other social media users.  While AI can help you track performance, find the right audience and get to know them better, it cannot create authentic personal content—and we think that’s a good thing.  Social media is a great tool for getting closer to your audience. Using bots to pose as you isn’t a good use of the medium—plus, your audience will probably be able to tell that you’re using AI to create content.

Power Your Performance Marketing with Open Moves 

The three examples we’ve chosen in this article illustrate how using AI can help your business gather, analyze, and spot opportunities from huge datasets.

AI presents exciting opportunities for marketers to make their operations more efficient and their campaigns more effective.

We believe you should use AI to automate routine tasks and perform complex calculations—making it ideal for performance marketing campaigns using various performance marketing channels.

But AI will only get you so far. That’s because it has limited emotional and creative capabilities and doesn’t know when it gets things wrong. A good example of this is the many AI image fails that get posted online. 

AI can help with tasks like writing content, engaging on social media, and designing creative—but human oversight is required. 

For the same reasons, relying on AI for strategic decision-making is not a good idea. Humans need to stay in control of and be responsible for their own campaigns.  

That’s where OpenMoves comes in. We help maximize your performance marketing strategy.

Our veteran specialists are experts in all PPC platforms, including Google Ads and Facebook ads. We help you target buyers and customer segments, identify opportunities, and increase ROI.

We’ve delivered results that have transformed our customers’ businesses, including:

• +62% conversion rate for an HR SaaS client
• 30m people reached by an online ads campaign for an education institute
• +200% revenue earned for a clothing brand

OpenMoves uses AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Jasper to accomplish the marketing tasks outlined above. For example, we use AI to help find new keywords to bid on for PPC ads and to help write ad copy that delivers results. We us AI to help us find ways to increase website conversions, analyze the competition, and write Calls-to-Action. And we use AI for social media marketing to help us come up with compelling post topics, outlines, and images.

If you want to achieve similar results for your business, get in touch today.