The Google Ads agency is dead - unless it changes completely
In his guest post, guest author Stefan Vetter, founder of the Wortspiel agency, outlines five critical impacts of automation on Google Ads agencies—as well as on all companies that use Google Ads.
Automation through machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is changing all aspects of Google Ads. As a Google Premium Partner and one of the few "Google Managed Agencies" in Switzerland, we at Wortspiel are experiencing this development first-hand. In this article, I outline five critical impacts of automation on Google Ads agencies - and on all companies that use Google Ads. Google Ads agencies that don't change may no longer exist in a few years.
Content of this article:
- Introduction: Why advertising is being automated
- Impact 1: The agency becomes a pilot on autopilot
- Impact 2: Consulting and strategy become core competencies
- Impact 3: Data quality in Analytics & Co is crucial
- Impact 4: Attribution modeling instead of simple reporting
- Impact 5: Larger service portfolio
- Conclusion
Today, there are already tasks that a machine can solve better than a human: clearly defined problems with sufficient available data. These can be complex games such as chess or Go, where humans no longer stand a chance against algorithms. Or simply displaying advertising to the right target group.
What will therefore die out in the future is the classic "Google Ads craft", i.e. the manual, detailed optimization of campaigns.
What the machine will not be able to do in the short and medium term, however, are strategic and creative tasks. Humans still have the advantage here.
The following Five effects for Google Ads agencies:
Until now, a large part of a Google Ads agency's service has been the manual optimization of a Google Ads account. This optimization will remain a part of the service, but it will change levels and take less time.
Until now, optimization has been a "craft". This included routine tasks such as manual bid adjustments for certain keywords or analyzing performance by day of the week and time of day.
In future, agencies and Google Ads managers in companies will take on the role of "pilots on autopilot". Their task will be to compare the company's goals with the campaign results and intervene to correct them if necessary. In future, an algorithm will take care of the details.
Advertisers who make use of automation will have an advantage in the competition for the most valuable visitors.
The future added value of a Google Ads agency will largely lie in consulting. How can a company's goals be achieved with Google's automation technology? This requires a greater understanding of the overarching goals than before. The consulting expertise required in the area of (marketing) strategy will therefore increase.
A recent study by Marketing Land confirms this. It names "strategy" and "strong customer communication" as the most important future soft skills for an agency:
Handling data is also becoming increasingly important. AI only optimizes as well as the quality of the data it learns from allows.
Agencies must therefore help companies to collect the right data, put it in the right form and feed it into the (Google Ads) machine.
This means that an analytics setup must measure, classify and make accessible all success-relevant interactions.
Our Senior Consultant Christian Ebernickel aptly formulates this task with his guiding principle: "The right data in the right place at the right time".
The more marketing channels and forms of advertising are available, the longer and more complex the customer journey becomes. At the same time, there is increasing pressure on agencies and platforms to prove the success of a campaign in figures.
As a result, attribution modeling is becoming increasingly important: what share does Google Ads have in the overall success of an omnichannel campaign? This requires a higher level of technical understanding on the agency side than before.
Many of the tasks that Google Ads agencies will perform in future are channel-independent. This includes alignment with the company's goals, reliable tracking and clean attribution.
The operational effort and technical knowledge required to optimize the Google Ads channel, on the other hand, will decrease. This means that an agency with the same human resources could add additional services to its portfolio.
In the area of advertising, Facebook / Instagram, Amazon, LinkendIn and Apple Ads would certainly be interesting:
And in the area of marketing, it's getting loud Assessment by experts In addition to data science / analytics, there is a growing need for conversion optimization. It is not without reason that we added this area to our range of services last year.
Google has summarized the changes for Google Ads agencies in the following visualization:
The time spent on manually optimizing campaigns will be massively reduced by automation. This creates space (and demand) for more strategic consulting, better data management and more reliable attribution.
And according to Google, the massive changes will not come at some point, but "in the near future" according to the diagram above. This statement is in line with opinions in the industry. According to the aforementioned study by Marketing Land, "automation" is the most common answer to the question of which technology marketing agencies will invest in over the next twelve months:
I therefore see 2019 as a fateful year for Google Ads agencies. Those agencies that take advantage of the opportunities offered by automation for their clients have good prospects for the future. However, this will require far-reaching changes to the services and skills they offer. As mentioned at the beginning, Google Ads agencies that do not change may no longer exist in a few years' time.
The author: Stefan Vetter is the founder and managing director of Wordplay. He has been active in digital marketing since 1999 and has been working full-time with Google Ads and conversion optimization for many years. He enjoys passing on his knowledge: as the author of the first Swiss Google Ads book "AdWords for Startups", as one of nine "Google Certified Trainers" in Switzerland, as a keynote speaker and as a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland FHNW, at the Swiss Distance-Learning University of Applied Sciences, at the Swiss Institute of Business Administration SIB and at Google Zurich.
This article was first published on Wordplay.com published.
Handling data is also becoming increasingly important. AI only optimizes as well as the quality of the data it learns from allows. Agencies must therefore help companies to collect the right data, put it in the right form and feed it to the (Google Ads) machine. This means that an analytics setup must measure, categorize and make accessible all interactions that are relevant to success.
Our Senior Consultant Christian Ebernickel aptly formulates this task with his guiding principle: "The right data in the right place at the right time".
