Marketers face a complex array of variables at play when trying to optimize ad campaigns, from audience demographics to platform algorithms. With the media landscape in a constant state of evolution, it’s difficult to keep up with every new trend and technology that could impact ad performance. Moreover, consumer behavior is often unpredictable, requiring marketers to continuously test and refine their strategies to achieve the best results.
Given such wide-ranging challenges in tracking and adjusting ad campaigns today, artificial intelligence can provide invaluable assistance in addressing a variety of these issues. Below, 16 members of Forbes Agency Council explore the ways their agencies are integrating AI tools and resources to facilitate ad optimization and how these approaches are working for them.
1. Creating Customized Personas
We use AI to create customized personas that mirror target audiences our clients are hoping to reach. Like a virtual focus group, these personas communicate and respond to prompts to better inform how audiences may respond to a campaign in real life. With these insights, we are able to optimize the actual ad campaigns to reach these human audiences more effectively. - Dani Mariano, Razorfish
2. Personalizing Prospect Emails
We leverage AI to personalize emails for client acquisition. Especially if you are striving to connect with executives, hooks that are personalized according to prospects’ interests through AI offer a way to differentiate. - Cem Hasoglu, Puzzle Agency
3. Identifying Customer Trends
An effective way we’ve utilized AI to optimize ad campaigns is through data analysis and trend recognition. These systems can help identify repeating patterns and trends in customer behavior, which ultimately leads to more efficiently structured campaigns. - Jordan Edelson, Appetizer Mobile LLC
4. Filtering Intent Data Signals
AI gives our agency powerful filtering capabilities, along with speed and scale, when using intent data signals to fuel targeted programmatic advertising campaigns for clients. With billions of digital intent signals processed weekly, AI saves us time and resources and enables us to uncover deep insights around preferences and interests to improve campaign targeting and personalization. - Paula Chiocchi, Outward Media, Inc.
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5. Breaking The Rules
AI has broken down all of the barriers that once limited the potential of the creative process. The power now lies in the hands of the creators, rather than with the technicians who assist the creators in achieving their vision. Think of how Adobe Photoshop gave power to art directors, only with a much higher level of capabilities. We use AI for concepting, generating assets and breaking the rules. - Terry Zelen, Zelen Communications
6. Doing A/B Comparisons Of Ad Copy
AI is great for doing an immediate A/B comparison of different copy for advertisements. It’s simple to tell a large language model to pretend to be your audience, and then you can use it to provide interesting insights on which copy is likely to perform the best. We’ve created custom GPTs to give us feedback from different personas. Although it’s not always right, neither are human copywriters! - Mike Maynard, Napier Partnership Limited
7. Analyzing Competitors’ Ads
We have an AI specialist in-house who developed an AI tool that aggregates data from Facebook Ad Library and TikTok Ad Library. This tool analyzes competitors’ ad spend, frequency and creative variations across platforms. By synthesizing this data, we can pinpoint optimal budget allocation, identify underutilized ad placements and refine targeting strategies for our clients. - Frederik Bussler, Bussler & Co
8. Hyper-Personalizing Messaging
Instead of relying on an existing AI, we created our own. It can examine a customer’s implicit and explicit behaviors and, through behavioral analysis, predict and create messaging that can prompt the customer to take action. This level of hyper-personalization has been incredibly effective for our clients. - Roger Hurni, Off Madison Ave
9. Identifying Underperforming Segments
For a recent campaign, we used AI to optimize our ad spend across multiple channels. The AI identified underperforming segments, and we were able to reallocate the budget to higher-performing areas. It also suggested new audience segments that we had not previously targeted—resulting in about a 25% increase in conversion rates and a 25% reduction in cost per acquisition. - Goran Paun, ArtVersion
10. Finding Keywords For Google Ads
AI can help come up with keywords to target and write copy for Google Ads based on these keywords. You can feed it the page you are sending the ad to, and it will come up with the best keywords to target from there. - Trey Robinson, Story Amplify
11. Testing For Maximum ROI
With the rise of AI, we can now quickly test to see which creative is working best for clients’ digital advertising campaigns, enabling us to avoid spending too much of their digital advertising budget while still achieving amazing results. Combined with a detailed level of reporting, this allows us to scale our clients’ companies like never before. - Adrian Falk, Believe Advertising & PR
12. Adjusting Targeting Parameters
Instead of focusing on smaller things, one effective way our agency uses AI to optimize ad campaigns is through predictive analytics. By educating the AI on key performance indicators and user journey data, we are able to optimize ad campaigns by ensuring targeting parameters on our website are adjusted, enhancing engagement while reducing the cost per acquisition. - Ajay Prasad, GMR Web Team
13. Selecting And Analyzing Influencers
We use AI to select influencers and analyze their metrics. The number of influencers is growing, and searching manually and analyzing each one takes a lot of time that could be spent on developing a creative concept for launching an advertising campaign. Also, with the help of AI, the outcome of a campaign becomes more predictable. - Michael Kuzminov, HypeFactory
14. Creating Copy For Paid Media Ads
We’ve utilized AI to help create copy for paid media ads. We have expert-level marketing and search engine marketing professionals review the AI-suggested copy and finesse it accordingly so that it’s relevant, more impactful and matches our agency’s creative tone, as AI can only do so much. - Isadora Marlow Morgan, Isadora Agency
15. Pushing Divergent Thinking
We use AI to push and condition divergent thinking under condensed timelines and go-to-market pressures. It enables creators to explore more lines of original thought in pursuit of interesting connections in less time. But, as with any tool, it requires a skilled hand. Don’t let AI think for you. Leverage it to bounce, build, vet, stretch and go after those big, bold campaign ideas rooted in strategic decisions. - Shanna Apitz, Hunt Adkins
16. Quickly Developing Creative Variations
We've used AI to develop dozens of ad creative variations in minutes and then run predictive A/B testing analysis to determine the most effective visuals, headlines and calls to action. This has subsequently increased our conversion rates and decreased our cost per lead across all of our ad channels. - William Gasner, Stack Influence
