New Skai Search Features Highlight the Evolving Role of Intelligent Tools as Team Members

Over the last few decades, the role of marketing technology has changed from just being tools to accomplish basic repetitive tasks to evolve into advanced, intelligent machines that can work and learn to take on more sophisticated responsibilities. In a recent SalesForce.com study, the percentage of marketers using or planning to use artificial intelligence will increase an average of 257% over the next two years.

Two recent feature updates to Skai Search are examples of how machine learning and artificial intelligence aid search marketers to intelligently manage and optimize accounts:

• Audience Shift Smart Tag monitors the impact of automated publisher bidding platforms to audiences prioritization
• Ad Group Auditing automatically performs daily checks to ensure that ad groups are aligned to marketer best practices

The new Audience Shift Smart Tag helps search marketers monitor and learn from publisher automated bidding platforms 

Last month, we announced the release of our Device Shift Smart Tag which tracks automated publisher bidding platform changes to device targeting.

“When a significant shift occurs in a campaign’s click distribution among mobile, tablet, and desktop due to publisher bidding, the Device Shift Smart Tag notifies the marketer of the change and suggests recommendations to take action. In some cases, it may direct the marketer to consider splitting the campaign into separate campaigns in order to get more control over targeting distribution.”

This month’s new release of the Audience Shift Smart Tag is similar to Device Shift as it monitors changes made by publisher automated bidding, but for audience targeting deviations. With better transparency into the changes made by publisher bidding, Skai’s Audience Shift Smart Tag offers two clear benefits to search marketers:

1. Marketers can monitor automated publisher bidding to ensure that audience targeting changes made by these somewhat “black box” solutions are aligned to the campaign strategy and goals. For example, maybe an audience gets deprioritized by the publisher’s automation because it’s not generating enough ROI, but the goal of the campaign was to build awareness with that audience type. It may be important for the search marketer managing the account to be alerted to that so that he or she can override those changes.
2. Marketers can learn from automated publisher bidding and apply those insights across their paid search accounts. For example, if the publisher system begins to spend more against two audiences within a campaign with ten audiences, it’s probably because it has detected signals behind-the-scenes that those two audiences are more valuable than the other eight. This insight may be valuable when creating new ads or adding new keywords.

“Marketers know that the potential for AI and machine learning could be amazing,” says Skai’s Director of Product, Noa Reikhav. “Automation is an attractive solution but it still needs monitoring and human involvement to not only just focus on short term performance but maximize the potential for long-term business. Marketers want to know what’s going on behind-the-scenes so that they can monitor those decisions. But there’s also an opportunity to learn from what the machines are seeing that can help them with other marketing decisions.”

Skai Search expands automated auditing capabilities to ensure ad groups are optimal

Search engine marketing has become very complex over the last two decades and there are now so many settings within an SEM account that it’s not uncommon for mistakes to be made—and the problem only gets bigger with size. Enterprise-level accounts generally have multiple cooks in the kitchen, and unfortunately, it’s very easy for something to be forgotten or accidentally get changed.

First released last year, Skai’s Audit is a feature that enables search marketers to set rules for the system to automatically check for common account irregularities that could take many, many hours to accomplish manually. Some examples of the first set of functionality from Skai Audit are the ability to check geolocation and audience targeting. 

With this new release, the Skai Search team has added five new audit rules to ensure ad groups have:

• At least 3 active ads
• At least 1 responsive search ad
• At least 1 standard text ad
• No underperforming ads
• At least 1 active keyword

These are the default launch thresholds, but Skai Search clients can customize them to align with their own account best practices. 

“We are learning more about how humans and computers can best work together and Skai Audit is a perfect example of the evolution of marketing technology,” says Jerome Crochat, Skai’s Senior Director of Product. “Every day, Skai can quickly check to ensure settings are correct in just a few minutes even for the largest SEM accounts. We are building the tools to allow paid search professionals to leverage, automate, and share audit best practices across their organization.”

The future of SEM: intelligent tools becoming team members

The new Smart Tag and Skai Audit capabilities are examples of how marketing technology is evolving from being a task-oriented toolbox to intelligent “co-workers” that can be counted on to perform complex tasks better suited for computers. By offloading repetitive tasks to technology, marketers can spend more time on the creative and strategic work that can make a difference to the bottom line. 

Smarter tools = smarter marketers. 

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