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🐣 Welcome Back — Hope You Got a Little Chocolate… and a Small Pause from the Chaos
Whether you spent the weekend hunting eggs or hiding from Slack, I hope it gave you a much-needed moment to reset. 🙂
Now, let’s talk about the new normal in marketing — one that’s evolving fast:
AI-powered ad campaigns.
Back in 2008 (Hard to believe it’s been 17 years already 🙈), I ran my first Google Ads campaign—manually setting bids, writing 90-character text ads, obsessively watching CTRs, and optimizing everything with an Excel File, a lot of caffeine, and intuition.
We had control… and chaos.
Why chaos?
Because every win felt fragile.
We’d launch a campaign, monitor it like a hawk, then make judgment calls at midnight based on partial data and gut feeling. One wrong keyword match type? Budget gone. Forget to exclude mobile traffic on a flash-heavy site? Burned again.
Even something as simple as testing ad copy required duplicated campaigns and clunky manual tracking. We were reacting to what happened yesterday, not predicting what would happen tomorrow.
The chaos wasn’t just in the tools—it was in the mental load 🧠:
Were we targeting the right audience?
Did we set the bids too high? Too low?
Should we pause this ad or wait?
Why did conversions drop last Tuesday?
🚀 Fast Forward to Now:
Google’s Performance Max, Meta’s Advantage+, and Amazon’s AI Shopping Ads run on machine learning. We no longer control every click — instead, we train algorithms.
And for many marketers, that shift feels like losing control.
This edition is here to help you take it back. ✅
AI ADS WEBINAR ALERT 📢
📅 [Live Webinar: Driving Revenue Growth with PMax – April 29 at 12PM EST]
Join us as we unpack how we helped clients increase ROAS, lower CPA, and actually understand Google’s Performance Max engine.
💣 The Scope of the Problem: Why Traditional Campaign Management No Longer Works
Digital advertising has become more complex than ever:
5+ platforms (Google, Meta, Bing, Amazon, TikTok)
Dozens of ad types
Infinite targeting combinations
Constant policy, bidding, and tracking changes
Manual management is no longer scalable.
Even the most talented media buyers can’t manually test every combination of:
Audience + creative + placement + bid + timing
Across thousands of auctions, in real time
💡 Google alone runs 63,000+ searches every second. Meta handles 4 billion+ ad impressions daily. Your human brain can’t out-optimize that.
At the same time, marketers are under pressure:
Rising Costs: Social media advertising CPMs have increased, with platforms like Instagram and Facebook averaging $7.17 per 1,000 impressions in 2023.
Increased Competition: More brands are investing in digital advertising, intensifying competition for audience attention.
Signal Loss: Privacy updates, such as Apple’s iOS 14 changes, have reduced the effectiveness of traditional tracking methods.
The result? Many brands are paying more and getting less — stuck guessing what’s actually working.
Where are you in this? Do you know what’s truly driving results for your business — or are you still guessing too?
🤖 Why AI is Actually Good for Marketers
AI isn’t a “nice-to-have” anymore. It’s the operating system of modern performance marketing.
Here’s why it’s good — when you use it right:
✅ AI Handles Complexity Humans Can’t
It runs millions of split tests per day
It dynamically adjusts bids, placements, and targeting based on performance signals
It scales what works while you sleep
✅ AI Unlocks Hidden Efficiency
Google’s AI-led bidding strategies outperform manual bidding
Meta’s Advantage+ campaigns can reduce CPAs by up to 32% for new customer acquisition when set up with exclusions and signals.
✅ AI Frees Up Strategic Brainpower
When you stop manually tweaking bids and duplicating campaigns, you can focus on:
Improving creative
Mapping customer journeys
Aligning marketing + sales data
Building long-term brand equity
You’re no longer stuck in campaign grunt work. You’re leading the strategy.
🚀 The Shift:
From “media buyer” → to “AI curator”
From “campaign optimizer” → to “signal architect”
From “guessing what works” → to “scaling what’s proven”
The platforms have changed. Your strategy just needs to catch up.
💡 Quick Tips - Fast Wins
3 Things You Can Do This Week to Help the Algorithm Help You
Whether you’re spending $2,000/month or $200,000/month on ads, AI doesn’t just run your campaigns — it learns from your inputs. The quality of what you feed it directly impacts performance.
✅ 1. Refresh Your Creative Inputs
AI-powered campaigns (like PMax or Advantage+) auto-test your creative in real-time — but they rely on what you upload. If the system only has one video and two headlines to work with, it’ll fatigue fast.
📉 Stat: From our experience, creative fatigue can drop conversion rates by 30% or more when assets aren’t refreshed within 30 days.
Fast Fix:
→ Build a monthly/quarterly creative calendar (depending on your budget).
→ Rotate 3–4 key visuals per campaign every 4–6 weeks. Use Canva + phone-shot UGC for quick tests.
→ Focus on 2 ad types: testimonials and product demos.
Lead Gen vs. eCom Tip:
Lead Gen: Prioritize credibility — founder stories, success stats, testimonials.
eCommerce: Focus on benefits + use case + reviews. Make sure lifestyle UGC is included.
✅ 2. Use Audience Signals (Even If They’re “Optional”)
In PMax and Meta Advantage+, audience signals don’t restrict delivery — but they do influence who the algorithm learns from first. That “learning phase” determines early traction.
Easy-to-implement signals by business type:
eCommerce Brands:
Past buyers (upload Shopify/CSV list)
Cart abandoners (GA4 audiences or Meta Events)
Instagram engagers
High LTV segments
Lead Gen Brands:
CRM-qualified leads (from HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, etc.)
Webinar attendees
Form starters who didn’t submit
🛠 Pro Tip: You can create audience signals in Google via “Custom Segments” and in Meta under “Custom Audiences.”
✅ 3. Track Value, Not Just Clicks
AI thrives on conversion quality — not just volume. If your tracking only shows “lead submitted” or “add to cart,” you’re missing the full picture.
🧠 Meta and Google reward advertisers with more efficient delivery when platforms understand true value events (like actual purchases or sales-qualified leads).
What to do:
Set up Enhanced Conversions in Google
→ Use Google Tag Manager, Shopify, or manual coding
→ Hashes first-party data (email/phone) and improves match rates
Implement Meta’s Conversions API (CAPI)
→ Tools like Shopify, Zapier, or Segment make it easy
→ Sends backend data (purchases, lead quality) to Meta for smarter optimization
Track downstream sales
→ If you’re lead gen, pass the deal stage or SQL status back into the platforms
→ Use Zapier or CRM integrations to trigger offline conversion uploads.
By business type:
Lead Gen: Track not just “form fill” — but “booked call,” “qualified lead,” or “closed deal.”
eCommerce: Set values for each conversion (order value, LTV) so the AI can optimize toward high-spenders, not just coupon hunters.
💡Pro News:
🛠️ Resource of the Week:
🔍Strategy Deep Dive: The CEO Playbook for AI Campaigns That Actually Scale
🚀 Ready to turn AI into your actual growth engine?
Don’t let your budget outpace your strategy. If you’re serious about scaling profitably in 2025, get the full CEO Playbook we use at ScaledOn — and learn how to train the algorithms to work for you, not against you.
🧭 Feeling Overwhelmed by AI, Signals, and Tracking?
Want a walkthrough of how to read your Google Ads placement report and clean it up? Hit reply, and we’ll send you our video tutorial and a list of YouTube Kids Channels to exclude.
👉 If you’re ready for clarity, not confusion, book a strategy call with us. We’ll audit your setup, identify what’s holding you back, and help you unlock your next level of growth.
