Leveraging AI Automation for Marketing and Personalization in Retargeting Ads to Boost Retention

Using AI automation for marketing when running your retargeting ads is the best way to get potential customers who already have some connection with your brand to reexamine your offers with fresh eyes. So why not make them as optimized as possible?

If you’re a business that is looking to explore retargeting ads to improve PPC performance, personalizing your campaign and leveraging AI could get you the right marketing ROI you’re looking for!

Read on and explore how our award-winning digital marketing agency uses AI and personalization to create an effective PPC retargeting strategy by using the latest trends powering customer retention.

The Current Landscape of Ad Retargeting

Before we get to the more advanced methods of PPC retargeting, it’s essential to understand what retargeting is and the role it plays in helping you convert leads to loyal customers.

So, what is retargeting? It is simply a PPC strategy that seeks to re-engage users who had previously interacted with your website but didn’t convert to buyers. This contact could have been brief or involved placing product items in a cart before abandoning the website. 

Retargeting serves as a reminder for potential customers to return to your website and take the next step. The importance of using retargeting cannot be understated, given that online businesses operate in an era where customer attention spans are short and the competition is high. 

However, although traditional retargeting methods are effective, they do have their limitations. For example, poor segmentation and generic messaging may target warm leads but not convert them effectively.

Instead, to stay competitive and achieve a better return on investment (ROI) on their ad spend, brands are turning to AI and personalization to create more relevant retargeting that speaks directly to the customer. 

How AI Automation Is Changing the PPC Game

Using AI for retargeting enables faster and more personalized customer experiences, leveraging real-time data on how your website visitors interact with your website. AI can instantly analyze user behavior and group users based on their intent. 

This type of segmentation can genuinely help with marketing efforts by setting a foundation for the kind of messaging that marketers create that resonates with each group’s needs and desires. 

Another way AI helps marketers develop a more precise and effective PPC strategy is that it can predict purchase intent and serve the most appealing images, headlines, and calls to action to each user. 

Likewise, machine learning algorithms continuously adjust bidding strategies to maximize marketing ROI by targeting the most likely leads for conversion. This helps businesses hone in on the right leads that are likely to become customers without overspending on general targeting that is based on guesswork. 

The Power of Personalization in Retargeting

Now that you know more about how AI can help with better user intent targeting that leads to more efficient marketing spend, let’s explore further how it does this in more detail. 

• Behavior-Based Retargeting: In this type of retargeting approach, AI tracks how users interact with your website through various metrics like which pages are most often visited, how long users stay, and how they interact with your content. This information helps create ads that are tailored specifically to their pain points and needs.
• Contextual Personalization: This type of AI personalization adjusts ads based on the user’s environment, device type, and even the weather and time of day. For example, if you are browsing on your mobile during a work lunch break, AI can detect this and create a short ad based on your search context instead of a long one that is more relevant to someone browsing on a desktop on Sunday evening. 
• AI-Driven Product Recommendations: Another great benefit of using AI for retargeting ads is that AI can easily analyze purchase history and behavior to then suggest the most relevant products to a specific user. It is also able to recommend products based on what similar customers have purchased. This helpfulness can be more effective at attracting customers because the ad would come across as helpful guidance rather than a sales tactic. 
• Personalized Ad Sequences: AI can also personalize PPC campaigns by guiding users through a multi-step ad journey. Instead of repeating the same ad and hoping for conversions, marketers can now nurture users by showing them different ads at different stages of their experiences with a brand. For instance, a user may see a product reminder, followed by a review, and then a discount to encourage them to take action. 
• Real-Time Dynamic Creatives: Along with being a fantastic researcher and analyzer, AI can also use data to create personalized creatives. This means that depending on users’ behavior on your website, AI can put together the best combination of headlines, images, and calls to action for each individual. This way, users are dynamically targeted according to their preferences, which helps to increase engagement without manually building many ad versions that can still only target segments of users (and not specific users in real-time). 

How to Implement AI Personalization in Your Retargeting Strategy 

Audit Existing Audience Segments 

Foremost, start by reviewing your current retargeting strategy (if you have one). Depending on your ad performance so far, are your audience segments too broad and ineffective? If so, go back to the drawing board to study your user analytics patterns and how you can reshape your messaging and creatives more strategically to reflect what potential customers are looking for. 

Integrate AI Tools

Next, use AI tools or platforms to help you with segmentation, creative optimization, and other predictive analyses. By leveraging AI in your retargeting campaigns, you will save time and improve performance. We recommend AdRoll for beginners because it is very user-friendly and has all the comprehensive features you’ll need to create budget-friendly retargeting strategies. 

For more advanced marketers seeking deeper levels of segmentation, we recommend Mutiny, which enables B2B businesses to customize their website content and messaging. 

Personalize Creatives Based on Intent

To achieve better results with your retargeting efforts, consider expanding beyond the simple demographic characteristics of your audience. Instead, focus most of your marketing efforts on customer intent. Once you understand what made your users act in a certain way, you can create ad creatives that guide them in the direction that they want to take. The most effective way to achieve this is through targeted messaging, visually appealing content, and promotional discounts. 

A/B Test Personalized Ads vs. Generic Ones

To see AI personalization benefits in action, always test your personalized ads against your standard ones. Analyze the click-through and engagement rates to understand what you can improve on to generate even better conversions. Testing is an essential aspect of performance marketing, as it helps you understand the gap between your ideal customer’s expectations and whether you adequately meet them.

Analyze KPIs

Always track metrics that matter! KPIs such as cost per acquisition, repeat purchase rates, customer lifetime value, return on ad spend, and click-through and conversion rates can provide a solid foundation for revamping your retargeting campaign and achieving remarkable sales outcomes. 

AI Automation for Marketing Trends

The future of PPC marketing will very likely include further synergy with AI to simplify the data collection process and personalize messaging. In fact, the trends are pointing to ad retargeting becoming more conversational and visual. 

For instance, voice and conversational AI are emerging as powerful tools for re-engagement, and chatbots and personalized SMS messages are currently among the most popular ways businesses leverage communication to reduce buyer resistance. 

Short-form and personalized ad videos are currently emerging as a top strategy to capture attention and deepen engagement, outperforming static ads by sixfold in terms of engagement. 

And finally, as AI continues to grow in its influence across marketing and various industries, privacy is becoming a significant concern for online consumers. That is why privacy-first personalization using AI will continue to grow over time, enabling brands to deliver tailored ads while protecting the real user data. 

Best AI Marketing Agency in Atlanta 

At CloudMellow Marketing, we utilize AI automation for marketing in all our strategy and implementation work to minimize guesswork and increase our clients’ ROI. 

If you’re looking to improve your PPC performance and are curious about the power of AI to improve your marketing outcomes, let’s talk. Get a free quote!