Adriel AdOps | EP04 | AI ad gen tool, 5 must-have widgets, and Inbound & outbound marketing tips

Hey there! Welcome to Adriel’s AdOps newsletter, where 6300+ marketers get some of our best insights on ad operations, digital marketing, and marketing automation every month in an easy-to-digest email format. 

Spending hours on creating, testing, and launching ads on multiple channels? 😩

You can now automate this with AI.

We’ve been working hard on this and we’re so excited to share it with you—

Our AI-powered creative generator and launcher: AdGen AI, will be open to the public at the end of October! 🎉

On AdGen, you can get a collection of ads for different channels and audiences based on a single website URL—and launch them on Google and Meta in a few clicks. No more manual work. 

Our Beta testers love how simple and easy it is, and rated 10/10 for UX. 

Learn more about AdGen and see examples in this blog. Or sign up for the waitlist and we’ll get back to you with a Beta link. 

⚡Power Up Ad Operations: 3 Tips 

From creating ads to optimizing campaigns, adops can be incredibly time-consuming and mentally-taxing. Every month, we share tips and tricks in this section to make it just a little easier.

1) Google Ad Extensions: Do you need them? PPC advertising is competitive…but adding extensions to your Google Ads can increase your chance of showing up on the search results page and getting higher clicks and conversions. 

There are currently 19 different extensions available on Google, but the two most popular ones are Callouts and Sitelinks. 

Callout extensions highlight special offers or unique aspects of your business, giving potential customers extra reasons to choose you. Sitelinks, on the other hand, allow you to link to specific pages on your website, guiding prospects directly to what interests them.

Get a full breakdown of these two extension types in this article [2 mins read].

2) 💡Design Tip: Tell a story with your data. Dashboard storytelling bridges the gap between technical users and those less familiar with analytics to facilitate a clear communication of business strategies and objectives.

To excel in data storytelling, plan your dashboard layout in advance. Determine the most relevant chart types based on your audience and goals to make sure your reports aren’t a random mix of visualizations but rather purposeful tools tailored to users' comprehension levels and end objectives.

3) 5 Must-have widgets on your marketing dashboard. Ready-made templates are great, but if you want more customization and control, use these widgets to design your dashboard:

1. Trend summary: see trends over time compared to previous periods. Great for visualizing high-level KPIs.

2. Creative widget: see all your ad creatives in one space. Helpful for creative marketers and anyone who wants to display actual creatives in their reporting!

3. Pivot tables (ads): aggregate all your ad data in one space and drill down to an extremely granular level.

4. Goal Pacing: keep track of how you’re trending towards spending your overall budget, conversions completed, ROAS, and more.  

5. Alarms: stay on top of performance 24/7 with custom alerts that notify you immediately when something changes. Check out how alarm widgets work here. 

The result is a super clean but powerful marketing dashboard that looks like this:

📖 What digital marketers are buzzing about

1) Creative Analytics: Bridging art and science: Traditional ad campaign optimization strategies are dying. Instead of relying solely on demographic segments, the focus is shifting toward dynamic testing and modeling. Contrary to conventional belief, the key to enhancing customer response rates lies more in creative data than in media planning.

Enter: creative analytics.

Creative analytics combines audience and creative data, looking at them together instead of separately. It uses AI to scale tests and identify patterns that may go unnoticed by planners, facilitating a more comprehensive campaign performance analysis. 

Find out how to implement creative analytics in this Martech article. 

2) 15 best AI ad creation tools for marketers. AI ad creation tools are all the rage right now—but not all of them are created equal. Get a breakdown of 15 hottest ones in the market and choose one that suits you best. 

3) What to expect in B2B advertising in 2023. Demandbase’s 2023 State of B2B Advertising Report reveals 5 key trends shaping B2B advertising:

1️⃣ Investing in measurable channels: B2B digital marketing continues to gain traction amid economic uncertainties. 78% of B2B marketers are boosting digital marketing budgets in 2023. Expect a 12.3% increase in B2B ad spending.

2️⃣CTV is becoming a top B2B advertising channel: Over 90% of U.S. households now have CTV access. Personalized messaging and data-driven targeting are driving its popularity, leading to improved engagement and brand presence.

3️⃣ New metrics: Modern B2B measurement focuses on outcomes like pipeline and revenue, diverging from traditional B2C metrics. Efficacy, amplitude, and value are the new benchmarks for optimizing advertising efforts.

4️⃣ Combatting bot activities: The U.S. faces a 23% invalid traffic (IVT) rate, emphasizing the need for robust anti-bot strategies to safeguard digital ad investments. Partner with B2B-specific advertising organizations to address IVT. 

5️⃣Adapting to a cookie-less world: With Google phasing out third-party cookies, B2B businesses must adapt to alternatives like contextual advertising and identity resolution partnerships.

🔦Behind the Adriel Team

WHO: Gregory Beckham
ROLE: Customer Success Manager

Gregory joined us two weeks ago as our CSM, and he shares his best inbound and outbound marketing tips below: 

Tell us a bit about your professional background.   

When the pandemic hit, I switched to tech and software sales from the aviation industry. I was one of the first BDR hires at a software development company where I moved on to become the SDR Team Lead, and later a Marketing Ops Specialist.

What are the top insights that you came across in both inbound and outbound teams? 

Outbound is straightforward, you put together leads and reach out to them, but inbound is trickier. 

If you've got brand recognition, 40% is the golden inbound success number. This means your marketing team has absolutely pinpointed their target audience and the inbound team is just taking orders like a cashier. But this is nearly impossible.

If you’re converting 20% of your inbound leads, your inbound team is doing absolutely phenomenal and there’s not much they can do more. 

But 10% means you should sit down and try to figure out where the blockage may be. There may be a miscommunication somewhere or people who already downloaded ebooks and started trials bounced, and now you’ve got to reel them back in like a normal outbound lead.

If your inbound team isn’t taking the time to go after these prospects and ask the right questions, then your inbound conversion rate could easily drop below 10%.

What are your best tips to improve usage rates during the trial period? 

To get more people to use your trial, you should first make sure that each and every one of your salespeople starts and accomplishes the trial. If you don't know what the end result of the trial is, how can you expect your prospects to do so?

There needs to be a finish line - a story or adventure mode where you go from A to Z. And if your entire sales team goes through the trial, they’ll be able to tell you what all the friction points that your prospects are running into.

At the end of the day, your prospects want a tool that would make their jobs easier. If the trial makes things more complicated, they'll just move on.

What do you love to do?  

Motorcycling is my thing right now – I started about three or four months ago and it’s been really fulfilling. I also just started a co-op campaign in Baldur's Gate with my wife, that's fun 😃

Give us some fun facts about you? 

I was in the Air Force (Special Operations) 10 years ago and I can cut glass!