The Fall of Digital Agencies
The Fall of Digital Agencies
Anyone in digital that is not concerned for their jobs in the future is crazy or likes to look the other way. Google is constantly progressing in machine learning and implementing that in their Adwords tool for optimising PPC Campaigns. E.g. "Google smart bidding, smart campaigns, smart goals, smart shopping ads". Google tires to find patterns and understand who are the best converting people for you, targets them, increases bids on those who will convert, it can alert you of anomalies, should you increase budget etc... We didn't see such advanced features few years ago.
"Google how my PPC campaigns are doing?" and the assistant will provide you with an answer.
Google should create an AdWords personal assistant (right now it is only in form of textual tips in AdWords and videos on YouTube) that will guide you through optimising your business online (same goes for Facebook etc.). Take for an example the advanced game "Detroit: become human" launched in 2018. A menu is presented by an android assistant (photo on the left, video below) that converses with you and guides through your setup and looks 90% real.
An example if you played the game late, tomorrow she (the game) will ask you "Are you tired because you stayed up late (playing the game)?
This isn't the future, but the present. Also Google Analytics (currently in the main menu) can show some anomalies like "We noticed your bounce rate has increased a lot in the last 7 days". You click and it leads you to that personalised report Google has created. In this new tool & interface that I predict, you could ask by Voice "Google how is my campaign doing?" and the assistant will provide you with an answer.
The point is that Google can make a tool in a year or few that will do all the optimisation work for you and provide a better user experience than an agency very soon. A tool for PPC for now, there will definitely going to be some assistance in terms of content.
I believe Google will roll out all of this and not in a distant future. The question is are they better of with the way it is now? This roll out can affect agencies in a negative way because Google can do all of the optimisation instead of them. It would be wise for a client to cancel their PPC agency services and let Google do the work.
Agencies think they are working for themselves, but actually they are working for Google as well in recruiting new customers that will spend on Google's ads. In that respect, agencies are important for Google. That's why Google holds these events around the globe where they invite agencies and "Google Premier partners" (those agencies who spend a lot on ads) to tell them about the new types of ads they have.
If Google rolls out such a tool and interface agencies will rejoice if they don't loose clients. Because they will use the advanced interface themselves and just sit back and watch Google optimise their campaign and fix if an issue comes along. I'm sure some clients will continue to pay the same amount of service fees to agencies even though agency just got 200% more productive with this tool. A smart tactic will definitely be to keep the clients in the dark about this.
So the final question is will Google be better off (make more money) with the new automated, machine learning tool? What is the trade off? Will they "take" some clients from agencies and in the future completely remove the need for their existence? They will surely charge a fee to use this new tool, but a smaller free than a client would pay an agency. What we have seen in recent times is Google going for more money online (different topic) with changing the search results landscape.This is the future of digital marketing.
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