Behind the campaign
Ruden said Craft & Commerce used Stockholm-based Amanda AI, an AI-powered advertising service that helps marketing teams optimize ads across Google, Meta and Bing. The agency said the service was so successful, that it signed a deal to be its exclusive ad agency partner for nonprofit marketers in the U.S.
For the search campaign to be successful with the AI, however, the marketer needs to input enough signals, essentially first-party data that drives outcomes. “The key is to ensure the click and conversion tracking is in place. We look to make sure there are at least 30 conversions/signals per month. This can be as simple as a click for traffic acquisition or a lower funnel membership acquisition,” Ruden said.
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Craft & Commerce works with several nonprofit companies including Habitat for Humanity and Feeding America, but it will also roll out Amanda AI for its commercial clients, as well, as it sees fit.
“We liked the way it plugs into Google,” as well as how it keeps a log of the changes it’s making, which other platforms including Google’s built-in AI does not, Ruden said. “The optimization it makes is all transparent to you versus if you just use the platform AI or you don’t know what it’s doing.”
Ruden said it would be impossible to manually make all of the slight adjustments Amanda AI made to the Girl Scouts campaign (hundreds in one day)—including tweaks to audiences, devices and day parts (meaning when ads are scheduled to run). He said the platform also does ad copy adjustments, though the agency didn’t use that tool for this campaign.
“This tool takes a lot of the manual labor of managing search campaigns out,” Ruden said. “It’s driven great results for the client and allowed our team to get out of the weeds. With search campaigns, there are so many knobs and levers; it’s always great to be able to trust some of that to machines.”