Back To Blog
Marketing is complex. Very complex. You have to plan, measure, and tinker campaigns to find their sweet spots for generating clear returns.
And, us marketers love to do everything by hand: optimizing, tweaking, fixing bugs, etc.
This takes up a lot of precious time and energy that takes away from important work. That includes nurturing customer relationships, launching products, and developing strategies.
Wouldn’t it feel nice to have more time to dedicate to what matters in your company?
That can become a reality with marketing anomaly detection.
This is a technology stemming from a new vertical Morphio has created called marketing security—software that automatically alerts organizations of unseen marketing dips and rises.
Don’t believe me? Consider for a moment that 79% of executives believe AI helps them operate more easily and efficiently.
It also allows them to enter new ventures, futureproof their business, and improve how they use data. Don’t you want all of those things?
If so, continue reading because I’ll be showing you examples of marketing anomaly detection and how to find them yourself.
Make sure to try Morphio today for free and apply what you learn.
Start Defending Against Marketing Failures Today!
Discover why over a 1000 businesses trust Hawke AI to help protect their marketing ROI.
Request a free trial
What is marketing anomaly detection?
Let’s dive deeper.
This technology begins with a form of artificial intelligence called anomaly detection. It can be applied to any part of a business, including search engine marketing, PPC, finance, and more.
Artificial intelligence learns a company’s typical behaviour to alert teams of suspicious and radical changes in data. They can take action sooner than later while focusing their effort into high ROI tasks in the meanwhile.
Normally, marketers have to conduct lengthy experiments or stumble upon ideas by accident. Not anymore.
Organizations achieve a peace of mind that wasn’t possible before with anomaly detection.
Take Accenture, for instance. They are one of the world’s largest software companies and process over 26 million different expense lines every year. Let that sink in.
They originally used a manually designed rule-based system for compliance with these accounts. 10% of those expense lines would get flagged and audited by their compliance team.
While traditionally rule-based systems do work, they can return false positives and mistake safe behaviour for risk. This causes both the customer and Accenture’s compliance team to work extra for no reason—time that could be better spent elsewhere.
So, Accenture decided to take action. They developed an AI algorithm that measured historical expenses, charges, location data, and other key metrics. It was able to observe the data to improve future decision making, as well.
The results?
Firstly, it reduced the number of false expense entries being detected up to 10%. With 26 million annual expenses, that’s up to 260,000 Accenture no longer had to manually address!
That, as a result, improved the employee experience as compliance members no longer had to handle those inquiries. They were able to invest that time into more serious claims while helping customers.
This is just one example. Let me explain several other ways anomalies can appear in marketing and be leveraged for growth.
SEO
Search engine performance changes like the wind. Everything from organic traffic and keyword rankings shifts as Google’s algorithm updates and reallocates positions.
Being able to pounce on new SEO opportunities and retake rankings is extremely important for this reason. Otherwise, competitors will slowly get ahead.
SEO anomaly detection tracks a brand’s metadata, backlink profiles, organic traffic, and keyword rankings. Marketers are alerted when any of these pieces of information change—positively or negatively—to take immediate action.
This is also much more convenient versus constantly running URLs through software.
PPC
Why do you run PPC ads? To generate conversions!
That means every action needs to contribute to creating the highest converting ads while building pay-per-click campaigns.
Spending extra budget to run split tests and experiments is the old school way to do it. Nonetheless, let’s like trying to fix a car by hand when the dashboard tells you what’s wrong. There’s an easier way to do it.
With that being said, anomalies in paid advertising include over or under-performing ads, campaigns, creatives, copy, or audiences. Advertisers can cut out any items draining the budget and reallocate it to the top-performing assets.
Channels
Which channels drive the most sales for your brand? Is it social? Organic? Referrals?
You should know this. Otherwise, you’re pouring excess time and money into something that isn’t creating a return.
Anomaly detection can do this for you. It looks at all of the channels you’re using (and not using) to determine which are reaching KPIs or lagging behind.
Let me ask you this: have you ever taken an omnichannel approach and discovered that one channel you’ve spent months developing isn’t doing anything?
Yep. It happens very often.
But, it doesn’t have to be that way. Anomaly detection finds the marketing channels that are doing the most for your company so you can double-down on what works.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a necessity for any modern company. It establishes authority, trust, and generates organic customers. However, it’s easier said than done.
How do you determine the best topics? What do your customers like to read? You could study your analytics like a college entrance exam or not break a sweat and use anomaly detection.
It will alert you of content driving the most performance and those that aren’t reaching expectations. This empowers marketers to produce more valuable content for readers.
Budgets and finance
What expenses are eating up capital and which are generating a clear ROI?
There are so many things that add up on a balance sheet: software, contractors, tools, and dozens of others. Imagine being able to trim the fat and keep what’s necessary for growth.
Marketing security software alerts organizations of anomalies in their marketing efforts such as overspending or low returns. These items, whether tools or campaigns, are addressed quicker to reduce spending and waste.
Customer profiles
You can’t deliver all of the same creatives and campaigns to everyone. Each segment has unique characteristics, pain points, and interests.
That means marketing needs to be personalized to have the greatest engagement and return. Otherwise, it makes customers yawn and look elsewhere.
In fact, 58% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand that recommends options based on past purchases.
Anomaly detection helps achieve this. It sifts through customer profiles to determine the traits that make up the highest converting customers. This enables marketers to deliver targeted and relevant offers to those most likely to convert.
Let me explain how to begin finding marketing anomalies next.
How to find marketing anomalies
The first step in discovering marketing anomalies is by adopting a marketing security solution like Morphio.
This type of software integrates with a company’s tool stack to begin learning what typical behaviour and performance are like. It is then able to alert teams of any radical changes.
Secondly, consider the pricing of the tool. It should match your budget and offer the ability to upgrade when needed. Demos are also important because it allows you to test the software first-hand.
It should integrate with tools that you use on a regular basis to improve workflow and the impact anomaly detection has on your organization, as well.
Lastly, reports should be easy to read and understand. A lot of marketers avoid AI-driven tools because they’re intimidating, so you want it to be easy to use.
Next is understanding the levels of anomalies. They look like this:
Everything in the middle range is considered average behaviour. Then, there are level one, two, and three anomalies which become increasingly serious. Higher level anomalies are addressed first as they carry more weight.
But, they need to be handled by the right people. Ensure that you hand off the anomaly information to the right team, whether that’s content, SEO, PPC, etc.
Conclusion
Marketers work hard enough every day. From managing campaigns to overseeing teams and addressing issues as they arise, there’s no shortage of things to do.
And, there are human errors. We all make mistakes that often have a larger impact than expected. This creates more situations to handle and before you know it, hours have passed on the clock.
That’s why marketing anomaly detection is one of the best investments a modern business can make. It removes the need to constantly play cat-and-mouse with optimizations and risks, so you can get back to work that matters.
Want to see how anomaly detection can scale your marketing with fewer headaches? Try Morphio today for free.
