Picking up where we left off in our exploration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), you might be wondering – is all this AI talk just hype, or is there real substance behind it? In part one of this series, we saw how AI, with a human touch, is transforming web design. Now, let’s delve deeper and unearth some of the concrete benefits AI can bring to your business. As you’ll see, AI isn’t just science fiction anymore; it’s a powerful tool waiting to be harnessed!
Unless you have been making your home under a rock or in a Luddite colony with no Wi-Fi—yes, they do exist, and ironically, I learned about it online—then you have probably heard more about AI than you really care to. I know I have. However, there are definitely some real benefits behind all the hype. You have to dig for them a bit, but they are there. Lets take a look at a few Bullseye has found so far:
At Bullseye, we have been testing machine learning—AI’s predecessor—in our ads accounts since it became available several years ago. What is it good at? Well, it’s really good at finding little things that you as a human might overlook. What’s it really bad at? Doing everything and giving you an optimal result. It just doesn’t happen.
For example. The latter half of 2023 and earlier this year, we were testing performance max campaigns for our clients. It’s a new campaign type Google released. If you want to read more about it, here you go. Essentially, it was supposed to be the Ronco Rotisserie of ad campaigns—you just “set it and forget it.” You put in a little information, AI looks at your site and your content, and the marketplace at large, and it drives you leads. Boy, did it. Every campaign we tested it on was seeing more calls and more form submissions. Woo Hoo win for AI!
However, the vast majority of those were not good potential patients. The program was missing the nuance of understanding what types of patients our clients were looking for. As an example, let’s say you’re a fee-for-service practice. You don’t want people on insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid. You want people who are willing to pay cash on the spot. There is (currently) no way to teach the campaign that aspect of the business. We were nervous about that fact but were assured by Google that we could adjust after it got some learnings under its belt. We turned the campaign on and flooded the office with unqualified calls. Not great. We did learn a lot about ad quality, targeting and how important it is to understand an existing practice’s patient base. As you have inferred by now, the test was pretty much a failure across the board. In every account we tested it in, leads went up, but lead quality took a nosedive, so we pulled back.
Another example of AI that has been extremely powerful is its ability to develop code. We were working on a project to connect lead data to a Google sheet for a practice to review and update. Our phone call data and our form submit data are in two separate platforms. To combine them, some development work had to be done. In the past, we would have had to hire someone to build this kind of connection and to maintain it through updates. I thought to myself, let’s see if the ol’ ChatGPT can handle this. Sure enough, with a little tweaking and more than a few copies and pastes back and forth, we were able to get the data to populate. I was blown away. What used to require a third party’s involvement, contracts, and not a small amount of money could now be done by a relative moron (me) with the ability to copy and paste. Amazing! Now, does this mean all our coding problems are solved? Far from it. I still had to troubleshoot the code a few times and get some help from Stack Overflow before I could get it to work, but it definitely gave me the leg up I needed to get the project done.
The biggest asset AI has been so far to Bullseye is with content production. We are able to leverage ChatGPT to help us come up with ideas, refine blog posts and emails, along with any other content we need to produce. The platform excels at this and is a great help not only to me but to our entire staff. This post, for example, was put through ChatGPT and corrected quite a few errors for me. While it doesn’t understand my sense of humor (yet), it’s still great at making everything we produce better.
To me, the moral of the AI story so far is this: The sky is not falling, and we will not all be out of jobs tomorrow. What will happen is those who leverage its capabilities and continue testing and learning will become exponentially more productive and efficient. That is until our robot overlords subjugate us all. I, for one, welcome them <- ChatGPT wrote that!
Have any questions or see an opportunity to test AI? Reach out to us and let us know. We are always excited to test and learn!
