• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 7, 2018

Adobe on Wednesday will introduce a completely rebuilt platform it calls Adobe Advertising Cloud Search as part of the Adobe Experience Cloud. The automated platform aims to make it possible for marketers to make better decisions when considering the billions of data points required to inform a typical search campaign, from thousands of keywords to parameters such as geography, time of day and device.

Pete Kluge, group manager, product marketing of Adobe Advertising Cloud, called this release “the most significant revamp” of the search features since the acquisition of Efficient Frontier in 2011. The advancements link audiences from its marketing technology stack, Adobe Experience Cloud, with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to drive higher returns.

Adobe developers rebuilt the user interface from the ground up, making significant enhancements to the workflows and adding time-saving features such as bulk editing that allow marketers to copy and paste edits directly into Excel, and vice versa. The changes made in the user interface are immediately reflected in live campaigns.

The platform enables marketers to take advantage of audience data to drive performance by optimizing and personalizing content with the assistance of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The platform applies both to search advertising in new ways in an effort to drive better results for advertisers through forecasting.

Kluge said Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI and machine-learning framework, sits at the center of the platform and scans for discrepancies between modeled and actual performance, automatically adjusting keyword bids multiple times per day to maximize returns.

The platform gives advertisers total visibility into forecast models and their accuracy, with reports available at any time for advertisers to drill into click, cost and revenue models, Kluge said.

These features are available globally today for all Adobe Advertising Cloud Search customers. Adobe declined to break out customers by search when asked how many use the platform, but Kluge said that overall, Adobe Advertising Cloud manages roughly $3 billion in ad spend for more than 1,000 clients.  

Many of those clients are seeing an increase in performance. Kluge pointed to Hagerty as an example. He said that in less than four months the specialty car insurance company saw paid-search ads and start policy applications increase the number of people coming to the site by 118%, while cost per click fell by 10.4%.

Many of the features were the direct result of input and best practices from clients like Barclays, who are actively using these features. 

“Ultimately, our goal is to build the next generation of search advertising, continuing to innovate a tried-and-true format for marketers,” Kluge said.