Chatbots are most commonly used in customer contact centers, which delves towards self-service and automating processes to manage incoming communications and direct customers to the appropriate resource. You’ve probably interacted with a chatbot whether you know it or not. For example, you’re at your computer researching a product, and a window pops up on your screen asking if you need help. They’re also frequently used for internal purposes, such as onboarding new employees, helping employees with routine activities, training, ordering business supplies, and other self-service activities that do not require human intervention.
Chatbot provides you the flexibility of creating various interaction modules and the scalability of automating the processes. Combining it with your Paid Per Click (PPC) campaigns can enhance the overall performance of Click Through Rate (CTR).
Before jumping into the decision of combining Chatbot with PPC campaigns, you need to define the objective and final goal of your campaign - you want to sell something or want to provide information? Let's first learn more about Chatbot.
What is a chatbot?
According to Wikipedia - A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an online chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent.[1] Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would behave as a conversational partner, chatbot systems typically require continuous tuning and testing, and many in production remain unable to adequately converse, while none of them can pass the standard Turing test.[2] The term "ChatterBot" was originally coined by Michael Mauldin (creator of the first Verbot) in 1994 to describe these conversational programs.[3]
Chatbots can also be defined as artificial intelligence (AI) created to answer customer questions. They’re capable of answering basic or common questions, sending people to pages answering their questions, capturing relevant information, looking up orders, and more. Based on customer interactions, the chatbot can escalate any case to a human agent if the need arises.
Below are some resources to learn more about chatbots:
How do chatbots work?
Chatbots are usually of three types - rule-based, task-oriented, and data-driven. Depending on customer engagement strategy, one can choose to create an easy algorithm-based chatbot or pragmatic pattern-matching chatbot, or a complex artificial neural network chatbot. Let's have a look at the functioning and features of these three types of chatbots.
Rule-based chatbots: This is the simplest type of chatbot today. Users interact with these bots by clicking buttons and using pre-defined options. Since the chatbot is based on a flow algorithm, the chatbot requires users to make a few selections to give relevant answers. These chatbots usually have a longer user journey, as they depend on user selections, but they are good for capturing and qualifying leads. In an ideal scenario, the chatbot asks all relevant questions to users and receives answers as input in terms of buttons/selections. This stresses developers to work with a large amount of conversational data, questions and classify those data to different intents, answers and selections.
Task-oriented chatbots: Task-oriented chatbots can handle common questions, such as queries about hours of business or simple transactions that don’t involve a variety of variables. It uses rules, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and very little Machine Learning, to generate automated but conversational responses to user inquiries. The architecture of such a model contains a generator that generates a diverse sentence and a discriminator that judges the sentences between the generated and the raw data. Due to their highly specific and structured Interactions, these chatbots are used mainly for support and service functions. The usage of NLP provides a conversational experience to the users, however, their capabilities stay very basic.
Data-driven and predictive chatbots: The best example of such chatbots are Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri. They can also be identified as virtual assistants or digital assistants. These chatbots are contextually aware and leverage artificial neural networks, natural-language understanding (NLU), NLP, and ML to learn as they go. They are much more sophisticated, interactive, and personalized compared to other task-oriented chatbots. Capable to apply predictive intelligence and analytics to enable personalization based on user profiles and past user behavior. The AI-driven backend helps the chatbots to evolve in digital assistants, helping it to learn users’ preferences over time, provide recommendations, and even anticipate needs.
Understanding how chatbots work, and how they’re trained is the first step in developing an effective digitally-enhanced customer experience roadmap. In today’s highly digital age, chatbots can be a powerful addition to the customer experience strategy for any business or contact center.
How to connect chatbots to a PPC campaign?
Adding chatbots to your PPC campaigns embeds flexibility, especially when your goal is to maximize conversions of click-throughs. Your conversation can be sales goals, communications goals, or individual campaign goals, chatbots can be your campaign assistant enhancing conversions and boosting customer engagement. Let's discuss some effective use cases:
Landing page equipped to answer FAQs: I am sure we all have gone to those landing pages where you are asked to fill up a form for very basic information and must have felt if there was a way to interact with someone to get a piece of rather personalized information. A landing page equipped to answer the FAQs can be based on a series of scripts to help prospective customers find the information, products, or services they are looking for. Further automation based on the customer journey can be asking more direct questions related to customer preferences rather than asking similar questions as to the first-time visitors; delivering a personalized experience.
Familiarizing with users: A PPC campaign can only give you insights on generic (demographic/geographic) information of the users clicking on the ads. However, when combined with a chatbot integration, you can get more specific data based on conversation. PPC campaigns help you get data on motivation and needs whereas chatbot uncovers additional behavioral and preferential information related to the user.
Level up conversation to connection: When interacting with chatbots, you can personalize it to lead the user to believe that he/she is chatting with another human being. Especially when chatbots are available 24/7, always ready to help, and a feeling of human connection can lift up the customer experience multifold. Chatbots when combined with marketing automation can help in analyzing the digital body language of users, help in lead scoring and provide feed to your sales funnel; converting a conversation to a long-term business connection.
Enhancing brand equity: Chatbot integrations help in improving brand awareness the conversational way, irrespective of it's a potential first-time customer or a returning user introduced by your PPC campaign. Chatbots can be designed to have a brand persona for the users. Starting from conventional naming/dynamic names for chatbot agents, the first pop-up introduction message to the language/tone used by the chatbot, all are part of the brand persona and bring users closer to the brand. You can also introduce a character/mascot of your brand to be the “face” of the chatbot. Users are usually aware of their interaction with chatbots and of the fact that it's not a human being but an AI and generally fine with it. The personal connection with the brand, combined with enhanced user experience can boost your brand equity.
Measuring the success of your PPC-Chatbot strategy
The first step of setting up the PPC-Chatbot campaign is to define goals, objectives, and KPIs. Your dashboard can have three different sections displaying the performance of the PPC campaign, conversion through chatbot, and overall KPIs. While PPC campaign KPIs will be focused on CTR, chatbot KPIs will be related to interactions and conversions. Lastly, the overall KPIs can be business-oriented for e.g. - Customer acquisition, product/brand awareness, Net Promoter Score (NPS), Account-Based Marketing (ABM) goals, etc.
Conclusion
Users are getting bombarded with hundreds of PPC ads in a day, chatbot integration adds a feeling of being heard or given attention to, hence it has a better opportunity to start a conversation that can lead to business conversion. chatbot integration to PPC landing page with a journey to educate users about the brand can enhance the overall experience and engagement. Also, the data captured through the PPC-Chatbot integration can be used as a feed to future digital marketing campaigns.
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