How Our Team Is Using AI to Find Ad Targeting Winners

Something genuinely exciting has been happening in our paid media department lately. Our Paid Media Lead, Matt Jones, has been putting some free AI synthetic audience tools through their paces, and the early results are very promising.

He's been using these tools to build extensive, highly detailed audiences for ad targeting. Then, crucially, he’s been A/B testing them against existing ad campaigns. The outcome? Clear winners for conversions, picked out by the AI.

It’s another example of how we’re constantly looking at new technology, testing it, and figuring out how to make it work harder for our clients. (Or, just as importantly, figuring out when it’s all hype.)

What Matt has been testing

Matt has been exploring tools that generate what are called ‘synthetic audiences’. If you haven't come across them before, think of it like this: instead of relying solely on real-world data from past campaigns or broad demographic targeting, these tools use AI to create incredibly detailed profiles of potential customers.

You feed the AI specific parameters and qualifiers, things like interests, behaviours, challenges, even their typical online habits, and it generates a comprehensive audience profile. One of the tools Matt found particularly useful was getminds.ai, which allowed for a lot of customisation.

The output is far more granular than what you might typically build manually, giving us a much richer picture of who we're trying to reach.

How it actually works

Once Matt had built out these super-extensive synthetic audiences, the real test began. He took ads that had already run and had established performance, then pitted them against the same ads targeted at these new AI-generated audiences.

It was a straightforward A/B test, designed to see if the AI's audience insights could actually improve conversion rates. The results were pretty striking. Hand on heart, Matt found a clear winner for conversions in most of the ad groups he tested. Not just a small bump either, but a landslide in some cases.

He even ran a smaller follow-up test, and it picked the highest converting ad again. It points to a powerful way of refining who we show ads to, based on a much deeper understanding of their potential motivations.

Why this matters for your campaigns

This isn't about replacing the smart human strategists we have on the team; it’s about giving them even better tools to work with. What Matt's experiment shows us is a concrete example of AI's potential in paid media.

• Smarter Targeting: We can identify and reach potential customers with far greater precision. This means less wasted ad spend and more relevant messages for the people who see them.
• Improved Performance: By finding those 'clear winners' for conversions, we can drive better results for your campaigns. More sign-ups, more sales, whatever your goal.
• Proactive Innovation: It highlights Clicky's commitment to adopting new technology early. We’re not waiting for new tools to become standard; we’re actively exploring, testing, and integrating them into our strategies now.

It’s about making sure your budget works as hard as possible, using the best available technology.

What we're doing next

Matt's work here is just the start. We're looking at how we can integrate these kinds of synthetic audience insights more broadly into our paid media strategies. The goal is to make this a standard part of our process for qualifying and refining audiences, especially for new campaigns or when we're looking to break into new markets.

It's about continuous improvement, always pushing to find smarter, more data-driven ways to deliver results.

The world of AI in marketing is moving fast, and we're committed to being at the forefront, testing and applying the tools that genuinely make a difference. We're excited about what this means for our clients' campaign performance moving forward.