Markopolo review – Let AI Run Your Ads

So I’m spending more and more time running PPC ads for my product, Planzer.io. And in this process, I’ve learned how time-consuming it is. A/B testing your Ads. Now, this right here, Markopolo, who has managed to develop a platform which should allow us to test our ads utilising AI and just work a lot faster. But how is the output? Let’s put it to the test.

So here we have dived right into Markopolo. And this is the platform. AI also powers the home page here because if we go down here, you can see some suggested adopted and some suggested to do, based on AI combined with your industry. But what I want to start with in this entire journey is I want to create an ad. I want to attach that ad to a campaign.

I want to see how it’s going with the campaign. And then let’s see the AI suggestions that are coming using Markopolo. So when you need to build an ad, there are two ways of doing it. Either you can use the ad maker or the quick promo. Let’s start with the ad maker.

So here, we just click on the create ad and then choose where you want your ad to show. As you can see right now, Markopolo integrates with Google and Facebook, which opens up for both Instagram and YouTube. So I will go simple, and then I will choose the Facebook image ads. To begin with, we need to create our ad copy. You need to set the language when you create your ad copy.

We need to set the tone here, which I will set as convincing. You can see it has already filled out my product brand name and my product description, and the creativity level. Let’s try and set it to medium and then generate some copies. So on the right side, it is utilising AI to generate text that we can use in our ad. And based on my experience thus far, it is very mixed based on the results you get back, some are good, and some are just completely off.

But here we got some results back, and I’m surprised here. I think this is the best result I’ve seen so far using Markopolo. I could take all of these six and then use them. But here’s the thing, I can only choose one ad text to go with. I would love to take all six and then the A/B test in the end.

But for now, we are only building one ad. So let’s go with the first one here, and we will continue where we now need to create our creativity. Here there are three ways of going around this. You can either upload your own, you can design using the mark editor, or you can design using Canva. So they have an integration directly to Canva where you can just sit and design your ad. So we will take a look at that.

You can see it over here; it’s very simple. We have some templates which will get you started very fast. I will scroll down and see if I can find a template. So I’ve chosen this template here I will just very simple write the product name, and then here we will write something like start being productive today. So now we have our ad.

Of course, I could go around and then change the font, so it matches my style of using Planzer.io in this case. So let’s just do that fast. As you can see here and now, it’s ready. So I’ll press Save. So we now have our image that we can use on the ad.

When I press save, then it pulls it directly into Markopolo. It is now saving the image and then we’ll be able to move on and set up our ad in the next step, where we need to set some very simple elements. We need to give this ad a name. Let’s just call it the first Facebook ad. We need to write the URL which will be shown. This is not the URL you’re sending people to; the call to action will be signing up.

So now I’ll save this ad as finished. So it’s now ready to be combined with a campaign, and setting up a campaign is the next step. So within campaigns, it works more or less the same way. We create a campaign; we choose what platform we want to use, and here I can choose multiple. So, for now, we’ll just use Facebook and Instagram and let’s give it again a campaign name.

It’s called YouTube Video. And here’s the first thing I wish they would change, which is down here, I need to choose a duration. I can’t just choose to let it run forever. You can say, on the other side, that it is a positive thing because A/B testing, in this sense, you want to test within a given period and then compare the results on all the ads within this period. So running it within a fixed period can sometimes be a good idea.

What I want to run this ad for is conversions both on Facebook and Instagram. You can choose to run your ad for many other things like just pure traffic. Video views. Engagement, but if you just have a slight chance of running with conversions, then I will recommend that so you make sure that Facebook and Google, in this case, optimise your ads for more conversions. In the next step where we need to choose our ads, and as you can see down here, we have the ad we made before. Now, if I want to A/B test, I can also choose the other ad I’ve previously created.

So now I have two ads. I can also choose to create one, but for now, I’ll go with these two and then move to the last step here. On the last step here, you can see that they have automatically chosen the date range for me, even though we just set it before. And then, they set a minimum budget required for this period, and they set $140. So down here, you can see my two ads which will be A/B tested against each other.

So I will just add my URL here for sign-up. And the thing here is that the pixel event type needs to align with what we said before. So as you saw before, my call to action was to sign up, but here it has chosen purchase. It would be a nice add-on if you automatically choose the one I wrote before. Or maybe they just only gave me these options as a call to action.

But let’s choose the website registration right here. So now we are ready. One more thing we need to do is that we need to select an audience. And here, Markopolo has developed something extraordinary. So here, you can set up audiences, as you can see here.

Or you can create a new audience. When you create a new audience, I recommend you go with the preset audience, which is prebuilt from Markopolo. If you want to go completely custom, choose the custom audience. But for now, we will choose the preset one. And I want to build an audience for freelancers.

The platform is Facebook; in this case, we keep the audience type as preset because that was what we said before. And then going down, we have to choose some elements still. I will choose all genders and age groups, and I will just let them be. For the location, let me set Denmark in this case. And now, we need to search relevant keywords for this specific campaign.

As you can see already, it has suggested me some keywords based on AI and based on what I’ve already added. So the planner and scheduler here are perfect. And the same with the productivity software. If you want to add more keywords, you can also do that here by simply just searching for the specific keywords. Scrolling further down, we have now reached the Facebook Pixel step, and I think you need to ignore this one because I have already installed my Facebook Pixel, but it is telling me that it’s not installed.

And that can be an issue with maybe the crawler that checks on my website or something else. But now to the exciting thing. Down here, you choose your audience preset. And an audience preset can be everything from power users to brand new users. It can be former power users.

And so on. So here they have taken ten different categories to put users in, and based on these categories, you are now exposing your ad to only this group of people. And what’s interesting is that Planzer.io is still a relatively new product. So I will need power users for this specific campaign because power users, as it says here, are early adopters, and those are the people I want to target with my campaign. And this is interesting.

You can also choose Happy Campers and become more engaged based on your campaign, but for now, I’ll choose power users. And now we’re ready to save this audience. So this audience is now saved. So the next time I need to use it, it is ready to be used. I don’t have to go through all the steps again.

So, as you can see, we are now back-setting up the campaign, and the audience has been chosen. Even though we have two ads which are fighting against each other to be the one to perform the best, then we can A/B test even further. So here we can A/B test audiences. So, we are A/B testing campaigns and can also A/B test audiences. This means that you are adding an extra layer to the way that you A/B test and you can A/B test so many different variables in this way and I just think it’s so interesting to see. So now it’s ready.

So let’s launch this campaign. So right now, Markopolo is creating these campaigns for me on both Facebook and Google. If I had chosen Google, I would only choose Facebook to run this. So now the campaign is down here, it is running, it is saying YouTube video because that was what I called it. We can then expand it here to see the start and end dates; we can pause it.

But here’s the thing we can’t go in and manually optimise this campaign. To do that, you have to go into the Facebook ad business Manager to optimise it in the way you want to maybe tweak the different elements because here I can see the different ads. Another thing I’m missing here is some more insights on how the different ads are doing because with our ad running now, we can go to the dashboard to see some statistics. These are statistics on how it’s going. But as you saw before, I can’t see the specific ads here either, and I’m missing a step further. I can’t see conversions, and right now, my campaign is running to optimise conversions, meaning I get the most conversions out of it.

But here it’s not showing conversions. I can see it in a grid view or a list view, but I can’t see my conversions, and I think that they should add that even if I click to view more details, I will still be unable to see my conversions. But I can see elements like clicks, impressions, click-through rates, and just the everyday things that we can also see, of course, within Facebook and within Google Ads here it’s maybe just showing a little bit easier for us to read. As I mentioned, you can also set up a quick promo. And a quick promo is an easier and faster way to set up a campaign.

So here, we just choose a campaign name and what platform we want to target. For this, I will choose Instagram. And what it’s now doing is that it’s pulling ads in from Facebook. So you can see all these combined ads and Instagram posts. So I can easily just choose this post here and then start running a campaign for it.

Again, go down, choose my audience, and then I can just finish and launch. So that’s an easy way of how you can very fast set up an ad and just start testing it out. The last thing I want to show you is Nucleus. When you have started using Markopolo for some time, you will get suggestions based on AI, just as you saw before when we were on the homepage. So here it will tell you how you can optimise your ads from very specific angles.

It can be anything from trying to create a new ad, maybe creating an ad with this specific language or something third. It’s a really interesting suggestion engine, and I’m looking forward to following this to see how good the recommendations are. Because if we go back to the home page, you can see the recommendations here are to create a video traffic engagement ad objectives, make an ad down here, and make an audience. So these are very generic suggestions, and I’m hoping that Nucleus would at least give us more detailed suggestions based on our AI.

Now, I like products that go the extra mile and build a modern UI that’s easy to use.

Markopolo’s UI is not necessarily bad, but they could make it more modern. With that being said, their core functionality does bring value to the table. You can very fast set up an A/B test and test both ads but also audiences, even though we are having issues with seeing conversions. And we can’t optimise our ads using Markopolo, but based on my experience using Markopolo, I want to give them three and a half stars. There is some potential here, but they have a lot of essential elements they need to work on.

That’s my review.