The Google Smart Shopping Campaigns Crash Course

Thanks to machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), selling products online is becoming increasingly easier to do for you, and unfortunately, for your competitors as well. While other bidding strategies are available for a customized campaign, Google Smart Shopping Campaigns saves you both time and money.

When paired with modern pay-per-click (PPC) marketing and proper targeting approaches, these campaigns can be your gateway to true advertising success.

In this article, we’ll outline the optimization tips and best practices you need to run shopping campaigns like a champ.

What is Google Smart Shopping?

A Smart Shopping Campaign is a Google-automated bidding process. By using ML and AI algorithms, Google automatically optimizes and adjusts your shopping campaign in order to drive conversions.

All advertisers need to do is set their budget and goals. Smart technology does the rest: from setting your keywords bids to performing strategic ad placements for better audience targeting.

Here’s an interesting fact:

During testing, advertisers that used Google Smart Shopping Campaigns found a near 20% increase in conversion rates. The system works, all you need to do is understand how it works.

How Does Smart Shopping Work?

Smart Shopping uses your existing product in order to produce creative ads by itself. That means, if you’re already running a shopping campaign, the amount of work you put into creating a Smart Shopping Campaign is next to nothing.

All you need to do is set your budget and objective.

By using the content and images from your existing product list feed, Smart Shopping produces ads for each product. Then, through the power of ML technology, it optimizes each ad.

According to Google, the advertisement development and optimization process will take about 15 days. Once completed, Google’s algorithms take the next steps required to maximize your return on investment (ROI), based on previous data and information.

Main Requirements for Smart Shopping Campaigns

While Smart Shopping is mostly a cinch to use and work with, it does have some requirements before you dig in:

1. Users must own a Google Ads account and a Google Merchant Centre account.
2. On the Merchant Centre account, you must have product data feed uploaded. This is where Google Ads gathers data for completing ad descriptions.
3. Users must set up conversion tracking with transaction-specific values.
4. As a user, you must have an audience of at least 100 users.
5. You must have an installed remarketing tag on your website to enable dynamic remarketing.

11 Things to Watch Out For with Google Smart Campaigns

Now that we understand the full scope of Google Smart Shopping Campaigns, let’s see how to kickstart your advertising efforts. Use these optimization tips to get the most out of these campaigns.

1. Data Integrity Matters

Smart Campaigns are designed to optimize and bid, based on previous data of past KPI’s. This algorithm works to optimize campaigns only if it has acquired enough precious data from various campaign elements. Depending on a product’s past performance, Google increases or decreases the bids.

Once the algorithm analyzes performance data, it adjusts various elements of your budget accordingly. The more data it collects, the more Google can optimize your campaign.

2. Budget Allocation

Smart Campaigns maximize conversions within a set budget.

That being said, it’s good practice to set your budget by using the past analysis of costs within standard Google Ads campaigns that you’ve been paying. Make sure to not set it too low, as this will result in missing out on real exposure for your audience.

3. Target All Your Products

Make sure you target every available product you have within one campaign for the best possible performance outcome. This technique helps make performance comparison extremely simple as well.

4. Use Product Categorization

We recommend that you use product categorization to narrow down product advertising targeting for specific audiences. This will help Google optimize your ads in order to target the most relevant audience.

5. Experiment with Targeting Exclusions

Smart campaigns will combine different types of targeting parameters in order to create a campaign that’s more focused on a specific audience. For example, it may target mobile users in London on weekday evenings, or desktop users in New York between 9 am and 1 pm.

However, there’s a problem with this.

If Google sees that one of these methods isn’t performing well, it will switch its focus to a more effective method. This may exclude areas that best suit your product. Therefore, it’s best to keep track of the different exclusions Google creates. Also, make sure to never exclude the main geographical locations that you do business in. Otherwise, you will not be making good use of your budget.

6. Tweak for Standard Feed Optimization

Feed optimization includes pricing, using your full name, description, and better quality images. Google will generate product descriptions depending on your product list. By optimizing your descriptions, titles, and images, you’ll be working with Google’s best practices.

7. Use Quality Score as Guiding Star

Google uses this score to assign ad rankings to every ad. This score depends on ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected clickthrough rate (CTR). So, make sure these elements are fully optimized to earn a better quality score, and in turn, get your ad in front of a wider audience.

8. Beware Insufficient Data

Insufficient data availability can be deceiving since ML makes decisions based on past element performance. This means that sometimes, it lacks the ability to predict whether an element would perform better under certain conditions. If your data isn’t purified, it may be draining your budget, which in turn, limits your reach.

9. Customer Journey Steps

Your visitor’s journey towards conversions must be quick and easy. Too many steps tend to create difficulty, resulting in an increased bounce rate. Most visitors abandon their online cart simply because of the lengthy forms required. Minimize the information you ask of your visitors before they check out.

10. Don’t Ignore “Landing Page Not Found”

This is a serious error. This not only increases your bounce rate but it also damages your brand credibility. This may occur for many reasons including broken URLs, server issues, or outdated links. Make sure to keep on top of these issues and update your links.

11. Always Be Testing

Testing is vital for optimization. Make sure you continue to test several campaigns by trying out different settings and gauging the impact on performance.

Once you have enabled Google Smart Shopping Campaigns, measure your campaign performance, compared to standard shopping remarketing. This will help you understand the factors in your campaign that have changed.

Performance Analysis is Key

Google Ads success relies on optimization. With Google Smart Shopping campaigns, the burden is lifted, and automation does a lot of the hard work for you.

But you shouldn’t take your eye off the ball completely.

You can conduct performance analysis with our easily digestible iPDF reports, which will help you stay on top of your Google Smart Shopping Campaigns.

These reports provide a drilled down analysis on your core KPIs for any Google campaign. Check out the Account Audit Report from PPCexpo to gain actionable insights and optimize your campaign for better results.