How to Maximize Google Smart Shopping Campaigns

In the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, it’s getting easier than ever before to sell products online. Advertisers have a ton of strategies to consider for marketing and targeting, but one of the most effective tactics in modern e-commerce is the use of Google Smart shopping campaigns.

This won’t just save you time, but it also can minimize any wasted spend, ensuring you get much more bang for your buck.

In this article, we’ll explore the current best practices and provide a host of optimization tips to help you make the most out of Google Smart shopping.

What is Google Smart Shopping?

Google Smart Shopping is an automated bidding process in Google Ads. The platform uses AI to automatically optimize your shopping campaign, making adjustments according to your budget and goals so that you generate the maximum number of conversions.

Google Smart Shopping campaigns develop creative ads by using the existing product feed you have in your Ads account. Once you set up your advertising campaign budget and goals, Google takes care of the rest.

Studies indicate that for the same cost as a manually-run campaign, some advertisers have generated a 20% boost in conversion rates with Google Smart Shopping.

How Does Google Smart Shopping Work?

Google’s AI algorithm uses whatever content and images you already have in your product list feed. It then creates new ads for your products and leverages machine learning to optimize your ads.

According to Google, this process of ad development and optimization takes around 15 days. By that time, the AI algorithm has collected enough data to maximize your return on investment (ROI).

With data insights in mind about how ad performance, the machine learning-based system automatically increases or decreases your keyword bids and advertising budget so you can earn more conversions.

Basic Requirements for Smart Shopping Campaigns

Before you can start using these specialist campaigns, there are a few things you need:

1. A Google Ads account
2. A Google Merchant Center account.
3. A product data feed uploaded on your Merchant Center account. This provides the data for Google Ads to create ad descriptions.
4. Conversion-tracking. This must be set up with transaction-specific values, and you also need to install a remarketing tag on your website.
5. An existing audience of at least 100 users.

11 Optimization tips for Google Smart Campaigns

Once you have everything set up, you can get started. However, don’t just leave everything to Google. Sure, the AI system is sound, but you can always do a little to help the cause.

Here are 11 tips to ensure Google Smart Shopping delivers excellent results.

1. Be Mindful of Data Integrity

The success of this strategy hinges on the quality of data at hand. Google needs sufficient data about the historical performance of key performance indicators (KPIs). The more data that is available, the better it will be for your ROI. Also, it’s crucial that this data is complete and accurate, with little to no anomalies that could skew the AI’s decision-making.

2. Refer to Past Data for Better Budget Allocation

The platform will try to get as many conversions as possible within your set budget. Analyze the historical data to see what you have been paying until now, and set your budget according to that.

3. Target All Products

Use one single campaign to target all your available products. This improves performance, and it will also make it easier to compare data from one product to the next.

4. Use Categorization

With product categorization, you can narrow down the product ad targeting to offer it to specific audiences. This helps Google Ads optimize your ads to be served to the most relevant audience.

5. Keep Tabs on Targeting Exclusions

Google Smart Shopping campaigns utilize multiple targeting parameters to find optimized combinations that enhance audience targeting.

If Google Ads discovers a low-performing targeting method, it will stop spending on it as it switches its focus to more effective methods. While this sounds great for your budget, it can lead to a problem. This switch may cut out audience groups that are best suited to your product.

You should keep a close watch on the exclusions that Google creates in your campaign to ensure that it never excludes valuable areas, such as your main geo-location areas.

6. Polish Your Standard Feed Optimization

Google will generate product descriptions for your ads using information from the existing product list feed. To ensure better automated shopping ads, make sure you have optimized your titles, descriptions, images, and pricing.

7. Quality Score

Quality Score is the metric Google uses to rank ads. Google considers many factors, including ad relevance, the expected clickthrough rate (CTR), and the user experience. You should improve these aspects, and strive to create more relevant ads for your target audience.

8. Experiment With Your Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS)

It’s good to have a target ROAS. However, if you set a ROAS figure in your account, it may hamper your ability to spend your budget in full. By removing this or reducing it, you may find that Google Ads Smart Shopping campaigns can generate a higher conversion value.

9. Reduce Customer Journey Steps

This is a customer-centric era. A lot of consumers don’t have the patience to navigate confusing, long-winded sales processes. By reducing the number of digital touchpoints, you can offer a smoother, shorter route to conversion. This will reduce your bounce rate and abandoned cart rate.

10. Beware of ‘Landing Page Not Found’ Errors

This is a critical error that will not only cause your bounce rate to soar, but it will ultimately damage your brand’s credibility. By staying on top of issues like outdated links, broken URLs, and server crashes, you can minimize this problem, so that prospects don’t lose faith in your site or business.

11. Always Be Testing

With Google Smart Shopping, you should be testing out different settings. Try running various campaigns with different settings to help determine factors that drive success or failure.

Performance Analysis is Not an Option

You may think Google Smart Shopping is an excuse to set and forget.

It’s not.

While Google Ads can take care of a lot of tasks for you, it’s vital that you remain vigilant with your data analysis and testing.

Check out the PPCexpo reports library to get actionable insights on your data now, so that you can help Google create better, more effective ads for your campaign.