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Whether you’re new to paid advertising or a pay-per-click (PPC) veteran, Google Smart Campaigns can be your best friend. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence technology at the heart of Google Ads make PPC marketing an entirely different beast — one that may be easier to tame in 2023.
You may already be familiar with Smart Bidding, which is a Google AI-led bidding strategy you can use in any campaign type. By comparison, Google Smart Campaigns demand even less of you. In fact, you don’t even have to provide Ad Groups — Google can do that by itself.
There’s a lot to love about Google Smart Campaigns. Let’s find out what they can do for you.
You can use Google Smart Campaigns in three separate categories:
The table below gives you the quick insights you need to understand what’s possible with each type of Smart campaign.
Google Smart Campaigns are ideal for small to medium businesses that lack the time or expertise to manage their Google Ads account properly.
If you have some more experience with PPC advertising, you may be more comfortable with standard campaigns.
Google Smart Campaigns have the edge over standard PPC ad campaigns in several ways.
Google Smart Campaigns rely on solid data sources — the more data you have, the better your results will be. At the very least, you should have data from the last 30 days.
What’s more, is the data must meet the following basic requirements, depending on which type of campaign you want to run:
Smart Search campaign:
Smart Display campaigns:
Smart Shopping campaigns:
So far, so good, right?
Well, it’s not all plain sailing. Here are a few pitfalls to be mindful of when you’re using Google Smart Campaigns:
Sometimes, your Google Smart Campaigns may not work correctly. In this scenario, several possible problems could be to blame.
Google Smart Campaigns need at least 100 conversions on the Search network or 50 on the Display network. If you don’t provide Google with enough data, your campaigns won’t stand much chance.
If your remarketing tags are inactive on your websites, Google Ads can’t collect the data it needs to feed your smart campaigns.
You must enable conversion tracking to gather enough data. If it’s not enabled, your conversion-based bidding strategies won’t work.
Make sure you have enough budget to run your campaign. Set your daily amount and check in regularly to ensure it isn’t running low.
If your business category is not trending as high as current market trends and search behaviors, then it’s possible that Google is struggling to find relevant search terms for your Google Smart Campaigns.
By now, you’re probably interested in trying out Google Smart Campaigns. However, you’re sure to have a few concerns or queries. Here are some common questions about Google Smart Campaigns (and the answers you need!)
If you run several campaigns for the same products (or groups of products), then the Smart Shopping campaigns will always take priority over standard Shopping campaigns or Display campaigns.
So, if you advertise a black leather jacket in a standard campaign and a smart campaign, the ads in the smart campaign will get shown first. You should pause the other campaigns to save your budget and to let the smart campaign have a better chance of maximizing its reach.
Google Smart Campaigns can save you a lot of time and money. Better yet, they drive better results thanks to the AI and automation that guides your creative, bidding, and targeting.
Studies suggest that PPC advertisers who use Smart campaigns on the Display network generate a 20% increase in conversion rates.
With Google Smart Display Campaigns, you can set your Target CPA at $200 or less. Anything higher will trigger a warning message, and you will incur charges for the higher CPA amount.
Ideally, you should look to reduce your Target CPA to less than $200 to optimize your budget.
If you don’t have a lot of data, try starting with the Maximize Clicks setting. Over time, as you gather more data, you can shift to Manual CPC (cost per click). When you don’t have the data or PPC experience, it’s hard to predict the max CPC rate, so aiming for more clicks is a wise move in the beginning.
You should make small incremental increases of about 10-25%. So, for example, if your maximum daily budget is $40, you could increase it to $50 to discover more keyword opportunities or reach a wider audience. Just keep an eye on it over time to gauge performance.
If you aren’t hitting your projected targets for conversion rates, try experimenting with different bidding strategies. When you have products with similar profit margins, you can run the Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) setting. However, if your products demand different targets for ROAS, it may be best to create separate campaigns for each product.
Click through rate (CTR) is a crucial metric in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Thankfully, Google smart campaigns can help you maximize your CTR, which is good news for your campaign goals, and your budget.
Low CTR is bad news for your campaign goals. If you can’t get enough people through your marketing funnel, then you’re going to end up with little to no sales. Furthermore, a low CTR can lead to higher cost per click (CPC) bids and low-quality score — both of which can cause wasted spend.
In this article, we’ll perform a Google Smart Campaigns review to give you a better understanding of the importance of CTR, and how smart campaigns can help you get your PPC campaigns on the road to success.
When running a smart campaign, having a high CTR can have many benefits, including:
Here are some reasons why your smart campaign’s CTRs may experience a nosedive:
You could fix every other problem with your campaign and still not raise your CTR if your budget isn’t sufficient.
Consider the bidding competition for your keyword in your business category based on the search phrases. What may look like a reasonable ad budget for a low/medium keyword won’t hold its own for a high competition keyword.
You have to know the competitive level of your keywords to decide the size of your Google Ads budget.
When running smart campaigns, you’ll notice some ads aren’t bringing in enough CTR to justify running them. This could be a result of a number of reasons.
These ads may have been performing well just a few days/weeks ago, but have slowed down due to a change in search trends. With the COVID-19 health problem taking up mind and media space, certain winning ads may not fare well right now.
For instance, a travel agent business running holiday vacation search ads during a lockdown will get a low CTR. People are more worried about their health and jobs at the moment. Vacations aren’t a priority right now.
So pause such campaigns. You don’t have to delete these ads. They aren’t bad, they’re just not relevant now.
Another reason for this sudden drop in CTR could just be scheduling. Optimize your ad campaign by making sure your ads only show during peak CTR hours.
Another factor that contributes to low CTR is the placement of your ads in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The ads at the top receive the lion’s share of clicks. With that in mind, if the majority of your ads display lower down in SERPs, your CTR will be significantly lower.
Therefore, it’s crucial to get your ads in the top position. You do that by increasing your maximum CPC or by focusing on improving the quality score for your targeted keyword. If you have done both and nothing changes, it’s best to pause the keyword.
When your landing page is live, Google will crawl and evaluate that page.
If your page isn’t exactly related to the targeted keyword, your CPC will rise. You may also lose ad positions, which causes a drop in CTR. Your landing page has to be relevant to the targeted keyword and efficient for a good user experience.
Here are some things to know when building a landing page.
Watch out for seasonal keywords. Your low CTR could be a result of low tides and not some fault you need to fix. Hiking won’t be as popular in the winter months as it would be during the summer. All you need to do is stop the struggle. Pause it and wait for the right time.
Mobile use is always on the rise, so there’s a good chance that most of your target market will interact with your ads and landing page via mobile devices.
If your landing page isn’t mobile-friendly, you risk getting a low quality score, which leads to low CTR. So when you’re making your landing page mobile-friendly, make sure it’s fast, easy to navigate, and responsive.
Now, when you do a Google smart campaigns review, you can gain valuable insights on how to improve your campaigns. Here are some ways you can increase CTR:
Think About Your Audience’s Location
It’s advisable to target your potential customers using their search phrases. But when you’ve done that successfully yet get a sudden drop in CTR, you might want to add locations to your keywords.
These locations should be chosen based on the concentration of your target market. If you sell blue shoes to Londoners, it’s expected to have targeted keywords like blue shoes in London.
Also, try to know how your prospects see your product/service. Assuming you sell blue Italian shoes. Your customers would search with keywords blue Italian shoes and not just blue shoes.
Including Italian in your keyword, blue shoes will open your ad and product to a targeted market, which leads to increased CTR.
Show What Makes Your Business Unique
Remember, you have competition and prospects won’t click your ads if they don’t stand out. To do that, your ads must have unique offers. Are there special items on the menu as a restaurant? Does your e-commerce store have a large selection of products?
If so, then you should say these things in your ads. That’s how you persuade prospects to click your ads instead of the competition.
Show Prices, Deals, and Exclusives in your Ads
In the same vein, coupons, price deals, exclusives, and similar promotions should be highlighted. Remember, the searcher on the other end of your ads is hunting for a deal. If you have, don’t wait to reveal in the landing page, give it to them straight away.
That could be the only reason they look your way and eventually buy from you. See the landing page as a place to show details to what the searcher wants.
Let Your Customers Know What To Do
When writing your copy, use power words that make searchers click the link. Some of these words include active phrases like, make an appointment, call now, and buy now. When you give your customers directions on what to do, they follow. A strong and clear CTA gives prospects the nudge they need to take the next step.
Your Ads Should Contain Relevant Search Phrases
Another way to increase CTR is to use phrases closely related to the target keyword in your description. This will let other searchers who use these closely related phrases to know your ad is also meant for them.
Your Website and Campaigns Should Align
Your website should align with your ad content. This shows professionalism and instills confidence in the minds of potential buyers.
If your ads say you offer roofing services, then your website should be about roofing services. If you mislead traffic, they will quickly leave, which can lead to low quality scores, high CPC, and falling CTR.
So, with our Google smart campaign review done, you should now understand the value of CTR in your paid advertising campaign. A low CTR is a red flag that should not be ignored, and a high CTR is a good sign that your campaign is on track.
However, don’t rest on your laurels. With the advances in technology, you can make use of Google smart campaigns to optimize your campaigns and ads, which is sure to lead to higher profits and reduced costs.
Google’s Smart Campaigns isn’t a new tool.
This addition to Google Ads has been around for a while now, helping users make the most out of their Google Ad campaigns and business strategy.
There are big benefits to using Smart Campaigns. You can use this savvy tool to advertise your website on Google, write a personalized advertisement or help your ad appear at the top of Google searches.
However, there are a few drawbacks of Smart Campaigns that may restrict advertisers from using this tool effectively.
As an advertiser yourself, whether or not you should integrate Smart Campaigns into your strategy can be a crucial decision for your overall success. Despite its perks, there are a number of reasons why marketers may not want to take it on.
This has become clear from the fact that only a limited subset of Google Ad users have opted to use it.
Is there something fishy going on? What are the Smart Campaign issues you need to know about it?
Let’s find out.
What are some of these potential drawbacks of Smart Campaigns?
From afar, the tool seems helpful enough for advertisers. It’s a smart platform, offering helpful abilities to highlight your selling points and attract customers.
However, upon further inspection, we may begin to see the tool for what it really is.
This may be a top concern for many advertisers.
Google Ads are provided by Google to help run your advertisements as needed, however, Smart Campaigns leave all the control up to Google.
While Google operates everything, it begs the questions: is Google giving themselves more of a leg-up in the process than your business?
For example, Google may make you spend more of your budget compared to what your manual campaign may require, however in return, this could result in fewer conversions.
A certain amount of data is required to run machine learning algorithms properly. Since Google Ads Smart Campaigns rely on AI and machine learning, it may take a while to get your campaign to the level where you can actually choose this option.
In fact, Google suggests users have at least 50 conversions on the display network and 100 conversions from search ads in the past 30 days in order to be eligible for the Smart Campaign tool.
So, if advertisers optimize their campaigns for 100 conversions, then why would they need Smart Campaigns anyways?
While technology continues to evolve, automaton should be expected to provide perfect results every time. This is especially true when you’re in the first stage of the PPC life cycle.
By leaving campaigns up to Google, you run the risk of losing the ability to tweak aspects of the campaign that may have given you a competitive edge.
Leaving the work up to automation means needing to sacrifice some control over your campaigns. While automation may be the reason why you’re drawn to Smart Campaigns in the first place, taking a closer look at what that change means may sway your decision.
You’ll learn that Smart Display requires a combination of all targeting methods within regular display campaigns.
Some of the targeting smart display uses are:
The campaign targets and tests all these uses to discover which singular use or combination works best for offer conversions at the campaign’s set CPA target.
If Google finds that one of these targeting methods are performing poorly, it will actually switch focus to other more effective methods. This targeting trial may lead to a waste of your budget.
If your Display campaign isn’t performing the way you had intended, it may be because of problems with your bidding, ads, targeting, remarketing, conversion tracking, or campaign settings.
One of the ways to fix this issue is by setting a higher CPA target in order to see your ad in the ranking position you were expecting. However, this change involves bidding more money on the advertisement, and therefore affecting your overall budget once again.
While automation is an exciting movement towards the future of technology, other facets of Smart Campaigns’ technology may need more work.
Simple tasks such as placement exclusions still need attention in order for this Google tool to be fully functioning and effective for all advertisers. While this may be simply a lack of focus in specific areas, it could also simply mean the technology needs a bit more time to fully mature.
Google’s Smart campaigns are now available in all 150 countries. They make it easy for small businesses to get their ads up and running in less than 15 minutes.
You can use Smart campaigns to reach even more people at the right time. Google Ads are introducing features to help you sign up from any device, stick out on Google Maps, see your results right on Google Search, and control when your advertisements appear. In this article, we’ll look at what Smart campaigns are and how they can help you reach more customers.
If you want to know more about all the updates in Google Ads, check out this link. In this article, we’ll focus only on the latest updates in Smart campaigns.
Google’s Smart campaigns are now available in all 150 countries. They make it easy for small businesses to get their ads up and running in less than 15 minutes.
You can use Smart campaigns to reach even more people at the right time. Google Ads are introducing features to help you sign up from any device, stick out on Google Maps, see your results right on Google Search, and control when your advertisements appear. In this article, we’ll look at what Smart campaigns are and how they can help you reach more customers.
If you want to know more about all the updates in Google Ads, check out this Google Ads Updates. In this article, we’ll focus only on the latest updates in Smart campaigns.
Here’s how Smart campaigns can help you reach more customers:
You can sign up for Smart campaigns and run ads directly from your Google Ads mobile app. This makes the process faster and easier, allowing you to start advertising straightway. However, in-app signup is presently available in limited countries, including the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Japan with more countries to follow
With the Google Ads mobile app, you can track your Smart campaigns while on the move with your smartphone. You can monitor your ad campaigns in real-time, go through recommendations to optimize performance, and implement measures quickly and easily.
You can use Google Ads mobile app to:
Did you know, more than one billion people use Google Maps every month to see what’s around them, look for companies, and find directions? You can help your company stick out on Google Maps during this crucial time by showing a noticeable, square-shaped pin.
This pin can help you emphasize particular services like order pick-up, delivery, or any exclusive products or products. Your ad appears in Google search results whenever users look for businesses similar to yours. Your ad appears directly on Google Maps or under the search results.
You can include your company’s address and contact number in your advertisement as well. You only have to pay when someone clicks your ad.
You can edit or cancel your ad at any time. Google Ads wants to send more users your way as customers start visiting businesses in-person again.
Through September 2020, Google Ads isn’t charging advertisers for any clicks, calls, or sales from Promoted pins. It has started rolling out Promoted pins to Smart campaign advertisers with a Google My Business (GMB) profile. It is expected to be fully available in the coming weeks.
Here are a few tips to better optimize your GMB Profile to reach more users:
Google wants to help small businesses survive during the lockdown. It’s a big help if your business has taken a blow during COVID-19 and Google is supporting during this pandemic. But it’s an even bigger help if you’re presently running Smart campaigns while your competition isn’t.
This means you can make the most of the free pins while they can’t. Promoted pins are an excellent way to reach out to more than a billion people on Google Maps.
Google Ads has made its reporting features more accessible to make it easier for you to check your ad status. You can quickly see the status of your Smart campaigns, monitor their performance, and observe how your ads appear in front of your prospective customers.
All you have to do is sign into your Google Ads account and search for “My Ads” or “Google Ads.”
Here are some advantages of using reports in Google Ads:
The Google Ads platform provides small businesses with more control over keywords to reach prospective consumers. With keyword themes (formerly “products and services”), you let Google Ads know what your brand provides, and the platform would show your ad to prospective buyers looking for related keywords.
As a result, your ads reach more of the right people, and you can save time in the process. You can also tailor or eliminate keyword themes, which means you’re always in control.
Follow these tips to build a comprehensive keyword list:
Smart campaigns are intended to work with GMB listing for ad creation images, location addresses, and more. For brands that don’t have a website, Google will develop and host auto-generated and optimized landing pages that’ll match the ad creative and have in-built reporting.
These campaigns allow marketers to target their ads to users and placements that are most likely to drive conversions for their brand without needing any set targeting. All you have to do is choose a budget and upload some ad assets, and then Google manages the rest of the work. Smart campaigns allow you to reach users you’ve never reached before.
Google is the master of control. While this comes in handy sometimes, it also presents the possibility of the giant disabling the opt-out option for users in order to obtain maximum control.
For this reason and more, you need to come prepared with a tool that provides insight on what Google is doing to your Google Ads account, and whether it’s fulfilling its claim on providing you with a highly-optimized, effective campaign.
PPCexpo’s extensive library of reports allows you to run any report according to your specific needs, enabling you to receive a detailed analysis of the outcome.
Having a reliable reporting tool at hand is an absolute must for advertisers. With these changes in motion, keeping an eye on everything will keep you in charge and ahead of the game.
Google Smart Campaigns are a powerful tool in the PPC manager’s toolkit. When used carefully, they can save time, money, and a lot of frustration. They do require a lot of data, and a keen eye to monitor their performance. Still, Smart Campaigns offer a lot of promising opportunities, making them worth a try, no matter how much experience you have in PPC advertising.
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