Google Smart Campaigns – The Ultimate Guide

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 2021.

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.

Where You Can Use Smart Campaigns

You can use Google Smart Campaigns in three separate categories:

• Smart Search Campaigns.
• Smart Display Campaigns.
• Smart Shopping Campaigns.

The table below gives you the quick insights you need to understand what’s possible with each type of Smart campaign.

How are Google Smart Campaigns different from Standard Ads?

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 Requirements

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:

• Your Search Network must have a minimum of 100 conversions.
• Your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) must not be too low.

Smart Display campaigns:

• 50 conversions on the Display Network.
• Your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) must not be too low.

Smart Shopping campaigns:

• Users must own a Google Ads account and a Google Merchant Center account.
• On the Merchant Center account, you must upload your product data feed. This is where Google Ads gathers data for completing ad descriptions.
• Users must set-up conversion tracking with transaction-specific values.
• You must have an audience of at least 100 users.
• You must install a remarketing tag on your website to enable dynamic remarketing.

Learn More: Master the Art of Dynamic Remarketing

Challenges in Google Smart 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:

Smart Search Campaigns

• You can’t use remarketing with a smart search campaign.
• You can’t edit match types manually. This may change in the future, but for now, it is handled and applied automatically by Google Ads as needed.
• You can’t employ a negative keywords list for your search phrases.
• You can’t define your custom audience based on interests for your smart campaign.
• You can set your maximum budget, but you won’t know which automated bid strategy Google will apply during ad rank.
• If you want to duplicate campaigns and settings, it will start a fresh new account, so there’s no guarantee it will replicate the same results to date.

Smart Display Campaign

• Due to its black-box nature, advertisers can’t choose the targeting settings. This may result in your ads being shown to irrelevant users.
• Similarly, you can’t get insights into the performance data of your creative assets, so you won’t know which images or ad copy elements are performing well.
• You can’t use negative keywords lists.
• You can’t use settings like the delivery method or device targeting.
• You can’t manually target your audience based on interest.
• If you don’t use placement exclusion, you might get poor ad placement in Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

Smart Shopping Campaign

• You can’t use negative keywords lists.
• You can’t use device targeting.
• You can’t use bid adjustments.
• You can’t use custom location targeting. You can set the country, but it’s not possible to narrow your focus to a specific region.
• You can’t schedule your smart shopping campaigns according to your needs.

Learn More: Your Go-To Tips and Strategies for Google Shopping Campaigns

5 Reasons Why Your Smart Campaign Is Not Working

Sometimes, your Google Smart Campaigns may not work correctly. In this scenario, several possible problems could be to blame.

Not Enough Data

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.

Inactive Remarketing Tags

If your remarketing tags are inactive on your websites, Google Ads can’t collect the data it needs to feed your smart campaigns.

Conversion Tracking

You must enable conversion tracking to gather enough data. If it’s not enabled, your conversion-based bidding strategies won’t work.

Budget

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.

Business Category

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.

6 Common Questions About 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 execute a Smart Shopping campaign and a standard shopping campaign at the same time, will the Smart campaign take priority?

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.

Now that Google Smart Campaigns exist, do I need to bother with regular campaigns?

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.

What is the CPA limit for Smart Display Campaigns?

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.

Should you go with Maximize Clicks or Manual CPC when you’re starting with Standard Shopping campaigns?

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.

When increasing your budget on a smart campaign, what is a good % increase that won’t ruin the campaign?

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.

What if you aren’t hitting your conversion targets in a Smart Google Shopping campaign?

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.

Google Smart Campaigns Review: How can You Check why CTR is Dropping?

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.

3 Benefits of High CTRs

When running a smart campaign, having a high CTR can have many benefits, including:

• It’s an indicator of success – a high CTR implies you have configured your PPC campaign correctly, and the audience targeting is good.
• Improved quality score – This influences your CPC, which makes your ad campaign more profitable.
• Guidance for optimization – When you’re ad testing, CTRs let you know which ads are relevant to your audience and targeted location, if CTR is not appearing high then its time to think over it and make some changes This is how you optimize your ad campaign to get the most sales or leads.

10 Reasons for Low CTR in Your PPC Campaign

Here are some reasons why your smart campaign’s CTRs may experience a nosedive:

1. Low Budget

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 ad budget.

2. You’re Running Irrelevant Campaigns

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.

3. Ad Scheduling Needs Optimization

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.

4. Ad Placement is Impacting CTR

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.

5. Low Quality Landing Pages

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.

• If your landing page doesn’t load reasonably fast, people can lose patience and leave. Those who stay may become suspicious, which leads to low sales.
• Your landing page should match your targeted keywords. People aren’t going to change their intent depending on the content of your landing page. Keep the audience in mind, and write tailored content around the target keywords to attract their attention.
• The homepage isn’t a good landing page for the same reason above. There are just too many targeted keywords bringing in prospects with different levels of awareness.
• Your landing page should contain your keywords. This sounds like a no-brainer, but many people get lost in writing persuasive copy and forget about search engine optimization (SEO). Google could detect a drop in traffic and reduce the landing page’s quality score.
• Don’t flip-flop on your page content. You increase the chances of showing an irrelevant copy to users.

6. You Aren’t Paying Attention to Seasonal and Current Trends

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.

7. Your Website Isn’t Mobile Friendly

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.

How to Increase CTR?

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.

6 Problems advertisers should know about Google Ads Smart Campaigns

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.

6 Smart Campaigns Shortcomings

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.

1. Conflict of Interests

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.

2. Restrictions are Included

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?

3. The Level of Risk Involved

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.

4. Smart Targeting has the Potential to be Wasteful

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:

• Similar Audiences
• Remarketing
• Topics
• Keywords
• Placements
• Demographic
• Interest categories

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.

5. You May Need to Set a High CPA Target to Rank

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.

6. Technology May Still Need to Mature

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.

All You Need to Know About New Changes in Google’s 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.

Top 4 Benefits of Updates in Smart Campaigns

Here’s how Smart campaigns can help you reach more customers:

1. You Can Sign Up Directly Via a Mobile App

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:

• Track your ad performance and campaign metrics like conversions, impressions, and clicks.
• Quickly update your campaigns, bids, budgets, keywords, etc.
• Create, add, and edit ads to bring more sales, reach new audiences, and expand your business.
• Monitor your optimization score and apply recommendations depending on strategic insights.
• Obtain real-time notifications and alerts like performance summaries or ad disapprovals.
• Get in touch with an expert for support.

2. Stick Out on Google Maps for Free

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:

• Share valid business information and add an accurate description.
• Add images to GMB Profile to improve the clickthrough rate (CTR) of your ad.
• Respond to customer reviews as they can help determine whether or not a user engages with your business.
• Utilize posts to promote events, offers, and content.
• Add videos to attract, engage, and communicate with your customers. Include short names that allow buyers to “follow” your brand through your GMB page.
• It also allows your posts to get found in Google search and Google Maps.

Why is Google Offering Free Promoted Pins?

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.

3. Monitor the Performance of Your Ads Directly on Google

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:

• You get post-click performance metrics for visitors who clicked on your Google Ads, visited your site, or downloaded and started using your mobile app.
• You get a peek into your users’ Acquisition-Behavior-Conversion (ABC) cycle, i.e., how you acquire users, their behavior on your app or website after the acquisition, and their conversion patterns.
• You get valuable ABC metrics from Google Ads (such as clicks) and Analytics (such as bounce rate), offering you more insight into which ad strategies are performing well and which ones need improvement.

4. Control When Your Ads Show

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:

• List out your primary business categories and then list the keywords or phrases that might fall under each category. Consider including keywords or phrases your consumers would use to describe your offerings.
• Choose more specific terms directly related to your ad’s theme if you want to target users who may be interested in a specific offering. When you use more specific keywords, it would mean that your ad only shows up for phrases that apply to your company. However, bear in mind that if the terms are too specific, you may not be able to reach as many users.
• Choose more generic terms if you want to reach as many users as possible with their search intent. You may find it challenging to reach prospective buyers when including very generic phrases as your ad could show up for searches that aren’t always relevant to your brand.
• Group your keywords and ads into ad groups based on your products, services, or other categories to show more relevant ads to prospective buyers. If a lot of keywords match a given search phrase, Google selects the keyword to serve, depending on the ranking.
• Google Ads made alterations to exact match, phrase match, and broad match modifier to capture traffic from closely related variations of your key terms. No need to include all variants of each key term as your ads will be eligible to serve on searches similar to the keywords you’re targeting.

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.

Now You Know About Smart Campaigns

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.

Wrap Up

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.