Take your Shopping Ads to the next level by using Smart Shopping Campaigns

What is Smart Shopping?

Smart Shopping is Google's automated solution that integrates product ads, smart bidding strategies, and remarketing. It's a type of campaign that utilizes machine learning algorithms to optimize your shopping campaigns.

For far too long, setting up shopping campaigns has been a series of long, complex, and, frankly, dull tasks. Setting up campaign priorities, identifying negative keywords, and setting up bidding strategies, are probably tasks most digital marketers of yesteryear still have nightmares about.

With Smart Shopping campaigns, you no longer need to perform these tasks. You merely need to set a campaign goal and a budget. After which, the Smart Shopping campaigns will start using its machine learning algorithms to optimize your campaigns with automated bidding strategies and the ideal ad placements. It’s that simple. And in the end, this will help you free up loads of time. Time you can use to focus on matters that are more important or beneficial to your business or life in general. You could refine your marketing strategy or even go for a walk on the beach.

Smart Shopping campaigns are ideal for eCommerce companies with smaller budgets or who have less time to strategize and manage their campaigns.

Smart Shopping campaigns will feature both in Product Shopping Ads and Display Ads (e.g. remarketing ads and similar audiences through Google Search, Display Network, Youtube, and Gmail).

Is there a catch?

A small one.

At first glance, Smart Shopping might seem like the right path to go down. However, there is a small tradeoff between ease-of-use and campaign control that you should definitely take into account.

With Smart Shopping campaigns, it’s not possible to set negative keywords or specify on which devices you want to be visible. Those tasks are all set by Smart Shopping’s algorithms that optimize your campaigns towards your goals.

When developing this feature, we talked to a lot of agencies and marketers who have already set up Smart campaigns on Google. Even though the lack of control was received with caution, they did concede that Google’s algorithms are effective when best practices are followed.

Optimize your campaigns with smart bidding strategies

Smart bidding strategies are the key feature of Smart Shopping campaigns. When setting up your campaigns, Google gives you the option to choose between two different strategies. Choosing one over the other will determine how Google's algorithm optimizes your campaigns. The two options are:

If your main campaign driver is to optimize towards sales value, then you should choose Maximize Conversion Value. Choosing this option will maximize the number of conversions by determining exactly which of your products is most likely to convert, then to promote and make it visible to potential customers.

The downside of this strategy, however, is that there is no way for Google to know what your profit margins are on a sale. If you do want to take this into consideration, the TargetROAS strategy is the better option to choose.

Setting up with TargetROAS will determine what type of campaign Google will run for you. For example; by setting a low TargetROAS goal on products you want to promote, you essentially tell Google that you are willing to spend a lot of advertising budget to make these products more visible. You can even decide to set the TargetROAS to less than 1 if you are willing to make a loss with your sales as long as you’re more visible through advertising.

Let’s simplify it further. Assume you choose a TargetROAS strategy with a relatively low TargetROAS of 3. In this example, you are telling the algorithm that for every one euro of advertising budget you spend, you want €3 of revenue back in return.

Choosing the ideal smart bidding strategy is completely up to you. You can even combine them with the standard shopping campaigns in order to test out and find the winning formula.

Why feed management and Smart Shopping Campaigns are a great fit

Smart Shopping Campaigns are incredibly smart! However, they are only as smart as the information you provide them with. You can therefore easily state that feed health is the foundation for succeeding with Smart Shopping Campaigns.

If your product feed is not in a great condition, then Google's machine learning algorithms will have a harder time optimizing your campaigns. It is therefore crucial that you ensure that your product feed is optimized and eligible to serve. This is where feed management and tools like Channable suddenly become very handy.

With tools like Channable you can utilize built-in feed templates for more than 2500 different advertising and price comparison platforms. A template for Shopping Ads that works perfectly with Google Merchant Center is no exception and you can even set up a top-quality feed in no time. Not only will this result in greater feed health, it will also help Google better to determine when and where products should show up in searches.

So, where do we go from here?

Well, if you are relatively new to Channable and feed management, then we would recommend to first take a closer look towards our blog named: What is Feed Management and why do I need it? This blog gives you a great introduction to Feed Management while explaining all its benefits along the way.

On the other hand, if you already know quite a bit about feed management, already have a healthy feed or maybe you are already a client or partner of Channable, then you might jump right ahead towards our guide named: How to set up Smart Shopping Campaigns with Channable.