How To Optimize A Smart Shopping Campaign
The Smart Shopping Campaign option on Google Ads is a powerful and exciting feature for ecommerce and other product-focused businesses. Arguably, selling your products to online audiences has never been easier thanks to this AI-powered campaign option.
With a Smart Shopping Campaign, you can save time, waste fewer advertising dollars, stretch your budget to the fullest extent and, most importantly, drive more sales to your ecommerce site!
This discussion will look at the basics of developing a Smart Shopping Campaigns, as well as 5 tips for optimizing that campaign to produce the absolute best results possible!
What Is Google Smart Shopping
)? How Does It Work?
When creating a normal shopping campaign on Google Ads (sometimes referred to as a product listing ad campaign), you’re given the option to create a Smart Shopping Campaign. This uses artificial intelligence (AI) and impressive learning algorithms to automate certain components of the campaign development and management processes.
The campaign will automatically make bid adjustments and other changes in order to optimize the use of your budget towards completing your set advertising goal. For instance, if your goal is to drive conversions, then the Smart Shopping algorithm uses its complex algorithms to detect the best way to spend your budget to return the highest number of conversions possible.
Smart Shopping Campaigns also automates the ad creative process by using existing product feed data to produce ad listings. Smartwatches ad are realy in now a days. You can see many ads on best smartwatches 2022.Essentially, once you enter your budget and select a goal for the Smart Campaign, Google’s AI technology does the heavy lifting.
The AI system takes about two weeks before it has enough data to really optimize results. Once it is ready, however, some advertisers report seeing higher conversion rates! Better results with less effort —how can you beat that?
What Do You Need To Create A Smart Shopping Campaign?
There are a few requirements to creating a Google Smart Shopping Campaign. You need the following items:
● A Google Ads account (in good standing)
● A Google Merchant Center account
● An updated and accurate product data feed
● Conversion-tracking and remarketing tags enabled on your website
● At least 20 conversions (obtained manually) on the Shopping Network in the last 45 days
Once you’ve satisfied these requirements, you can create a Smart Shopping Campaign in Google Ads.
5 Ways To Optimize Your Smart Shopping Campaign
As a mostly automated campaign type, some marketers wonder what steps can be taken to optimize the results from a Smart Shopping Campaign. In a normal campaign, adjusting bids and developing ad creatives is a big part of the job description. With these tasks automated, what’s left?
Here are 5 techniques that you must use to improve results from your Smart Shopping Campaign.
- Data Feed Management
Whenever you’re creating product listing ads, the integrity of the data in your product feed is of paramount importance. As sophisticated as the Smart Shopping system is, it can’t account for your own errors when inputting product data into the feed.
One of your chief responsibilities when optimizing your Smart Shopping Campaign is to monitor your feed for errors or other issues that are resulting in bad ad creatives.
2. Monitor Targeting Exclusions
As the Smart Shopping Campaign works to find the best ways to use your budget, it will occasionally exclude certain targets that it finds are wasting your budget. Typically, this is fine. After all, it means it will preserve your budget for targets that Google has determined are much more profitable.
The drawback? You may not always want these targets excluded. The Smart Shopping system may unknowingly exclude a key audience group that your research has determined is ideal for your company. Thus, it is important to monitor these exclusions and make any necessary corrections.
3. Reduce Friction Along The Way
The Smart Shopping Campaign gets visitors to your doorstep, but it is still your job to turn these individuals into new customers. With the algorithms handling the bulk of the work, you have more time to commit to optimizing your landing pages and checkout process.
After all, if either of these components are clunky or create friction, it will hurt your conversion rates. Your goal should be to use your newly available time to find ways to eliminate friction and remove unnecessary steps in your checkout process.
4. Avoid Missing Landing Page Errors At All Costs
On the topics of landing pages and data feeds, it is absolutely critical that you ensure that the landing page URLs for all of your products are correct and properly functioning. Nothing spells disaster for an ad campaign worse than a landing page that doesn’t load.
Not only will bad URLs spike your bounce rates because people won’t land on the page you worked hard to create, but it will also hurt your credibility as a business. People aren’t going to feel compelled to shop with your site if you can’t even promise a working landing page!
5. Consider Your Product Selections Carefully
One of the components you do control are the products in your data feed. This means that you have full control over which products your Google Smart Shopping Campaign advertises to prospective customers.
You should try and categorize products as best you can. This will make it easier for the algorithms to target the right audiences for each item in your catalog. It will also better guarantee that the system doesn’t accidentally exclude audience targets that are valuable to your business.
Conclusions
When some marketers hear about automation tools and features, such as Google Smart Shopping, they start thinking, “Perfect, I can finally stop the endless tinkering and adjusting in my campaigns.”
Don’t fall into this wrong way of thinking.
Smart Shopping Campaigns do a lot of the heavy lifting, but it is still your responsibility to analyze the performance of these AI campaigns and do your best to optimize the results.
Remember, you know what’s best for your company and you have insights outside of your Pay Per Click data that these AI machines don’t have access to. Pair your insights with the number-crunching capabilities of Smart Shopping and you’ll have a winning strategy.
