What are Smart Shopping Campaigns?
This type of campaign is a subset of the standard Google Shopping Campaigns that gives Google control over the Ads generated for your products. Google also optimizes the placement, CPC and other metrics that influence performance. With that power, Google will maximize the conversion value, or will reach a target ROAS, for the products in the campaign. Google optimizes the campaigns using their machine learning algorithms. The results may vary based on how the campaigns are set up. Here you can find some best practices.
More information about the Smart Shopping campaigns can be found in this Google article.
What are the differences with Standard Shopping campaigns?
Smart Shopping share a lot of components with Standard Shopping for example:
- Product 'trees'
- Product groups (product_type, custom_label etc.)
- They have a campaign country of sale. This is not the target country, this will be added soon!
But there are also differences:
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A Smart Shopping Campaign has only one Ad group which means that you can only have one Product tree per campaign since a tree is always linked to one Ad group.
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A Smart Shopping Campaign does not have negative keywords.
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Bids management is done entirely by Google and you only get to set the (daily) budget.
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A Smart Shopping Campaign use either maximize conversion value or Target ROAS as bidding strategies.
Note that there is a limit of 100 Smart Shopping Campaigns per Google Ads account.
Which campaign controls remain when using Smart Shopping campaigns
There are a couple of things you still have control over when using Smart Shopping campaigns, for example:
- Which products are in the smart shopping campaigns;
- Budgeting. Like with standard Shopping campaigns Channable allows you to set the initial daily budget. This needs to be done in the local currency of your account. If you want to modify the budget afterwards you need to go into Google Ads and change it manually. This new amount will not be overwritten by Channable.
In Channable you can set this up in the 'Campaigns' tab of the Shopping Ad generator:
- Choosing your bidding strategy (Maximize conversion value or Custom Target ROAS). More information about this can be found down below.
How do I set up a Smart Shopping campaign in Channable?
This is very similar to how you set up a Standard Shopping campaign in Channable. There are some extra steps that have to be taken and some others that have to or can be skipped.
- Create a Shopping Ads generator. For more information see step 1 in this article.
- Change the 'campaign type' to 'Smart Shopping campaigns' in the 'Settings' tab of the Shopping Ad generator.
Note: You cannot change the campaign type after creation in Channable, so you can only choose this once. - Select your Target ROAS bidding strategy in the campaigns tab.
In Channable there are two types of Target ROAS bidding strategies supported:
In this image Target Return On Ad-Spent corresponds to Custom Target ROAS strategy in the tool.
When you choose for the Custom Target ROAS strategy, you also need to set a Target ROAS. Target ROAS lets you bid based on a target return on ad spend (ROAS). This value must be between 0.01 and 1000.
Important! With Smart shopping campaigns you need to give it some time before you can measure its performance.
The rest of the setup is basically the same as for standard shopping campaigns. More information about setting up standard shopping campaigns can be found in this section of our Help center.
More information about Smart Shopping campaigns can be found in these Google articles.