What are Google Ads Smart Campaigns?

You’re probably wondering, what are Google Ads Smart Campaigns? Many businesses use Google Ads to become more familiar with users who have looked up similar products or services in the search bar. We can’t deny the big impact on businesses when they are included in the top 3 search results, regardless, if these are ads or organic results.

As a marketer, running Google Ads is no walk in the park. You have to learn everything: keywords, negative keywords, custom audiences, ad extensions, analytics, geo-targeting, bid optimization, call to actions and more.

For a small business, it won’t be ideal to spend so much time on Google Ads or hiring an advertising agency since it can be very expensive.

The solution? Google Ads Smart Campaigns!

In today’s article, you will learn how to set up Smart Campaigns for your business. Without further ado, let’s learn what are Smart Campaigns and how you can leverage this to get your business known in Google.

What are Google Ads Smart Campaigns?

Google Smart Campaigns are intended for small scale businesses. These campaigns help in creating automated advertisements and delivery radius. Smart Campaigns also give businesses the choice to place a landing page even if they don’t have a website.

Running Smart Campaigns is easier than regular Google Campaigns, the interface is simplified, and Google will run the campaign for you. Smart Campaigns can be run through the Search and Display Networks.

Who Can Use These Smart Campaigns?

Smart Campaigns are ideal for small and local businesses. Businesses like restaurants, salons, laundry services, drugstore, boutiques, etc. can create Smart Campaigns to get their business known, especially, for local customers located within the radius.

Advantages of Using Smart Campaigns?

Rather than convincing you as the reader on why you should start using Smart Campaigns, let me list down the advantages of running one for a small business:

Running campaigns is easier
Quickly monitor dashboard through a simplified interface
Google automatically picks the best performing ad
Google extends your reach to a wider audience across devices
Helps your audience discover your business through Google Maps Listing

How to Set Up Smart Campaigns?

To run campaigns, you must first meet the requirement set by Google:

50 Conversions from Display Network
100 Conversions from Search Network
Your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) should not be too low

If these requirements are met, then let’s start creating the smart campaigns!

Open Google Ads
Click the blue plus(+) button on the left side of the screen, and select ‘New Campaign’ in the dropdown.
Choose Goal – no matter what goal you choose, always choose ‘Display’ as the advertisement type. Then you may enter your website (optional).
Set up the Campaign – you may now fill in the description of your campaign (e.g. campaign name, choosing location, languages, etc.)
Automated bidding system – this bidding system places its bids based on your campaign goal and budget.
Place your Daily Budget – the amount of budget you’re willing to spend on average daily for the Smart Campaigns. It is good to set your budget 2x your target CPA to get the most out of the Google ad.
Create Ad group – ad groups serve as your folder for different types of ads. For example, you’re a coffee shop and you offer different types of coffee. You may want to separate your products according to their category:
1. Iced Coffee
2. Hot Coffee
Create ads – once the ad group is set up, you may now proceed to create ‘New Ad’. You may now place the headline, description, contact number, etc. This is where all the ad assets are placed.

Disadvantages

Smart Campaigns may have their advantages, however, it also doesn’t mean that it has no downsides. Smart Campaigns are automated campaigns, which means the machine will do the work for you and you have no control over it. You can’t customize on what places your ads appear once you’ve set up the campaign.

Also, the dashboard may look simple and easy to understand, but let’s not forget that simple dashboard = less data. Less data means less knowledge of how your campaigns are faring well. We don’t want to burn money on ads that are not helping our business ROI, no?

That’s another wrap!

Smart Campaigns are a good option to increase the business’s presence online. It’s up to you as an advertiser or business owner how you can leverage your business on Google.

So far, we have covered everything. If you have other questions, just hit the comment button below and we’ll discuss it.

Before I officially end this article, I’d like to remind you that, no matter what platform you advertise, always make sure to set your spend low before you scale up. You don’t want to blow your money for an experiment that will not give great results.