Patience Hurlburt-LawtonIf you run an e-commerce business, you’ve likely dabbled in Smart Shopping campaigns.
Smart Shopping, as the name suggests, is pretty darn smart. It uses a learning algorithm to determine what type of people buy your products. Then, it searches the Internet for users that fit the profile—and places your ads in front of them.
It’s brilliant, honestly.
But here’s the catch: You need to know when and how to launch Smart Shopping. You should also understand how to properly scale this type of campaign. Otherwise, you can accidentally kill it, resulting in less sales.
John Moran, a Senior Client Strategist at Solutions 8, gives us the lowdown in this insightful YouTube video.
Standard Shopping Now, Smart Shopping Later
In order for Smart Shopping to work its magic, you need to start with a standard shopping campaign.
When you run a standard campaign, Google’s algorithm gathers info about your customers. This allows Google to figure out what type of users are actively buying your products (i.e., giving you money!).
Next, you can unleash Smart Shopping in all its brilliant glory. Smart Shopping will swoop in and leverage the data obtained from your standard campaign. It will say, “Let me look at what’s going on. Where are the people coming from? What do these users look like? What do they search for?”
Once Smart Shopping determines the attributes of your typical customer, it will go find that user and show your ads in Google Search, Google Shopping, Gmail Sponsored Promotions, YouTube, and Google Display Network.
Like we said… it’s magic. (Or just really awesome technology.)
With that said, you’ll want to launch Smart Shopping only if you’ve already run a standard shopping campaign. That’s because Smart Shopping requires certain data from standard shopping to properly do its job.
Admittedly, running a standard campaign will be a bit painful at first. “You probably won’t make any money, because that’s your initial investment into Google,” explains John. “Think of it like giving a road map to Smart Shopping.”
When it’s time to scale Smart Shopping, slow and steady wins the race.
As Smart Shopping gets smarter, you can build and grow the campaign.
You’ll want to do this reasonably, though. This could mean gradually increasing your daily ad spend from $60 to $80 over two weeks, for example.
On the flip side, you don’t want to go all-in and jump to, say, $5,000 a day. In this case, Google will show your ads to any ol’ person, rather than your ideal customer.
“If you give it a whole bunch of money, it’s going to say, ‘Alright, I’m going to spend it, but I’m not going to maximize my return,” says John.
And just like that, your sales will trickle away. Whomp whomp.
However, if you scale things incrementally, “you’re forcing the learning algorithm to go and try to find those new users, and look for additional signals,” explains John.
Solutions 8 lives and breathes Smart Shopping.
If you’re struggling with the complexities of shopping campaigns, let us help. We’re highly experienced in this sort of thing, so we know when and how to launch Smart Shopping in Google Ads. We can also ensure your campaign is operating in a way that makes sense for your bottom line.
Oh, and if you haven’t used Smart Shopping yet? We can get you started with that, too. Contact us today.
(P.S. For more videos about Google Ads, subscribe to the Solutions 8 YouTube channel.)
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