Learn what Smart Shopping is on Google Ads and how you can use it to automate your campaigns and maximise your return.
Martin Langborg Hansen
If you’re using standard shopping campaigns on Google Ads, you’re very likely limiting your target audience. Google actually knows far more than YOU and I do when it comes to targeting ads in relation to click price and your customers. That’s why you should consider Smart Shopping.
In short, Google Smart Shopping is a much more intelligent shopping campaign where you hand everything over to Google’s algorithms and vast data knowledge. When Google first launched Smart Shopping a few years ago, it was fairly poor, but it has since become one of Google’s strongest tools. Google collects statistical data about all its users across websites, providing enormous insight into user behaviour. You can leverage this through Smart Shopping, which is quite literally worth its weight in gold.
Display campaigns
Smart Shopping also uses display campaigns, which are shown on Google’s huge display network such as BT. If you’ve set it up correctly with a product feed and dynamic remarketing tag, it will display products in the ads that users have previously viewed on your website.
Google is smarter than you and me
Using Smart Shopping means you no longer need to focus on click price, demographics or interests. This is because Google simply knows BETTER than YOU and I do who should see your ads and when, based on your bid strategy, budget, products, remarketing lists and more.
The reason you should use Smart Shopping is, as mentioned above, that Google is 9 times out of 10 smarter than you and me. As a result, it often delivers better results and therefore a better ROAS or POAS in the end. This is also because people typically can only focus on 10-20 parameters at a time on a Google Ads account – such as demographics, platforms, audiences, bids and so on. In contrast, Google evaluates millions of parameters in a split second and never sleeps. In other words, it optimises round the clock.
There’s always a catch! Google knows a lot, but it doesn’t know everything… yet. Google can never perform better than the information it’s given or already has. Similarly, Google is never better than your product and price. In other words – if there are no Google searches for your product, or all your competitors are cheaper than you, Google can’t perform optimally.
If Google is fed with data, remarketing lists and sales, it will get smarter about your target audience each day. That’s why you’ll often see the best results when your remarketing lists have been filled and tested. This typically takes about 30 days, depending on the number of visitors and sales. Your most important role with smart bidding is therefore to feed Google with data and knowledge about your customers and their behaviour, as well as making sure you have popular products and competitive prices.
There’s also a major catch when it comes to search terms. In traditional shopping campaigns, you can usually see which keywords your products appear for. You can also create brand campaigns and split them into generic and brand searches. However, this is not possible with Smart Shopping. This is both good and bad.
The advantage of the above is that Google often knows better than we do, and the less we know, the fewer limitations we place on the account. On the other hand, it’s difficult to see which keywords are performing really well or poorly and then build this into search campaigns or exclude the keyword. In other words, Google will test things that you would not normally try. This can end well or badly, but in most cases it works out well.
Optimising Smart Shopping campaigns is completely different from standard shopping campaigns. Below you can see the most typical optimisation options.
The more you tell Google about your product – for example in the product title or the structured data in your product feed – the more Google knows about your product. This makes it easier for Google to match people’s Google searches to your product. You can read more about data discipline and how to give Google all relevant data about your products here.
Dynamic remarketing is a very powerful tool to give Google better insight into what your visitors are interested in. Dynamic remarketing involves adding tags to your website so Google knows exactly which products a customer has viewed and the total value of their basket. Google then uses this to show display ads with the products the user has seen and added to their basket. In addition, automated audiences are created based on behaviour such as “abandoned basket”, “viewed product” and much more.
When it comes to bidding strategy, Smart Shopping is a bit different from standard shopping campaigns. It can only use smart bidding.
I would often recommend starting with the bidding strategy “Maximise conversion value” until it has generated enough conversions to know who your customers are. This typically requires more than 30 conversions. After this, you can try changing the bidding strategy to target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). For example, you can set it to your desired sales relative to spend. If, for example, you set a target ROAS of 1000%, Google will aim to generate ten times your ad spend in revenue. I recommend changing the ROAS target every now and then – about every 14 days – as this can sometimes kickstart the campaign. Using a target ROAS is a very important tool in Smart Shopping. It means Google will try to use your budget as efficiently as possible.
If you’re not using a ROAS target – for example, if it’s performing better without, or you’ve just started a Smart Shopping campaign – you can also manage performance with the budget. For example, if you use the bidding strategy “Maximise conversion value”, you can control the campaign by increasing or lowering the budget and analysing ROAS or POAS accordingly.
Similarly, if you use a ROAS target and you’re close to hitting your target but often hit your budget cap, try increasing the budget, as many limit performance by restricting the budget.
One way to optimise Smart Shopping campaigns is to segment products into product groups such as brands, product types, profit labels or similar. This gives you a better overview. You can also split products into different Smart Shopping campaigns with different ROAS targets, depending on the various profit margins on the products. You can also exclude products you don’t want to advertise – for example, if they consistently perform poorly. Often, you get the best results by gathering all products in one campaign, as this gives Google more options and data. If you want to include all products in one campaign and still set different ROAS targets, you should read about POAS further down.
As mentioned earlier, the more Google knows, the better. That’s why one of your most important roles is to provide insight into your visitors – for example, previous customers, loyal customers, newsletter subscribers and people who perform certain actions on your website. The way you give Google insight into these things is via customer lists, audiences from the Google Ads tag or Google Analytics, and more. Google can then use this to increase bids if a particular audience performs well.
One of the “easiest” ways to optimise Smart Shopping is to use CSS, which gives you a 20% discount on click price and therefore a better ROAS. You can read more about CSS here.
If you want to grow your Google Ads account and gain a deeper understanding of your ads’ impact on your business, it’s a really good idea to include profit in your optimisation. This allows you to focus on selling the products that generate the highest profit and therefore grow your bottom line.
By calculating profit on all conversions, you can then work out POAS (the same as ROAS, but with profit instead of turnover). Read what POAS is and why ROAS is NOT the best KPI for your webshop.
Would you like to know more about Smart Shopping, or do you need help setting up Smart Shopping? Then don’t hesitate to contact us here!
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