Smart Shopping campaigns are the latest innovation by Google in the shopping arena. The aim of Smart Shopping campaigns is three-fold:

• Simplify campaign management.
• Maximise your conversion value.
• Expand your reach.

This new campaign type combines standard shopping campaigns and dynamic remarketing, using automated bidding and machine learning to promote your products and business across multiple ad networks. For shopping campaigns, this is revolutionary. It means that beyond search results pages, shopping ads can now show on the Display Network, on YouTube and in Gmail.

To get this all up and running, Smart Shopping campaigns use your existing product feed and remarketing assets, before leveraging Google’s machine learning capabilities to help you maximise conversion value.

Through automated targeting, audiences and placements, Google ensures that your ads are being shown in the right places, to the right people, at the right time. As a result, you can maximise your sales opportunities.

Sound good so far?

Well before you can start getting to work on Smart Shopping campaigns, Google requires you to have:

• A conversion tracking tag.
• Transaction-specific conversion values.
• A remarketing global site tag.
• A dynamic remarketing tag.
• At least 20 conversions in the last 45 days.
• An audience list with over 100 users.

If you have all these, you’re all set for your first Smart Shopping campaign!

For us here at Mediaworks, all this sounds pretty enticing: less time spent on the long and arduous campaign set-up which makes our manual campaigns so successful, more time spent on creating strategic growth and ensuring the product feed is in tip-top shape!

Putting Google’s machine learning to the test, we tried a trial campaign with one of our e-commerce accounts. The results we experienced should raise the eyebrows of even the most ardent manual-loving PPC consultant.

After the initial 15-day learning period, we compared 30 days of Smart Shopping vs the campaign we were previously running. The results were as follows:

• Revenue was up 72%.
• ROI was up by 67%.
• Conversion Rate was up an astonishing 138%.

Leveraging Smart Shopping enabled us to free up a lot of time to introduce multiple feed rules to the account and create a Supplemental feed to make even more product data optimisations. This meant product feed data was fully optimised, in a way that had not been possible previously.

The results we saw with this campaign truly surpassed expectations. This campaign type certainly won’t be for everyone, but with automation and machine-learning only growing in presence, could this be the future for Google Shopping?

If you’d like to discuss whether a Smart Shopping campaign and an optimised product feed managed by Mediaworks would give your shopping campaigns a lift, get in touch with us today by filling in the simple form below!