Google allows for two types of Shopping campaigns: Smart Shopping and Manual Shopping. With all things Google pointing in the direction of automation, it comes to no surprise that Google favors Smart Shopping campaigns over manual.
While making a marketer’s job much easier in terms of less manual work, automation still does have it’s downfalls – it limits our control. Where Manual Shopping campaigns allow us the visibility into search terms and the ability to negate keywords and set our own bids, Smart Shopping pretty much only allows for us to do one thing – set a budget, and just allow Google to do the rest.
Google “best practices” suggest only creating one smart shopping campaign so that the machine learning algorithm can learn from as much data as possible, but that fails to take into account that marketers may have different marketing goals/strategies for different product lines, or that some product categories may have different ROAS goals. Google’s algorithm also tends to go after the easiest possible conversion, which possibly means it can be allowing products of lower value to eat up your marketing budget. With little control over your one smart shopping campaign, there isn’t much you can do within these parameters.
The first thing you’ll want to do is take a look at your product group report in Google Ads. Here, you can see if certain product types (and you can get more granular data if you’d like to view by Product ID and look this up with your inventory) are bringing in a higher return than others. Then, you can decide on the best strategy for your business.
We’ll show you three ways to regain some of that control over your smart shopping:
· Segment by Marketing Strategy
· Segment by ROAS Goals
· For smaller inventories with different ROAS targets, single product smart shopping