AdWords has officially been rebranded to Google Ads, but that's not the only big change that was made to the platform. Google also has also launched Smart campaigns, an easy and automated way for small businesses to rank higher through paid search campaigns. Here’s what you need to know to get started.
What are Smart Campaigns?
Google Smart campaigns are automated paid search campaigns that take all the headache, hassles and guesswork out of paid ads for small businesses. Instead of manually creating, monitoring and updating your paid ad program, now you can simply just set it up.
Setup is easy, thanks to a slate of automated features that create and optimize the ads for you, based on the service or product you’re advertising and the goal you want the ad to achieve. Goals can include providing directions to your shop, getting people to visit your website, or prompting prospects to give you a call. All of the above can ultimately result in increased traffic and conversions for your brand.
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Benefits of Smart Campaigns
In addition to taking the hassles and guesswork out of manually creating your own paid search campaigns, Google Smart campaigns brings on a slate of benefits.
- Set Goals: We already mentioned the automation designed to do all the heavy lifting for you, along with the ability to pick a specific goal that you want the campaign to achieve.
- Audience Targeting: Smart campaigns are built using AdWords Express technology, which is Google’s advertising product that automatically manages your online ads. Smart campaigns rely on Google’s machine learning algorithms to show the ads to the right audiences, based on audience members’ behavior, location, device and other signals.
- 3X More Effective: Google Smart campaigns are three times more effective than Adwords Express campaigns for reaching a company’s target audiences.
- Auto-Fill Information: They also sync with Google My Business to help with ad creation, featured images and your business address.That means you barely have to fill in any info for your ad, as Google Smart campaigns automatically deliver the right information in the right fields, and then launch your ads to be seen by the right audience.
- Generate Ad Text: Smart campaigns will automatically generate text ads as well as display ads, with automatically generated landing pages expected to launch later this year.
What You Need to Do
Getting started with Google Smart campaigns can be done in several simple steps. Here’s a rundown on how it works.
- Create a Google Ad account: Set up a new account for your business, or log into your existing account if you already have one.
- Set your budget: You’re in charge of setting your budget, the same way you’ve set budgets for other paid search campaigns.
- Pick your goal: Choose the goal you want your campaign to achieve, whether it’s prompting phone calls, encouraging engagement or driving traffic to your website.
- Determine the number of campaigns: You can run more than one Smart campaign at a time, with each campaign having a different goal.
- View results as desired: Head to your account dashboard to check the progress and performance of your Smart campaigns.
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What Google Smart Campaigns Do for You
In summary, building a Google Smart campaign can do the following:
- Fill in business info: Google automatically pulls information from your business profile.
- Create campaigns, fast: Google’s machine learning automatically creates ads within minutes.
- Update and optimize throughout campaign: Google keeps an eye on your result data, continuously updating and optimizing your campaigns as they’re running to improve results on an ongoing basis.
For small businesses that want to improve their reach, but don’t have the time or manpower to manually create and manage paid search campaigns, Google Smart campaigns might be a good fit. Google is aiming to make Smart campaigns the default ad type for new advertisers in Google Ads, and existing advertisers can take advantage of it, too. For more info on Smart campaigns or paid search, contact LyntonWeb today.
