Google Smart Shopping

[Irena]

Hello,

• Can someone explain the difference between Google Smart Shopping and Automated bid strategies (Target ROAS, Maximize clicks)?
• To what campaign type it's best to switch our existing standard shopping campaigns if we already have about 100 conversions?
• Should we change the campaign type in existing campaigns settings or should we create the new Smart or automated campaigns separately?

Thanks!

[EmmanuelFlossie]

You can not compare Smart Shopping with automated bidding.

Instead Smart Shopping vs standard shopping.

Smart shopping, is fully automated and target both shopping ads and display ads.

Standard shopping, is purely shopping ads, and you need to manually manage the campaign.

Now within standard shopping you can compare all the different bidding strategies, and you should use the strategy that best fit your goals. Do you want to maximize clicks? Or do you want to be profitable?

Depending on your goals, you need to decide yourself which one fits your goal.

Whether to choose smart or standard shopping, also depends on your goals and knowledge. If you find that you prefer to spend your valuable time on more important things, then use smart shopping. If you have enough time to maximize your setup use standard.

Or instead, look at what yields the best results. Test smart shopping for 2 months and compare the results and choose whichever you see performs better.

[Irena]

@EmmanuelFlossie and @dylanpham, thank you for clear explanations! Finally I got it!

I'll give Smart Shopping a try, therefore I have 2 questions:

• When creating a new Smart Shopping campaign, is it needed to pause all standard campaigns or can we do A/B testing?
• Will those paused campaigns perform the same way after unpausing them, if we find that Smart Shopping not profitable for us?
• Does Smart Shopping use already gained data from all our existing campaigns or it will learn from scratch?

Thank you for clarifying!

[EmmanuelFlossie · Accepted solution]

Smart campaigns take priority, so you should not get any clicks for products that are available in both campaign in the standard campaign, only the smart shopping campaign.

When pausing smart shopping, and unpausing standard, yes standard will continue to run, and may take a hit on performance, and can take 2 to 3 weeks to get back to previous levels.

Yes, Smart Shopping uses all historic data, from all campagins/

[Irena]

@EmmanuelFlossie thank you!

[dylanpham]

Hello,

1) Can someone explain the difference between Google Smart Shopping and Automated bid strategies (Target ROAS, Maximize clicks)?

The campaign type is different from bidding strategy. 
+ With the campaign type you will have:
a) Search: Standard Search Ads, Dynamic Search ads
b) Shopping: Standard Shopping ads, Smart Shopping ads
c) Display:....
+ With the bidding strategy you will have: manual CPC, Maximize click,...
===> Depending on which campaign type you choose you can have different bidding strategy for them for example if you choose Smart Shopping you will have Target ROAS bidding.

2) To what campaign type it's best to switch our existing standard shopping campaigns if we already have about 100 conversions?

Right now with Standard Shopping you only have 3 options of bidding: manual cpc, maximize click and Target TROAS. In this case you need to check that with your 100 conversions do they have value tracking? 

If YES ==> Highly recommend use tROAS to optimize for your performance
If NO ==> You should choose maximize click if you want to optimize for traffic and if you want to more control in your campaign please choose manual CPC.

3) Should we change the campaign type in existing campaigns settings or should we create the new Smart or automated campaigns separately?

Nope you can not change the campaign type in the existing  campaign you have to create the new one.

Hope these information helps you.

[Socialhead]

Hi Irena,

As Emma has said, you should not compare Google Smart Shopping and Automated bidding strategies, put it on a scale with Google Standard shopping instead. 

Here are a few differences between Google Smart Shopping and Google Standard Shopping that you need to know!

1. Google Standard Shopping:

• Only shows on Google Shopping
• Set up and run manually, no need any historical data to run
• 100% control over the campaign
• Allows you to add negative keywords

2. Google Smart Shopping

• More diverse network placements: Google Shopping, Display, Email, Youtube
• 100% automation
• Little control over the campaign
• You cannot add negative keywords

Types of automated bidding strategies:

• Maximize Clicks automatically sets bids to assist you receive as many clicks as feasible within a specified budget.
• Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) can help increase conversions for manual bidding. It automatically adjusts your manual bid up or down based on each click’s likelihood to result in a conversion. 
• Target return on ad spend (ROAS) dynamically adjusts your bids to enhance conversion value while achieving a desired average return on ad spend. 
• Maximize conversion value bidding automatically sets your bids to maximize your conversion value, while attempting to spend the available budget you set.  

Keep in mind that: With Smart Shopping campaigns, you can only use Target ROAS bidding strategies. 

“To what campaign type it's best to switch our existing standard shopping campaigns if we already have about 100 conversions?”

-> With 100 conversions, you can run test Smart Shopping campaigns now and spend more time on other store management and marketing tasks. 

However, our advice is to run a few other Standard campaigns before switching to Smart campaigns. Since the Smart one uses your historical data to target the right people. The more data you get, the more accurate and profitable your ads can be.

Wish you all the best!