For many retailers using Shopping Campaigns, balancing customer acquisition and retention, feed management and making best use of key words can be difficult to manage. Rolling out a Smart Shopping campaign approach across your platforms can enable you to keep an eye on your overall spend, while ensuring that your site traffic continues to rise.

In the second blog post of this series we’ll approach how you can remain on budget while maximising your conversion value as we explore the benefits of Smart Shopping Campaigns for your business.

What are Smart Shopping Campaigns?

Smart Shopping Campaigns are feed based campaigns covering PLA, Display, YouTube and Gmail. These campaigns enable you to maximise your Conversion Value while remaining within your budget.

What are the pros of Smart Shopping Campaigns?

• Your ads are exposed across multiple platforms allowing Google to use its machine learning algorithm to adjust bids and investment across various touchpoints.
• On each platform, Google uses elements such as search queries and previous site engagement to deliver the most relevant ad.
• As with Smart Bidding, this Campaign Subtype allows you to focus more time on other important Shopping aspects such as Feed testing, innovation and researching new opportunities.

What are the cons of Smart Shopping Campaigns?

• For most retailers, customer acquisition is a key metric. However with Smart Shopping Campaigns you lose the ability to add audiences so you can’t clearly segment your investment and performance metrics.
• Negative Keywords is another feature you miss out on. A key blow if you segment between Brand and generic or wish to safeguard against Competitor terms or bad language.
• What’s more you also lose visibility of search queries. This makes it difficult to optimise your feed toward strong performing query groups and identify emerging query themes.

I’m interested in exploring how Smart Shopping Campaigns can benefit my business…

As with any new Google feature it’s worth running a test campaign to see how it works for your business.It’s important to know that for the same products, Smart Shopping campaigns take priority over standard Shopping and display remarketing campaigns within the same account.

At Kelkoo Group we’re big on feed testing. Losing search query visibility does restrict this although we can still see performance at the Product level and use this as our primary source of measurement.  Why not get in touch with our PPC team to find out how we can run a test campaign for you?