Google Ads, or AdWords, has always had frequent product updates, with more automated features, allowing us to have similar results with less manual work. Along with Google’s recent rebranding from AdWords to Google Ads, they also announced the arrival of a new automated campaign type for small businesses called Smart Campaigns. It can produce significantly better results, with businesses being able to choose from varying levels of automation. Smart Campaigns will start automating ads and landing page generation based on data from Google My Business (GMB), as well as other user-selected images. So what needs to be done by the user? Budgets, target location, and language can be managed by the advertiser, but realistically they won’t change after a campaign is set up.
In May 2015, Universal App campaigns helped advertisers get more installs of their app or drive in-app conversions. It is one of the first fully automated campaign type in Google Ads. Google manages bidding, targeting and creatives and works to achieve the maximum results for the desired goal within the budget set by the advertiser. For this, advertisers just need to select a daily budget, a target cost per result and location and language targets. Google also asks for a few ad text ideas as well as some optional images, videos, and HTML5 assets to give their ad-generation system some ideas for a starting point, and the system does the rest!
There are seven automated bidding strategies from Google that help advertisers reach a variety of business goals with minimal work. Three of these are based on a mechanism called Smart Bidding, where Google uses machine learning to predict which clicks are most likely to drive conversions and conversion value. For this, automatic bidding should not be considered fully automated, as targets should be adjusted for factors that its automation doesn’t consider. How do they help? They remove the need for additional calculations that advertisers used to do manually. But because targets can change based on factors that Google has no insight into, these automated bid systems will perform best when they’re managed by people who are aware of what is best for the business.
For advertisers with large sites, Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) offer an automated solution that targets ads to relevant queries, with relevant ads and the right landing page. The advertiser can choose whether to include all the pages from their site that are in the Google index or just pages in a feed, and Google then automatically targets the ads and shows the ads with an automatic headline.
There are many other automations, with the new automations getting the word “Smart” in front of them, like Smart Campaigns or Smart Bidding. Today, July 10, Google will host Google Marketing Live, the annual launch for new ads and analytics products, so be on the watch for some up and coming technology!