A Smart Shopping campaign automatically pulls product data from a feed and uses it to create Shopping ads specifically designed for your customers. Then, the campaign intelligently places these ads across different Google surfaces using bidding strategies that you choose.
This article explains how to create a Smart Shopping campaign.
Before you begin
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Before you can launch a Smart Shopping campaign, you’ll need to set up these things:
- A Google Ads account
- A Merchant Center account with up-to-date product data
- A link between your Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts
You should also review the Shopping ads policies that govern what retailers can and can’t show in a Shopping ad.
Additionally, we recommend pausing any Shopping or display remarketing campaigns you’re running for the products you want to advertise with a Smart Shopping campaign. If they’re running at the same time, these campaigns could interfere with the machine learning that Smart Shopping campaigns use to display and optimize your ads.
Instructions
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- In the page menu on the left, click Campaigns.
- Click the plus button
, then select New Campaign.
- Select Sales as the goal for your campaign, or choose to create a campaign without a goal's guidance. Learn more about campaign goals
- For "Campaign type", select Shopping.
- Click Continue.
- Select the Merchant Center account that includes the products you’d like to advertise with this campaign and the country in which these products are sold.
Note: Each campaign can only be linked to one Merchant Center account and can only have one target country or feed label.
- For “Campaign subtype”, select Smart Shopping campaign, then click Continue.
- Create a name for your campaign.
- Set your bidding and bid strategy.
- By default, Smart Shopping campaigns set bids that maximize the value of your conversions within your provided average daily budget.
- If you have a specific performance goal, add a target return on ad spend (ROAS). The campaign will use it once it has enough conversion data.
- Set an average daily budget.
- Choose specific products or groups of products that you’d like to advertise in your campaign. If you don’t specify products, your entire feed will be eligible to appear in your ads. This could reduce their specificity and worsen their performance.
- Upload assets, such as a logo, image, and text, that will be used to create responsive remarketing ads for the Display Network and YouTube. Learn about Smart Shopping asset management and best practices
- Optional: Click the plus button
- Ensure the video you’d like to show has been uploaded to YouTube. Then add the YouTube link by using the search feature or paste the YouTube URL. Learn best practices for including videos
- Preview some of your potential ads. Since responsive ads are built to reach across almost any ad space on the Display Network, they can show in thousands of layouts.
- Click Save.
Smart shopping campaigns use machine learning, which takes time to optimize your campaign for your specific budget, products, and audience. For that reason, we recommend you give a new campaign time to adapt and optimize before making any changes.
Next steps
Once you’ve set up your Smart Shopping campaign, there are things you can do to maximize its performance. Learn more about optimizing a Smart Shopping campaign
Try these steps first:
- Set up conversion tracking with transaction-specific values so you can track when your ads lead to sales on your website. To measure performance and get the best optimization, you will need an active, verified conversion tracking tag marked as “Include in Conversions”. Learn more about setting up conversion tracking for your website
- Add the Google tag to your website and have a remarketing list of at least 100 active users and a new user in the last 2 days associated with your account. This will allow your ads to be used for dynamic remarketing, which lets you personalize ads for people who have visited your website before. If you use Google Analytics, you can link to your Google Analytics account and set up tags there instead of using the Google tag. You aren’t required to tag any non-commercial pages of your site.