How to Generate Sales Using Smart Campaigns

Smart Campaigns help small businesses with lots on their hands generate more sales with a few clicks. This advertising type distributes your ads across the Search and Display Network, YouTube, Gmail, and partner websites. This gives your business more visibility and the opportunity to meet your sales targets.

How does Smart Campaign work?

To start benefitting from a Smart Campaign, first, you should select the Smart Campaign option under campaign type. Then set your bid strategy (area of performance for Google to focus on). Follow this with setting your theme keywords, including the necessary creative elements (text, images, number, links, etc.), and your budget.

In Smart Campaign, your bid strategy falls under:

• Store visits,
• Website visits,
• And phone calls.

 
Depending on your bid strategy, Google will optimise your bid to get the most conversions (ad’s goal fulfilment).

How can Smart Campaign generate sales for my business?

Once your ad is up and running, Smart Campaign uses a wide range of data to determine which audiences and keywords are most likely to convert, what terms to spend more of your budget on, and which to spend less on.

This strategy allows Smart Campaign to yield an 89% increase in conversion and a 32% drop in cost per conversion for businesses running large campaigns. However, its automated nature prevents advertisers from knowing which ad copy, image, or keyword is underperforming.

So, if your ad contains poor images, texts, or keywords with a broad meaning, you wouldn’t know which of these is underperforming, leading to little returns on your exhausted budget.

How can my business overcome this drawback of Smart Campaign?

You could start by selecting keywords that tie in perfectly to what you do – E.g. “PPC management agency” instead of “PPC advertising” for a PPC management firm. Also, put more thought into the quality of your ad copy and images.

That aside, if you are looking for more campaign freedom and insights alongside the benefits of Smart Campaign, then Enhanced Cost Per Click (CPC) is a better alternative. You can find this metric under the manual CPC bidding strategy.

How does Enhanced CPC work?

Under Enhanced Cost per Click, also known as ECPC, you can manually set your average and max cost per conversion, and monitor your ad performance.

On the ad bidding side, Google gets the right to adjust your bid amount on your set keywords to secure the highest returns in sales.

So, once you set up your ads with ECPC, Google uses its wide range of data to determine which audiences and keywords are likely to convert. Then it adjusts your bid amount accordingly following your set CPC to drive the most sales.

What is the right bidding strategy for my business?

Under the Discovery Campaign, there are only two bidding strategies to choose from.

• Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition/Cost Per Action)
• And Maximise Conversion.

Target CPA

Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Action allows you to set an amount you pay for each customer that converts. It restricts Google to only bring as much conversion as your CPA permits under your daily budget.

To use this strategy, you need to have previous ad campaign performance data. You also need conversion tracking enabled to avoid wasting your budget for little to no returns in sales.

Maximise Conversion

Unlike target CPA, Maximise Conversion enables Google to drive as much conversion as possible for your ad based on your daily budget.

This allows the ad platform to freely implement necessary adjustments on your ad, drawing from its vast data pool on your ideal audience.

See that you have the conversion tracking metric enabled to allow this bid strategy to secure quality conversion for your ad.

When looking to generate the highest returns in sales on the Google discovery campaign type, Maximise Conversion is the best option.