A Definitive Guide to Smart Shopping Campaigns: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

A smart shopping campaign is a brand new thought. The standard shopping campaign has ruled the google shopping world by providing virtual micro-market vendors ample scope to maximize the reach and conversion rate. The Smart shopping campaign has made things much trouble-free and effortless.

Smart shopping campaigns(SMC) work as a power booster to supplement the google shopping platform. Standard or classic shopping campaigns provide you with the ultimate control over your campaign, but you may find it a little bit difficult to run the whole campaign and carry out the manual updation process.

Automated services offered by the Smart shopping campaign need less human-power and reduced clock hours. You only need to enter the campaign objective and the budget. The smart shopping campaign will efficiently manage the rest of the things.

Nuts and Bolts of Smart Shopping Campaign

The SMC uses machine learning and advanced features of the technology to set up a shopping campaign that spans across all the search engines and social media platforms. In this AI-based campaign, google decides the visibility of your ads, where it should appear, and the targeted audience.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

By using the data you feed on the google merchant center, the SMC merges it with machine learning to generate automated and creative ads. Also, the relevance of the ads is not determined just through the search keywords. It is also determined according to the product feed and other information you provide on Google Merchant Centre.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly with Smart Shopping Campaigns

A smart shopping campaign is an innovative thought that could generate overnight traffic and conversion on your online store. But, its brand new stature also makes it vulnerable to some technical issues and lack of transparency by revealing the bad and ugly sides.

The Good: How it enhances the store traffic and Conversion

Smart shopping campaigns are easily manageable and inculcate a variety of ad types ( Product shopping ads, local inventory ads, display ads) by increasing visibility across the google shopping platform and display network platforms.

Here are some top-grade benefits of smart shopping campaigns that will help to retain the brand value and traffic on your site

1. Helps micro-market dealers with small budgets to start a campaign at a low maintenance charge.
2. Low maintenance services cover essential works like setting up automated campaign goals, keyword research, and bidding strategies.
3. Automated bidding strategy saves time and guarantees results.
4. Takes a shorter optimization period and yields better results.
5. Evaluate campaign performance by reporting conversion value and Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS).
6. Invites new customers by working across multiple channels
7. Advertisers are only paid per click.

The Bad: Complications and out of hand domains

Well, it is remarkable that you can easily set up your smart shopping campaigns, but does it provide 100% independence from the standard shopping campaign? As said, it is a new venture that could yield better results if used wisely, but some bad aspects could trigger growth prospects.

Complications appear when you are unsure of where your ads appear. The automated services take things out of your control in some cases. Here are some pitfalls you need to be aware of while optimizing a smart shopping campaign.

1. Negative keywords cannot be found in the Smart shopping campaign. This will promote irrelevant search traffic by wasting the money you spend on search optimization.
2. Smart shopping campaigns lack efficiency to determine the domains with higher ad performance. Usually, Display networks cater to low conversion rates compared with ads on Gmail and other platforms. This will lead to a budget issue in the long run.
3. Location specification cannot be optimized in a Smart shopping campaign. You can provide the country name, but you can’t include the region or local areas.
4. In a smart shopping campaign, you don’t have an option to schedule the ad timing. If your customers make the maximum purchase between 6 and 7, you can’t arrange the timing as per the traffic.
5. Automation is a bad option if you need to personalize the campaign by excluding the worthless categories. In the case of device preference, if you are focusing on mobile users, you can’t make a choice between the devices to run ads. This will also prevent you from arranging bid adjustments.

The Ugly: Lacks Transparency and Control

It is imperative to know where we spend our money. We should be able to analyze the strategies and the platforms through which our products are promoted. The target audience is also a crucial part of the business. If we fail to reach up to the customers, we may lag in the race.

If we want to leap ahead, we need to understand the critical area where we could make an impact. But, any such improvement is impossible if we are unable to get the right feedback and audience report.

Let’s see some worst drawbacks of smart shopping campaign that hinder progress and conversion:

1. Search query reports are significant data that let you know the efficiency of the keywords you use. But in a smart shopping campaign, you can’t get access to these data.
2. The direct automation process in the smart shopping campaign reduces transparency and eliminates any scope for improvement. In smart shopping campaigns, essential data and analysis reports are hidden, thus preventing us from framing improvement strategies.
3. Conversion tracking data is an important segment to understand the nature of your sale. It includes the data on phone conversations, store visits and online purchases to help in the future optimization process. But SMC lacks clarity over these data thus hindering any sort of progress.
4. Product optimization and segmentation of products according to the relevance, product type, brand and category are necessary to stay in the competition. But it requires a detailed study of google ads format. Long procedures involved in product division and running separate campaigns make vendors uncomfortable with Smart shopping Campaigns.
5. Our goal and value get affected if we can’t control the product bidding. The smart shopping campaign automatically considers all available products in one campaign. There may be high-value products, and the products you want to sell immediately. All these will be treated equally without any margin.
6. If you want to bid a product for a lower price to compete with the market trends then you don’t have any option left. The lower-priced product completely gets excluded from the ad campaign if you reduce even a single penny out of it.
7. Automation seems to be a tricky concept to trap the advertisers. We are relieved of time-consuming updation tasks, but in effect, we handover all the essential services to AI-based machine learning, and we are removed from framing goal-oriented strategies.

How to handle smart shopping campaigns smartly?

Optimum use of SMC can be made if you work smartly rather than working hard. Here are some top-notch methods to sideline the complications by utilizing the benefits of SMC

• Study the nuts and bolts of segmented smart shopping campaigns.
• Work in tandem with traditional shopping campaigns and segmented smart shopping campaigns.
• Fix smart bidding for traditional shopping and smart shopping. Traditional shopping won’t work until your smart shopping budget gets exhausted.

Final Note

A smart shopping campaign is an effective way to boost conversion, remarketing audiences, and promote products across multiple channels. It has its good side, the bad side, and the ugly side. It doesn’t mean that a smart shopping campaign is a worthless marketing tool. You can bring the optimum result by working in tandem with a standard shopping campaign.

The assistance of a digital marketing consultancy can help you to generate a positive impact using the shopping campaigns. At eComIntegrate, you will find paid advertising services that help to boost revenue and re-engage the audience.

[nerdy-form:11564]