Are Smart Shopping Campaigns Over Smart?

Prior to smart shopping campaigns, marketers relied on standard shopping campaigns for legitimate benefits it was giving to the eCommerce businesses. They became a brilliant way to get your products in front of more people, and they generated a lot of revenue back then.

In 2018, Google launched the Smart Shopping Campaign to make the process of running ad campaigns smoother by automating the process of campaign management. 

What is a smart shopping campaign and how it is beneficial?

Google’s machine learning combines and displays a range of ads across multiple channels, including the Search Network, Display Network, YouTube, and Gmail using your product feed data from the google merchant center.

Smart shopping campaigns are entirely automated and convenient. They use AI and machine learning to construct your Google ads with text and graphics provided by you.

Smart campaign adjusts your bids automatically based on the most effective keywords. It employs an algorithm to target audiences who are ready to buy right now, based on demographic data, location, search history, and previous purchases.

The following are some of the pros of smart shopping campaigns:

1. They are quite simple to set up and encompass a variety of ad kinds, allowing marketers to obtain visibility across both the Google Shopping and Display networks rapidly.
2. Makes your advertisement more appealing to the eyes by experimenting with different image and text combinations from your product feed. 
3. Shoppers want to make an informed buying decision, and with aesthetically revealing, information-rich ads, visitors arrive on your product page with an intent to purchase.
4. It makes use of remarketing approach, thus they work best after you’ve been advertising for a while.

You must be wondering how can they can harm your marketing strategy with such impressive and ideal marketing and promotional benefits! They do, however, have some drawbacks that could eat up a significant portion of your marketing budget. Smart shopping ads are a controversial topic among the google ads marketing agency because they can work successfully for some firms while failing miserably for others.

One of the key disadvantages is that you have very limited control over the campaigns once they are set up; the only control you have is to tweak the budget and change the target ROAS for the campaign, or you can make changes to your product feed in the merchant center to optimize it.

This drains your important and valuable marketing budgets but brings in the useless clicks and traffic. Certain niches necessitate the use of exclusions in their targeting but smart shopping gives you limited control over your campaigns.

Other limitations of the smart shopping campaigns are :

1. You can’t change your bids for different products or SKUs, or choose your target audience, Google handles all of this for you.

2. Smart Shopping does not support negative keywords. You might be spending money on irrelevant search traffic if you don’t use negative keywords. 
3. No access to the search terms that are bringing in the clicks. That makes another trust issue for marketers.
4. Network placements are beyond your control. You’ll have to pay for clicks from irrelevant traffic as they have no feature to filter out undesirable networks.
5. No control over ad scheduling. Google chooses the ideal times and days to spend your money, and you have no control over the process.
6. Authority over which devices to be targeted is not in your hands. You’ll have to pay to run advertisements on desktops and tablets if your intended audience is primarily using the mobile phone.
7. Attribution modeling has its own limitations here. It’s impossible to link conversion or clicks on ads to any particular channel as it combines Shopping campaigns with display advertisements and retargeting thus you will have no clear idea about this.

The key concern of handing over control of your Shopping campaigns to Google is the lack of transparency that results. Smart Shopping is a “black box” that keeps your valuable search term data concealed. This data can help to grow and steer the online business in areas like SEO, other paid advertising channels, feed optimization, and new product creation if it was available.

Giving eCommerce PPC services the ease of setting up, smart shopping campaigns deprives us of a significant amount of valuable data and control over our campaigns. We need data as marketers to optimize our various marketing channels. And nowadays, data-driven decisions are guaranteed to have positive consequences for the business. 

For certain businesses, Smart campaigns are not able to perform well due to these reasons and we are just giving up our valuable marketing budget waiting for Google Machine learning and AI to perform some sort of magic by bringing in the bulk of conversions.

However, as per the Google updates they are rolling out a smart shopping campaign and will upgrade all the smart shopping campaigns to performance max, let us see what this will offer to all PPC marketing companies.