How to implement smart Shopping campaigns?

Smart Shopping campaigns associate an online vendor’s Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts, to create autonomous advertising campaigns requiring hardly any management (or even none at all). By broadcasting the ads on all of Google’s networks (Shopping, Display, YouTube and Gmail), these smart campaigns help improve your products’ visibility and maximise sales. How does the Smart Shopping function work?

Before launching a smart Shopping campaign, you need to meet a certain number of conditions:

• own a Google Ads and a Google Merchant Center account with an approved product flow in Google Shopping format.
• have configured your product flow with regular updates (maximum every 30 days).
• have activated a conversion follow-up tag on your e-commerce site.
• have added a “global site tag” to your e-commerce site.
• have a list of at least 100 active users associated to your account, with a view to ensuring dynamic remarketing.
• respect the terms of use required for Shopping ads.

Implementing smart Shopping campaigns: what to do

So long as you satisfy all the above-mentioned conditions, you then need to follow these steps:

1. Create a new campaign in AdWords.
2. Choose a “Shopping” campaign and “Sales” objective.
3. Select the Google Merchant Center account you wish to associate, as well as the targeted country.
4. Select “Smart Shopping campaign”.
5. Allocate a name and budget to your campaign. You can set a goal for your return on ad spent (target ROAS), or let Google manage this aspect alone (in which case the platform will aim to maximise conversion value).
6. Choose the products or groups of products to be promoted through your smart Shopping campaign. Leave this field empty if you want all your products to be included. You can always change this once the campaign has been launched.
7. Import your business logo (if you have not yet done so in the Merchant Center), and an image representing your activity. You can also add a text.
8. Add a short title (25 characters max.), a long title and a description (90 characters max. each), as well as a landing URL.
9. Preview the ads as displayed within the network.