Smart Display ads are a great way to promote brand awareness and other upper funnel marketing goals. Generally display can drive cheaper traffic to your website in a way that is in line with your branding and imaging. However, display ads can have many different creative requirements and types of assets. Smart Display Ads take the confusion out of this set up process. Smart display campaigns give you a simple solution to managing the variables of display advertising. Using this process you can effortlessly broaden your customer base.
When using a Smart Display campaign you can show ads in almost any format across the Google Display network. This allows you to connect with people at all stages of their purchasing cycle. Covering people with an interest in what you supply all the way through to people who are just about to make a purchase.
The basis of Smart Display campaigns is automation. This automation takes the pain and guesswork out of running display campaigns. Specifically the three automation features are;
- Bidding
- Targeting
- Ad creation
Automated Bidding
Smart display campaigns optimise to set your bids according to the likelihood of conversion in each and every ad auction, seeking to give you the best possible value. The automation uses target CPA as a basis and scales from there. Smart display campaigns can take some time to stabilise depending on how much data you are getting through the campaign and how many conversions this is resulting in. Generally a good rule is to wait for about 50 conversions in order for the machines to work best. If you are not seeing any conversions consider raising your target CPA bid to encourage initial conversions.
Automated Targeting
These campaigns use automated targeting. This means the targeting optimises as your campaigns run. Your ads will increasingly show where they’ll perform best and get the most for your ad spend. Where necessary Smart Display campaigns use dynamic prospecting to match your products and service to specific user profiles.
Automated Ad Creation
Smart display ads are automatically generated from the uploaded assets you provide. This can include headlines, descriptions, logos and images. The benefit to smart display as that they responsively fit into almost all ad spaces across Google’s Display Network.
Smart Display Benefits
One of the key benefits to the smart display campaigns is that the creation is quick and easy. You can create a top performing campaign in minutes. Google states that these campaigns work ‘smarter not harder’. This is because they automatically optimise within days by selecting the best combination of assets to ensure performance. The ads are then served across Google’s Display network and enhanced by dynamic prospecting to match user profiles to your product or service feed.
When To Use Smart Display
There are many situations where you may decide to run Smart display campaigns. A few are listed below:
- If you would like to attract additional customers beyond your manual campaigns
- You have the correct conversion tracking set up
- You are comfortable with remarketing on the display network but want to expand your campaigns to reach people in other stages of the purchasing process
- You’re new to display ads and want a fast set up with high performance
By adopting smart display campaigns you are moving away from the pain of manual bid strategies. You also no longer need to worry about settings such as delivery method and device. Perhaps the most time saving point however, is that you will no longer have to manually create your ads.
What do the ads look like?
The ads that run through Smart display campaigns are responsive and feature on the display network. You control the look of your ads by uploading different assets such as headlines, descriptions, logos and images. Google then uses your assets to serve and optimise dependant on performance across the Display Network. This allows you to expand your reach without having to manually create dozens of ads.
Check Your Smart Display Performance
It is important to understand how your smart display campaigns are performing. You can check your performance by clicking campaigns on the page menu, then click the name of your smart display campaign to see a report of how each one of your assets is performing. Google ranks each asset relative to each other. Each asset will show as either ‘best’, ‘good’ and ‘low’ based on how they have generated conversions. If an asset has a status of learning it means it is still in the process of gathering data
Smart display ads are the solution to your display woes, give them a try today!
