Have you heard about ‘Smart Display’ campaigns yet?

June 30th, 2017 | 3 min

Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it – it’s new to a lot of people. However, we have been keeping an ear to the ground with the latest developments in Display advertising.

Recently, we saw that there was a new ‘AdWords Experience’ reporting tool added to the platform. This is very useful in assisting campaign managers in being more creative and developing adverts which sit better within the guidelines that Google sets out for everyone to achieve.

There are plenty of AdWords specialists (now known as Google Ads specialists) who are experiencing a sudden down turn in exposure and success when, not long ago, they were quietly celebrating. However, we must bow to the will of Google when it sets out to change the status-quo of operation.

Now that we know about the movement towards user and crawler experience, it’s worth informing you that Google has more up its sleeve; Smart Display campaigns. This is new because it is using machine learning to accomplish its goal. Effectively, this is going to create a whole new world for advertisers to peek into and get involved with.

Imagine you have managed to build an AI that is so complex, it can tell whether or not the Ads you have created are going to be successful and will it cope with the new strategy in place.

The best bit about Smart Display is that the system is pretty much automated!

Automation is ‘KING’ to Google when it comes to PPC, and it will never back down from simplifying a process. Nor will they back down from complicating it further too.

The Google Display Network (GDN) takes on 3 million apps and website, a crossover from popular websites to the latest gaming apps. With the perpetual evolution of Google and the Display Network in particular, there is plenty of movement for adapting to new requirements and further evolution of Google’s limitations.

Some campaign managers using Smart Display campaigns are already seeing an average increase in conversions at the same relative cost. This has been found by running Smart vs Standard display Ads.

Trivago, for example, has been using Smart Ads to reach out to their audience. Since ‘remarketing’ is so informative of the journey a visitor goes on after visiting their website, the information is absolutely vital to condense and communicate effectively.

Since they started using these types of adverts, they have seen an increase of around 36% in conversions. At the same relative CPA (cost per acquisition).

The testing stage showed that Adwords (now Google Ads) took it upon itself to create 25,000 tailored ads and showed them to visitors who were looking to travel – specifically looking at hotels.

BUT

There is a trade off. Essentially, you are leaving the campaign, in this specific setting, to Google to manage and choose the content it thinks you should display to your customers. So when you think about the increase in CTR that you will see from this, is that traffic worth the cost? Does it end up as wasted clicks? The evidence suggests otherwise. It all sounds like a perfect automated dream.

The movement on this process is somewhat slow as this was launched in 2016, and only a few advertisers have had the opportunity to discover the possibilities and trends.

We can help you with Smart Displays

At Brave, we think it’s usually best to stay in control of a campaign, especially an automated process, and keep a keen eye out for any change in detail. A free piece of advice would be to manage a standard setup alongside your Smart setup. This will give you comparable data of which achieves the best result.