What's the difference between a Standard Shopping campaign, and a Smart Shopping campaign?
When you set up a new Shopping campaign, Google gives you an option on its time.
Smart Shopping or Standard Shopping, and Google really wants you to pick Smart Shopping.
They make it the default first choice, and describe it with enticing terms such as,
"Maximizing your conversion value", "Effortless optimization", "Broader presence".
It then seems to describe Standard Shopping as mundanely as possible.
What's going on here? 🤷‍♂️
Is Smart Shopping the intelligent choice,
used by hip PPC managers, that understand and embrace the future?
Is Standard Shopping the run-of-the-mill choice,
used by unimaginative business owners, still clinging to ancient technologies?
Well, for better or for worse Google has been driving
its platform towards more and more automation for years now.
It strongly and openly believes that machine learning
is superior to humans in almost every area,
and they've steadily removed the strict controls and access to data that people have had for years.
There are many examples of this over the past five years,
including hiding about a third of all search query data,
making it much more difficult to know what people are searching before finding our ads.
Radically loosening how keyword match types work,
favoring their algorithms over your strict control, over search query targeting.
Removing ad positions, and reported data
making it possible to know how you're positioning your ads on the page.
In 2016 Google's CEO announced we would soon be living in an AI-First world,
and that Google was going to become an AI-First company.
We've certainly seen this rolled out in Google ads.
While this lesson isn't about the broader subject of AI and machine learning on ads,
I bring up the concept because nowhere else is it more highlighted than the
difference between Standard Shopping campaigns, and Smart Shopping campaigns.
For the advertiser, in a nutshell,
it's control and access to data, over no control and no access to data.
Let's look at Standard Shopping first.
When you set up a Standard Shopping campaign, you control the bids you want to set, per product.
The locations you want to advertise in, the devices you want to appear on,
the audiences you want to observe and target, and which networks you want to show on.
Google search page and the partner networks, YouTube, Gmail and Discover.
You can also review the search queries that are triggering your ads,
a crucial part of your optimization process.
With Smart Shopping you control locations,
and Google reluctantly only made that allowance for advertisers recently.
Smart Shopping is Google's "Trust us", option don't worry about the audience or network,
don't worry about the bids or scheduling, don't worry about
all that data you use to depend on for optimizations and growth for your business.
We don't want to share that with you because you're going to ask too many questions.
Google's got it from here, just make sure that your credit card is up to date.
The ads may appear anywhere Google feels they should.
On Google's main page, Google's Shopping page, YouTube, Gmail, various search partners.
So that's the difference between Standard Shopping and Smart Shopping
from an advertiser's perspective, but what about from a business perspective?
Well, in the two years or more that Smart Shopping has been available, my team and I,
have been testing it extensively, and what we've found is that it works brilliantly, sometimes.
Other times, it wastes your crucial budget and never finds a way to deliver.
What we've discovered is that generally Standard Shopping campaigns work better when,
your products are more unique, or when the search terms to find your products are more unique.
It's better for brand advertising, something we'll talk about in a future video,
and it's better when your goals are more complex than simple ROAS numbers.
Inversely, Smart Shopping campaigns generally tend to work better when your products are
commonly found in the marketplace, you're not concerned about separating brand traffic from
non-brand traffic, and you simply want Google's machine learning to target a specific ROAS.
That's a simplified and general way web used to approach Smart
Shopping and Standard Shopping campaigns, and generally for a fresh account that doesn't have
any conversion data at all, you'll want to start with Standard Shopping campaigns.
That's because you're likely to make more informed decisions than the machine learning, early on.
However, once your account has built up a decent amount of conversion data,
you'll want to test out Smart Shopping to see how it performs for your store.
Keep in mind that Smart Shopping campaigns always get priority in your Google account.
So traffic to the Standard Shopping campaign will dry up immediately.
Unfortunately, you can't test them side-by-side.
We'll wrap this up with a quote from Frederick Valles,
an ex-Google employee, who wrote the book 'Digital marketing in an AI world'.
"It's for you to figure out if a smart campaign is really the way to go in a specific situation,
and the answer is sometimes no.
Well-managed, but more manual campaign types built on long-standing optimization principles
frequently still work more effectively".
Now, if you're watching this video on YouTube,
this video is actually part of our free Google Shopping course.
It's a free course on our website, that takes you through everything from setting up,
optimizing, and scaling your shopping campaigns to make a lot of sales for your ecommerce store.
It's absolutely free, no signup required.
I'll leave a link down below so you can access it right now.
For the rest of this course, we're going to cover how to set up,
and optimize your Standard Shopping campaigns based on best practices.
From the basic fundamentals, all the way up to the exact strategies we're using to make
millions of dollars with Google Shopping campaigns.
If this video was helpful, please hit the like button,
let us know down below in the comments section.
Otherwise, thanks for watching guys, I'll see you in the next video.
Bye for now.