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Smart campaigns for small business Along with Google’s recent rebranding of AdWords to Google Ads, they announced the arrival of a new automated campaign type for small businesses, called Smart Campaigns. This campaign type, now available in the US, is built on top of AdWords Express, and according to Google, it can produce significantly better results. For now, this will become the default campaign type for new advertisers. The target users of this type of campaign might have chosen AdWords Express or Local Service Ads in the past, and those options will remain available until further notice from Google. If a small business decides to work with an agency or wants to venture into PPC management, it can still opt for the full Google Ads experience. This means they can choose from varying levels of automation and make decisions about where to trade off using machine learning to drive results with manual management that provides more control.

What is automated In the case of Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA, Target ROAS and Enhanced CPC, Google automatically predicts the likelihood of conversions by looking at auction-time signals including device, location, language, dayparts and more. These predictions feed the automated bids that are used for every unique auction. What still needs to be done manually While Google can predict changes in conversion rate and conversion value based on a variety of factors that are widely applicable across a range of advertisers, these systems don’t yet consider unique factors that impact individual advertisers. This means that advertisers should supplement “automated” bid strategies with a management methodology that changes targets based on business-specific conversion factors. Things like flash sales, coverage in the media, weather, social media buzz and so on can all impact how an ad campaign converts, but these factors may not be apparent to Google’s machine learning, so the advertiser who is aware of these factors must do active bid management. But instead of managing things by changing a max CPC bid, management now entails changing the target.