Google Smart Display Campaigns: Why You Need Them

The world of display advertising is undergoing a major upheaval right now, thanks to user privacy concerns, ad blockers, and regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

This wouldn’t be a problem if Display campaigns didn’t work — but they do. The Google Display Network reaches 90% of global internet users, which is why 84% of marketers invest in display advertising.

With all these obstacles, it’s essential that your team is working as smart as possible. You need to be strategizing — exploring new channels, developing new creative, and expanding your reach — not wasting your day away on manual bidding.

Enter Google Smart Display Campaigns.

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What Are Google Smart Display Campaigns?

Google Smart Display campaigns use machine learning to automate your ad creative, bidding, and targeting across the Google Display Network of over 3 million sites and apps.

With just a few pieces of data from you, Google Smart Display campaigns create conversion-driving combinations of ad creative and adjust your bidding, all in real-time. The result? 20% more conversions for about the same ROI.

In a Google case study, hotel search site Trivago loaded in a few headlines, descriptions, and images for their hotel listings in Rome and London. They also input their target CPA and daily budget. Smart Display took it from there, creating over 25,000 custom ad combinations to drive 36% more conversions at the same CPA as their traditional display campaigns.

How to Set Up Google Smart Display Campaigns

Part of the beauty of Google Smart Display campaigns is how easy they are to set up. Here’s what you need to do.

First, you’ll need three things.

Your Campaign Budget. This one’s self-explanatory.
Your Creative Assets. The trick is to make sure they can be used interchangeably with each other. Google recommends adding 1 Long Headline, 5 Headlines, 5 Marketing Images, and 1 Logo. The more you add, the better your Smart Display Campaigns can be customized to your audience.
Your Target CPA. If you currently run Display campaigns, Google recommends starting with a Target CPA that’s similar to the average CPA of your existing campaigns for that product or service. If you currently only use Display campaigns for remarketing, use a Target CPA that’s 20-30% higher. If you’ve only run search campaigns before, use a Target CPA that’s 200% higher.

Now, let’s get your campaign set up.

Click Campaigns on the left side of your Ads dashboard.
In the Campaigns view, click the blue + button to select + New campaign.
Pick your campaign goal (sales, leads, site traffic, product consideration, brand awareness, app promotion, or none).
Select Display as your campaign type.
Select Smart display campaign as your campaign subtype.
Enter your website URL (This field is optional. If you add it, Google will pull images or logos from your landing page. Otherwise, you can leave it blank and upload these assets manually during ad group creation in step 13).
Click the blue Continue button.
On the next screen, enter a name for your campaign.
Choose the locations you want to target.
Set the languages you want to use.
Select the Automated Bid Strategy for your campaign. You can choose from Conversions or Conversion Value.
- If you select Conversions, Target CPA will be your bid strategy. You can choose to pay for clicks, conversions, or views.
- If you select Conversion Value, ROAS will be your bid strategy. You’ll pay for clicks.
Set a daily budget that’s at least 2x your target CPA.
Create an ad group for each product or service you’re advertising.
Click +New Ad to create your responsive display ad. Here you can add images, logos, headlines, and descriptions for your ad (or edit the ones Google pulled from step 6).
Click the blue Create Campaign button!

Want a video to walk you through this process? Check out this step-by-step video by the Google team:

How fast can you expect results from your Google Smart Display Campaign? It depends. Google says the initial learning period can take 2 to 4 weeks, depending on the number of conversions you get. It takes time for your Smart Display Campaign to learn what makes your audience click. For example, do certain ads perform better at different times of day, or on different devices? As your campaign discovers that data, it will automatically adjust your ads accordingly.

During this initial learning period, it’s important to avoid making any changes to your campaign or landing page. You’ve got to let the algorithm do its work!