London: Google announced the rollout of its new advertising tool, Smart Campaigns, to all businesses across the UK.
Smart Campaigns uses machine learning technology to create relevant ads based on information provided by a business, its website, and its Google My Business listing. Businesses can choose the goals they care about most like incoming phone calls, actions such as sales or enquiries on their website, and store visits. Machine learning then goes to work to deliver results, automatically creating sample ads in minutes that can appear across Google Search and over 3 million sites and apps on display. Once the ad campaign is set up, the machine learning technology works to automatically optimise the ad campaign to deliver results the business cares about.
A feature launching later this year that makes this tool especially valuable for small businesses is Image Picker. A business’s existing assets, including images, logos, headlines and descriptions, can be inputted and Smart Campaigns will test combinations of images and text to get the best results from a display ad.
Through Smart Campaigns, advertisers can track how their ads are performing and see how effective they are at attracting potential customers. For instance, they can track the number of times customers have viewed and taken action on their ad, such as clicking it to the business’ website or placing a phone call. Other insights include:
- Impressions of an ad: see how often any version of your ad has been viewed by potential customers.
- Clicks: see how often any version of your ad has been clicked.
- Call clicks: see the number of times that potential customers tapped the ‘Call’ button in your ad from mobile devices. Knowing the approximate number of calls coming from your ad can help you to understand your ad’s effectiveness in driving business.
- Verified calls: see how often you received calls to the Google forwarding number in any version of the ad.
- Map actions: track the number of times that people saw your ad and then clicked your business pin on Google Maps or get directions to your business.
- Analytics goals: by linking your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts, you can use tracking IDs and tags to monitor traffic from your ads.
- Amount spent: see how much your ad has spent in the current month.
- Improve your ad’s performance
- If your ad isn’t performing to your expectations, ask yourself these questions to identify ways to improve it.
Google will continue to add new features to Google Ads that help drive results with ease and simplicity. For instance, it is testing “Auto-Optimised” landing pages: automatically creating web pages for small businesses that are optimised for ads; showcasing the right information about a product or service to match the ad creative. These web pages will be tailored to drive conversions with reporting built in – so small businesses can get the most from their advertising spend.
Please see here for demo product videos, and here for use case studies from SMBs. Below is an image of the service.
