How do the two programs compare, and how will advertisers be impacted?
For years, Google has pushed Smart campaigns to small business owners as a way to easily manage online advertising. This type of campaign was designed to simplify the advertising process for small businesses by automating tasks like ad creation, targeting, and bidding. It requires minimal setup and ongoing management, making it a popular ad choice for busy business owners managing their own campaigns, despite its limited customizations and less control over targeting and optimizations.
Users began noticing in August 2024 that their Smart campaigns were being discontinued and automatically integrated into Performance Max campaigns. Performance Max is a more advanced advertising option that leverages machine learning and automation to optimize campaign performance across multiple channels and ad formats. Unlike Smart campaigns, it allows advertisers to reach their target audience across various channels, including search, display, and video. Performance Max offers various targeting options, allowing advertisers to reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and online behavior. It also supports multiple ad formats, including text, image, video, and responsive ads.
Smart vs. Max
While Performance Max campaigns offer businesses the opportunity to be found in more online channels such as YouTube and Gmail, they often require more time and digital marketing expertise to manage effectively compared to Smart campaigns. We expect this update to leave Smart campaign users struggling to understand how to set up their campaigns in a way that will not leave them losing money on poorly performing ads, simply due to the steep learning curve required to set up campaigns effectively.
When managed correctly, Performance Max campaigns can be extremely impactful. This is because Performance Max learns and optimizes based on the goals you establish within Google Ads. For example, if you are a tour guide service that sells online bookings, you obviously would like to show your ads to those ready to book. By configuring "online purchases" as a goal in the Google Ads platform, the campaign will optimize towards reaching potential customers most likely to book a trip. This optimization is achieved by analyzing data based on user behavior, demographics, and search patterns of those who have booked a trip from your ads program in the past. Google then will adjust your ad placements accordingly. This means that your campaign performance is reliant not only on the accurate configuration of your goals within Google Ads (which is not an easy-to-understand process) but it is also essential to ensure that your ads are generating enough conversions initially for the AI system to optimize effectively.
The sweet spot of Smart campaigns has been their simplicity of use for advertisers wishing to maximize reach and generate leads or sales quickly. Performance Max, on the other hand, is ideal for advertisers who are looking to optimize campaign performance across multiple channels and formats while achieving specific business objectives, such as online lead forms or customer acquisitions.
What does Google have to say?
Google has not provided a date for this transition which is already underway, so it will be up to advertisers to monitor their accounts. However, Google did release the following statement on August 15, 2024: “As Google evolves its ads offerings, Smart campaign functionality is transitioning into Performance Max. Performance Max provides all the same benefits of Smart campaigns and more—advertise across all of Google from a single campaign, take advantage of Google AI, and get reliable results tailored to your business's goals. This upgrade may drive even higher return on investment, to take advantage of Google AI and optimize towards your advantage of Google.”
How to know if your Google Ads are running in a Smart campaign?
Check your Account: Open Campaign / Insights and look for campaign "Type:" at the top. If it says "Smart", then you're in Smart mode.
The Impact
Here at Rooted Rock, we don’t utilize Google’s Smart campaigns so this will not have an impact on our clients. However, Smart campaigns are heavily used by many businesses, and we expect that as Smart campaigns are systematically converted to Performance Max, thousands of campaigns will be live online achieving sub-par performance.
If you’ve been impacted or are worried you might be, we’re here to help! Our team of Google Ads specialists is ready to connect with you to discuss your campaign goals and objectives. Let us demonstrate how expert Performance Max management can enhance the success of your pay-per-click advertising!
About the Author
Paula Keck is head of Agency Operations and Project Management at Rooted Rock Marketing. She is passionate about industry innovation and uses her expertise to guide her teams to success.
About the Editor
Shelly Cihan is Founder and Lead Strategist at Rooted Rock Marketing. For over a decade she has dedicated her professional career to learning, executing, and speaking about SEO and Digital marketing.
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