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Should I reallocate all my ad spend into my smart shopping campaign?
Hello Everyone,
I hired someone to manage my business’s Google Ads about 4 months ago. Prior to that, I created a smart shopping campaign which was performing decently. Since he started, he has created a standard search campaign, standard shopping campaign, and has at least one A/B testing campaign running at all times.
Throughout the last 4 months, the smart shopping campaign I created is outperforming all of his campaigns combined. By a lot. I’d say +95% of all conversions are through the smart shopping campaign, but it uses about half of the ad spend.
Is he potentially doing things in the background that’s causing the smart shopping campaign I created to perform this well, or is it not possible to heavily optimize these?
I’m wondering if it would be better to put most or all of the ad spend into that smart shopping campaign and let him go (use his fee for more ads). I want to make sure performance in general is not going to go down the gutter without his management before I make any decisions.
Thanks for your help!
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4 Replies
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Smart Shopping campaigns don’t require that much management. You can check the change history to see what he is doing there and if he is doing anything at all. I am suspecting he launched the standard shopping campaign without removing its products from the smart shopping one. This means they are running in parallel on the same products. Google will naturally favor the smart over standard.
For Search and other channels, it’s usually the case that if your website is running on e-commerce and has Google Shopping implemented, you’re more likely to get better results on Shopping than anything else Google. I don’t remember one single B2C e-commerce client of mine where Search fared better than Shopping, but that’s my personal experience.
Now does it make sense to fire the guy? I’d rather not comment to be honest. 🙂
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Check the search terms which are driving the conversions into both the smart and regular shopping campaigns. It could be that Google is serving the smart campaign a bunch of Brand terms (like your business’s name) resulting in a bunch of super efficient conversions. If the regular shopping campaign is relying solely on, or mostly on, non brand terms it wouldn’t be a fair comparison.
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You only have 3 levers for smart shopping: SKU, bid strategy and budget. The big thing to be careful of is smart shopping can degrade in performance over time and need someone to fix/change things. Most of our clients have a mix of smart and standard shopping campaigns running. You can put all your ad spend into smart shopping, but just becareful that you don’t see a massive dip in performance months from.
One last point, smart shopping will always do better than standard shopping. The reason for this is smart shopping including remarketing audiences automatically. That alone will make performance appear better out from the gate.
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I am concerned he launched standard shopping – is it the exact same products being advertised?
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