Google Ads Smart Display Campaign Tutorial Step-By-Step

Key Takeaways

what's up everyone welcome to the surfside ppc youtube channel today i'm going to be going over smart display campaigns in google ads so they're a fairly new type of display campaign that you can create so i'm going to go over some of the benefits and go through the step-by-step process of creating one of these campaigns so you want to start in your google ads account and in order to run a successful smart display campaign you want to start by coming into tools and settings and making sure under measurement you have conversion tracking setup it's important to come in here and make sure you have at least one conversion action here that you're optimizing for so my main conversion action for this account is outbound clicks so if i'm running campaigns that's what i want to drive are outbound clicks i want people to come to my website and click off to some of the affiliates that are on my website so you want to make sure you're tracking for your conversion and you want to make sure that it's included in conversions here otherwise what you can do is create conversion action sets which will allow you to optimize for multiple conversions at the same time so that's where you want to start is with conversion tracking i'll put video a video in the description where i went over conversion tracking in the past and you can also watch my google display ads tutorial and my google ads tutorial for 2020 if you want to learn more about importing conversions from google analytics so for me i just create goals in google analytics and import them directly into my google ads account now once you do that you're ready to get started with smart display campaigns so when you come in here to the main screen i usually start in the campaign screen and i'll click on the plus sign to create a new campaign now when you come here what you generally want to do is start by using sales or leads as your main goal so for me my main goal is leads if you're driving sales on an ecommerce website or you're driving sales of a specific product that you are selling by yourself on your website then you would use that as the goal that's going to make this campaign successful to you now keep in mind if you do want to take advantage of smart display campaigns and you're not using conversion tracking you can use the website traffic goal click on display under campaign type and one of the options is going to be smart display campaigns but the one that they give you is standard display campaign when you choose website traffic as your goal now if i come in here and i choose leads and we choose display for our campaign type it's going to recommend a smart display campaign because advertisers with a campaign goal of leads or sales on average get more conversions using a smart display campaign so you would come in here select smart display campaign put our website in here so for mine it's going to be farmhousegoals.com and we're going to click on continue now before we start building this campaign what i want to do is go over some of the benefits of smart campaigns and some things to keep in mind so number one why use smart display ads if you're using conversion tracking they'll help you drive additional conversions and you can expand your targeting beyond remarketing so if you want to use remarketing you're going to create a standard display campaign and then create your remarketing audiences and create ads that are going to be served to those audiences with smart display ads google ads is going to go out and find people who are not in your remarketing audiences so people who are going to be the most likely to convert on your website google is going to attempt to find them and it's going to use automated targeting to find those people and then as you drive conversions the bidding strategy that you're going to be using are smart bidding strategies like target cpa and target return on ad spend which are going to help you drive conversions and conversion value now next i want to go over a little bit more about targeting so again there's no remarketing and the way targeting works so this is a quote directly from google ads automated targeting uses website visitor landing page insights and your search campaign's best performing keywords to automatically target customers across the web so the more data google ads has about your website the better targeting is going to work if you have no conversions on your website you've never ran a search campaign before and you just created a new landing page then it's going to take some time to drive some conversions and get some data in order to improve your targeting so essentially if we come over here to my landing page and you can see here i'm going to be driving people to this landing page so it's a promo page i have an april sale going on i want people to come to this page see some of the different categories here shop my website and take advantage of this offer if i don't have any data yet there's no conversion data for google ads to go off of what they're going to do is look at my landing page and try to find people who are going to be the most likely to convert on my website based on the content on my landing page so you want to keep that in mind as you set up your first smart display campaign the more data that google ads has the better that targeting is going to be in the very beginning of your campaign otherwise there is going to be a bit of a learning curve as you start to drive more conversions on your website now last but not least is going to be bidding so i want to go over bidding a little bit so ultimately with this type of campaign type if you're driving leads and sales you're going to be bidding for conversions or conversion value so if you're driving sales you're generally bidding for conversion values if you're just driving leads whether it's phone calls form fills bookings or outbound clicks in my case then you're going to be bidding for conversions which is going to be a target cpa bid strategy where you're focusing on conversions at a set cost per action so essentially if a conversion is worth ten dollars for me then i want to drive conversions at less than ten dollars every single time otherwise if you're driving sales where you have conversion value so for example maybe you have a product on your website for a hundred dollars a product on your website for ten dollars what you wanna do is pull in that value so that you can actually focus on conversion value because ultimately it makes more sense to drive less conversions if they're giving you a higher value so if you're able to pull in that data that's where you want to use target return on ad spend the other option is maximize conversions where you're just focused on driving as many conversions as possible within your budget i prefer the target cpa bid strategy type but maximize conversions is another option that you can use so now we're going to get into building a campaign so you want to get start name your campaign and set your location so location is wherever your customers are one of the things i generally do is coming here to location options and choose people in or regularly in my targeted locations for this campaign i want to target united states and canada but what you essentially want to do is just choose a location where you want people to see your ads exclude i just generally keep this as people in my excluded locations okay so next as we scroll down is language targeting so you want to select the languages that your customers speak here so for this i'm going to choose english keeps going down next is going to be bidding so you're going to see here what do you want to focus on conversions or if we click on the drop down here is going to be conversion value so if you're pulling in revenue you want to use conversion value in my case i'm optimizing for conversions and i want to set a target cost per action of seven dollars so i want to try to drive conversions for seven dollars or less and you can see once i enter that it's going to say this campaign will use the target cpa bid strategy to help me get the most conversions at or below my target of seven dollars i'm gonna be paying for clicks so that means every time someone clicks on my ad it's gonna cost me money so next we're gonna scroll down the budget so let's just say for this campaign i wanna spend ten dollars per day so that means looking at my target cpa of seven dollars hopefully i can drive a conversion or two per day and hope increase my budget over time and decrease my target cpa over time that's ultimately your goal with any types of google ads campaign so we're going to keep coming down dynamic ads you can use a data feed for personalized ads so this can again be very useful for e-commerce websites you can use a data feed and actually target people based on the products that they're visiting on your website in this case i'm not going to be using dynamic ads so we're going to come down to additional settings you can use start and end dates this is one of the main things i like to use here is conversions so if you're using the include in conversion settings then all the conversion actions i showed you before in my account google ads is going to optimize for what i prefer to do is choose conversion actions for my campaign select a specific conversion action and i'm going to be using outbound clicks here and we're going to click on save so i'm just optimizing for outbound clicks that's going to be the conversion that i want to drive for this smart display campaign and when we're targeting talking about target cpa that's going to be the action that i want people to take on my website is outbound clicks so you want to make sure you set your conversion here otherwise you can just use the account level include in conversion settings if you want to optimize for every single conversion you've imported into your google ads account next is going to be content exclusions you're going to see here show ads on all content so one thing you might want to do is exclude some of these sensitive content options you can exclude some of these content types it really depends on what your goals are with your brand so you can optimize out of showing ads on content that doesn't fit your brand so i'm just going to exclude sensitive content and we're going to keep going with our campaign next is going to be ad group so we're just gonna do automated targeting and you're gonna see here when you're creating a smart display campaign this is the quote i showed you earlier automated targeting uses website visitor landing page insights and your search campaign's best performing keywords to automatically target customers across the web so you don't actually have to set your targeting at all every other aspect of building your campaign in terms of a smart display campaign is really important for success besides setting your targeting you're essentially giving the keys to google to say go out and find customers across the google display network who are going to be the most likely to convert on my website okay we'll keep scrolling down now the next other important thing that you need to do is create responsive display ads and i would say the best practice here is just create one ad group you can set your ad group any name you want and what you can do is use multiple responsive display ads in that ad group just to see what's going to perform the best for you so when you're creating a responsive display ad the main benefit of these types of display advertisements is you can add multiple images multiple logos you can add videos you can add up to five headlines which you want to use take advantage of every single headline you can add you can add up to five description lines so again you want to take advantage of all these different description lines set your business name under more options you can use a call to action and you can also set custom colors to make sure the color matches your brand on the advertisements that you're building as you build your advertisements over here you're going to start to see a preview right in this area on websites and apps and you can look at different key ad formats so image ads native ads and text ads so you can also set mobile and desktop just to make sure your advertisement looks good on all these different placements across the google display network now if we look over here on the right hand side the other thing you're going to be able to see here is based on my targeting settings a daily budget of 10 and a target cpa of seven dollars so this is cut off a little bit but you can see weekly estimates is going to be between 470 clicks and 1.6 000 clicks so i'm going to be able to drive a lot of clicks for a small cost so i like to look at my weekly estimates just to have some type of forecast of the data that i can expect as i run my campaign so next what we're going to do is create our responsive display ad and we'll come over here and just start at the top with our final url so the other thing you're going to see here is add strength so once your ad is strong enough you've added enough headlines description lines and images you're going to have a complete here so you want to make sure you have that complete here before you launch your advertisement so first you want to start with your final url this is going to be our landing page where we're sending traffic so we're going to enter that here and final url images and logos so you need at least one square image and one landscape image and then you want to use at least one logo but you generally want to use more than that so you can choose up to 15 images and five logos you should take advantage of every single image and every single logo you can use it's only going to help add performance so you can start by scanning your website for images and logos and if we click here you can see the image requirements the minimum required for a landscape image is 600 by 314 pixels and then for a square the minimum required is 300 by 300 but what's recommended is at least one 1200 by 628 and at least one 1200 by 1200 i would recommend using as many as possible logo so you have a landscape 4x1 logo minimum required size of 512x128 and then you have a square logo minimum required size of 128x128 so you can start by uploading images if you don't have images that you can scan from your website if you start to use different images you can just come over here to recently used and anything you've uploaded will show up here so the dimensions don't have to be perfect for example this one's 1500 by 785 so if we click here on use image i can use this as a image as a 1.9 one by one and you can use it as a square so you can select two different ratios so we can move this around if we want and you can see this fits perfectly for a landscape so we're going to select two ratios so now when we come over to your assets you're gonna see we have two of our 15 images selected one landscape one square so we're gonna come back over here again to recently used and add a couple more images here so we'll come down here and we'll use this image so we're gonna do with the 1.9 one by one and we're also going to use a square we'll come over here to the left hand side so we have some bedding some furniture a lamp in here so we'll select two ratios again we're going to use this one as well so again both of the different ratios that we can use and we'll use this one here maybe for this one we'll just use square it looks the best as a square image so we'll select one ratio next we're going to choose our logos so you want to set your logo this is an 800 by 200 dimension so we can use it as our four by one logo select one ratio next what we can do is choose this one as our other logo so when you click on it up here at the top you're going to see use as image or use as logo so we want to make sure we're using this as a logo and it's going to be our one by one logo here so we can select this one ratio so now when we come over to your assets you can see we have two different logos so i usually just use two out of the five logos but you can use logos with different colors and different styles different designs if you want to we have seven out of 15 images so we're going to come back to recently used we'll set a few more images here so we'll take this one right here we'll use it as a square image select one ratio keep coming down we'll look at a few more so we'll take this one use both images so we'll come over here to the left select two ratios so that's good to get started we have 10 out of 15 images 2 out of 5 logos we'll click on save so next you can add videos to your advertisements so if you click on videos all you need to do is upload a video to youtube and then take that youtube url and enter it directly here so once you enter that url it's going to show up just like these do right here so these are different ones that i've entered so let's just say i want to choose this as my video we'll click on save so now i have a video to my advertisement so you can see as you start going through some of these different previews the video will be a different type of advertisement here that plays a video as people are scrolling across the google display network on their favorite websites and you can see this might be what it looks like so you have a little video here obviously it wouldn't fit this type of advertisement at all but you can use videos if you have a good video that's also going to enhance your advertisement in this case i don't so i'm going to remove this here just come in here select the x we have no video assets we'll click on save so we have our image assets here next you want to add up to five headlines you get 30 characters for each headline you get a long headline here so you get 90 characters for every long headline but you only can select one long headline and then you get five description lines and that you get 90 characters with as well business name call to action and custom colors so i'm going to enter all that information now okay so we've added our headlines we have five different headlines here essentially i'm just going to be showing my dif my promotion my april sale 10 off and free shipping that's what i really want to highlight in my advertisement so the images are going to show people different types of farmhouse styles and then the text is going to talk to people about the sale so if we come down here you can see i have five different headlines here mostly pretty similar come down we have a long headline so usually what i'll do with the long headline is no punctuation and then the description lines is where i'll use some exclamation points and more punctuation than i use in the long headline and i never use punctuation in the headline so if we keep scrolling down here we have our descriptions so you want to make sure you fill out all five descriptions enter your business name keep coming down we have our call to action text so mine is just going to be shop now and then you have custom colors so i have a main color so this is my main brand color and then an accent color as well so if we come to the top we can look at some of these different advertisements and you can see these ads look pretty good now so we can scroll through here and look at some of the different options so these are ads that would look good across the display network so that's essentially what you want to do and once you create your advertisement you can add it to the ad group so you have one responsive display ad here one of the things i like to do is just duplicate this advertisement update it with different images and then i might even duplicate it again and update it with different ad copy in this case i'm just going to create this one advertisement and that's the last step we need to do so all we need to do next is click on create campaign and that's going to launch our smart display campaign okay you can see congratulations your campaign is ready so if we go to continue to campaign you can see we have our smart display campaign here so essentially what you want to do when you're running campaigns is if you want to reach people beyond your remarketing audiences you can use a smart display campaign and then you want to run a completely separate remarketing campaign so you can see i have my remarketing campaign separate so this allows you to set a different budget for remarketing and then for people who haven't visited your website yet you can use a smart display campaign and google ads will go out and find people who are going to be the most likely to convert on your website so that's smart display campaigns once you start getting some data in here you can come in and you can look at some of the different placements where your ads are running and you can remove some of these different placements as you go but you really don't have to do too much in terms of targeting when it comes to optimization so what you want to do is just come to your ads and extensions and just make sure you're running multiple responsive display ads use different images maybe try and add with the video and you can see what's going to perform the best for you over time so if you have any questions about this please leave them in the comment section thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the surfside ppc youtube channel