Google Ads offers e-commerce advertisers two types of Shopping campaigns: Standard and Smart. Each time you create a Shopping campaign, the first step is to select which of these two types of campaigns you want to run. You can run both Standard and Smart Shopping campaigns from within the same account, at the same time.
In this post, we’ll take a look at how these two campaign types work together, but let’s first do a quick review of the difference between Standard and Smart Shopping campaigns.
Standard vs. Smart Shopping Campaigns
Standard Shopping campaigns are the original Shopping campaign type in Google Ads. In these campaigns, you get to pick the products, set targeting, and set your bid strategy and budgets. Ads in these campaigns will show on the Google Search Network.
Smart Shopping campaigns are meant to simplify management and maximize the conversion value of your ads. Google will pull information from your product feed and test different combinations of image and text you provide. You can set a budget, but Google will automate ad placement and bidding. Ads can show on Google Search, Google Display, YouTube and Gmail. Because this campaign type relies on a remarketing audience, you must have a remarketing list of at least 100 active users associated with your account.
You can create up to 100 Smart Shopping campaigns in your account, but Google recommends consolidating this campaign type except for when necessary.
Running Standard and Smart Shopping Campaigns Together
For most of our accounts, we are running a mix of both Standard and Smart campaigns and the performance of each type varies across accounts. So what happens when you have both Standard and Smart campaigns active at the same time?
Smart Shopping campaigns take priority over Standard Shopping campaigns, even if your Standard campaign priority is set to high. You won’t even see an option to set a priority level within Smart campaigns. This means if you are advertising products that are in both a Smart and Standard campaign, the Standard campaign will stop running ads for this product.
If you are running both campaign types, it’s best to exclude the products you want to show in the Standard campaign from any Smart campaigns. If you want to try out Smart Shopping campaigns for the first time, we recommend launching with a subset of products to see how it performs.
Are you running both Standard and Smart Shopping campaigns in your account? Do you see performance differences between the two campaign types? Let us know in the comments below!
