Smart Campaigns and the Small Advertiser

Advertising with almost no setup

Two weeks ago, Google announced that Smart campaigns will replace AdWords Express, its simplified advertising for small businesses.

They launched in the United States the same day. Google says they will roll out more widely by the end of the year; for now, Canadian advertisers remain on AdWords Express.

The pitch is easy to like. Choose a goal, describe the business, set a budget, and Google does the rest.

For an owner who has never had time to learn AdWords, that sounds like the answer. Before deciding, it is worth knowing what the rest involves.

What you tell it, and what it decides

• You choose a goal: phone calls, visits to the premises, or website actions.
• You describe what you sell in broad terms, not exact keywords.
• You set the area and the budget.
• Google decides which searches show the ad, and what to bid.
• Google decides where it appears across its own sites and services.
• Google adjusts the targeting as results come in.

The fourth is the one to understand first. The difference between a profitable search campaign and an expensive one is usually which searches it pays for, and that is the decision a Smart campaign keeps for itself.

What they do well

Smart campaigns deserve a fair hearing, because some of what they do is genuinely useful.

They are quick. A business can have an ad running in an afternoon without learning match types, bid strategies or the difference between the Search and Display Networks.

They are built around a goal rather than a click. Asking whether the phone rang is a better question than asking how many people clicked, and plenty of hand-built accounts never ask it.

They also draw on what Google already knows from the business's Google My Business listing, and Google says businesses without a website will be able to use a simple landing page it builds, later this year.

What you cannot see or change

The price of that simplicity is visibility. Google has said that, for now, reports cover the campaign as a whole, so expect totals rather than the searches that produced them.

As launched, you cannot choose exact keywords or how strictly they match, and you cannot switch off individual places where the ads run.

Nor can you set your own bids. The campaign spends the budget in the way it judges best for the goal, which is not always how the business would spend it.

Where the money goes

Broad descriptions meet broad searches. A campaign told only that a business cleans carpets has to decide for itself whether searches for carpet cleaning jobs, for machine rental, or for how to lift a wine stain should count.

Each of those can cost a click, and none of them is a customer.

A managed campaign makes those decisions on purpose. Job seekers, renters and people planning to fix things themselves are excluded by name, with negative keywords, before money is spent on them.

Neither approach gets every search right. The difference is whether anybody can see the mistakes and correct them.

A worked example

A handyman service with two vans had run an AdWords Express campaign since a sales call a few years ago, and the owner read that Smart campaigns would replace it.

The question was whether to wait. The campaign produced calls, but several each week came from people asking whether the business was hiring, or wanting a basement finished, which it does not take on.

Nobody could say which searches had brought the useful calls and which had brought the rest.

The business moved the same monthly budget into a standard campaign managed by its web company, with ad groups for the jobs it wanted: door and lock repairs, drywall patching, fence and gate repairs, small bathroom updates.

Negative keywords removed jobs, hiring, courses and tool rental. The ads run while somebody can answer the phone, within half an hour of the owner's base, and each leads to the page for its job.

Calls and forms are counted as conversions, and the search terms report is read every two weeks.

What management buys

A management fee is a cost, and it is fair to ask what it buys.

Mostly it buys decisions about where the money goes: which searches to pay for, which to exclude, which hours and areas earn their place, and which page each ad should open.

It also buys the habit of looking. Search terms are read, waste is cut, and changes are made in small steps with a note of what changed and why.

A managed campaign can still use Google's automation where it helps, such as automated bidding once there are enough conversions to learn from. The difference is that a person decides when.

The page the ad opens

No campaign type can fix the page it sends people to.

If that page is slow on a phone, vague about the service or hides the phone number, the automation is working hard to deliver people to a page that loses them.

A managed campaign usually sends each group of ads to the page for that job, which is one of the quieter reasons it spends the same budget better.

The counter-case

A Smart campaign can be a reasonable start.

A business with one simple service, a small area and a very small budget may find that a management fee would be a large share of its spending.

A smaller start makes sense there, provided the campaign is set up and checked by someone who knows what to look for.

A business with no website may also find the promised landing pages a useful first step, though a proper site will do far more for it.

But once the budget matters, or the calls include too many of the wrong kind, the same money is usually better spent on a campaign somebody manages.

Before you choose

1. Write down what your current campaign does.
2. Confirm the business controls the Google account.
3. Count the enquiries the ads produced last month.
4. List the wrong calls and what they wanted.
5. Check the page each ad sends people to.
6. Track calls and forms as conversions either way.
7. Review the choice after three months.

Step four tells you most. Calls from job seekers, from outside the area and from people wanting work you do not do are the clearest sign that somebody needs to be choosing the searches.

The rename that arrives alongside Smart campaigns is covered in AdWords becomes Google Ads next month.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.