For those who prefer to read…
Hi there! In today’s post we’re going to learn about differences between Smart Shopping versus normal Google Shopping Ads.
We’ll look at the pros and cons of each type of shopping campaign, after which I'll help you decide which type of Shopping Ads you should be using for your e-commerce business.
I've been managing Google Shopping campaigns for almost 10 years now — some of my current campaigns spend over six figures per month on Shopping alone.
My team and I regularly test Smart Shopping vs Normal Shopping in a myriad of different e-commerce niches.
And now, we’re going to share these knowledge bombs we’ve gained from all that testing we’ve done — with you.
Another bonus for you: I’m going to reveal a little-known secret about Smart Shopping campaigns that hasn't been published anywhere by Google.
This secret has actually been verified via two separate inside sources at Google, and could greatly help you get more conversions in your Shopping campaigns!
What is Smart Shopping?
If you’re reading this, you probably know what standard Shopping campaigns are. They are ads for products that show up in Google with an image and price. These ads are built off the back of your data feed.
But how is Smart Shopping any different from that?
In a nutshell, Smart Shopping Ads are like Standard Shopping Ads… Except with more automation and less control.
When you set up a Smart Shopping campaign, you are actually setting up four campaigns all at once. After you set up your campaign, it will be showing ads on Google Search, Google Display Network, YouTube AND Gmail.
With Standard Shopping you would ideally need to set up four different campaigns, one for each of those ad networks mentioned above.
With Smart Shopping, you can just set up one campaign and it will automatically create ads for all of the four different ad networks.
Smart Shopping Ads also use machine learning to optimise your bids and delivery between those networks, and it has retargeting built-in.
If you've ever struggled to set up your retargeting ads across Google Display Network, YouTube and Gmail, this might be a major boon for you — with Smart Shopping all that work is done for you.
Smart Shopping is very dependent on machine learning algorithms. It uses machine learning to decide your cost-per-click (CPC) bids and placements. However, you will not have the option for manual CPC bidding.
You’ll have to be comfortable with giving over a lot of control to the Google AI if you want to use Smart Shopping.
You’ll also need to have accurate conversion tracking and revenue reporting set up as the AI requires it. The machine will try and optimise to get you the most conversion value possible, and no if it doesn’t know how much conversion value is actually being made, you’re in for a bad time.
Another fun fact about Smart Shopping is that it runs prospecting traffic as well as retargeting.
When the Smart Shopping puts ads on Google Display Network, YouTube and Gmail it’s actually doing an optimised blend of retargeting and cold traffic.
How much of the spend goes on prospecting vs retargeting is decided by the algorithm. It will look at a few variables such as your spend, ROAS target, and conversion history and will determine how much to invest in things like cold vs retargeted traffic.
Smart Shopping Pros and Cons
So what are the pros and cons of smart shopping? We’ll get to that in a minute — I’ll start with the pros:
Pros of Smart Shopping
Pro #1: Easy to Set Up
The main draw of Smart Shopping is how quick and easy it is to set up.
You can set up retargeting, and prospecting you can get out ads on Google Shopping, Gmail, YouTube and Google Display Network all in one shot.
Assuming that you already have some images on hand to add for your retargeting ads, and if you’ve already got your product feed set up and connected to Google Ads —your Smart Shopping campaign is probably going to take you under 30 minutes to get up and running.
Pro #2: Easy To View Top-Level Data
As all those campaigns are rolled up into one, it’s really simple from a reporting point of view. In just one campaign line in Google, you can see the total conversions and revenue being generated by all four of those campaign types.
If you don’t have the time or expertise to dive into the data, this could be really useful for you.
Pro #3: Smart Shopping Has Reserved Inventory
And this is that little-known secret that I mentioned earlier on — something which you won’t find published anywhere, a fact that Google does not admit to publicly:
Google reserves inventory for Smart Shopping.
Unbelievable as it sounds, I have verified this fact with two trusted inside sources.
What does this mean?
It means that there are ad impressions that Google reserves just for Smart Shopping. If you only do Standard Shopping, you will never get access to these ad impressions as they are ear-marked for advertisers using Smart Shopping only.
This is actually unsurprising — Google loves machine learning and this is an incentive for you to love it too, in the hopes you will hand over as much control over your shopping campaigns as possible.
This means that you can potentially get more volume compared to Standard Shopping.
According to my sources, this reserved inventory is mostly on YouTube — specifically on the homepage — and of course, Gmail.
The homepage of YouTube is a GREAT placement for your ads. Potentially getting more inventory on YouTube is one of the more compelling reasons to utilise Smart Shopping.
#4 Google Favours Smart Shopping
Google is promoting Smart Shopping really hard right now.
As I run a Google Ads agency, we've met a lot of Google reps over the years. Often, the conversations we’ve had with them go something like this:
“Hey, do you want to do Smart Shopping?”
“Did you think about Smart Shopping lately?”
We tend to get a good sense of what's important to Google by listening to what our reps say to us. Right now, the hot topic seems to be Smart Shopping.
Based on the literature released by Google and at the pace Shopping Ads is being developed, it's clear that Google is very keen on the idea that everyone should just be doing Smart Shopping.
New developments on Smart Shopping are churned out at a prodigious speed and frequency. For example, a new feature called “New Customer Conversion Reporting” was recently released.
This feature allows you to set up a conversion goal for when a conversion was from a new customer. Once this is set up, your Smart Shopping campaign can then optimise more for new customers instead of returning ones.
This feature is currently unavailable for standard Shopping. It may be released in the future, but Google developed it first for Smart Shopping.
This is not the first time I have seen this happen, so if you opt to use Smart Shopping, you’ll be able to leverage these ‘exclusive benefits’.
Cons of Smart Shopping
#1 - Lack of Data
The biggest, most annoying con is the lack of data.
With Smart Shopping campaigns, you are going to miss out on a lot of the DATA that you would normally get. This will reduce your ability to get insights and make decisions.
For example:
You won’t get search terms data!
Without search terms data, you can’t see what terms are converting in Shopping. If you can’t see those terms, you won’t be able to add them to your Search campaigns.
Often, just by reviewing the search terms date on Shopping campaigns, you’ll come across some great ideas.
You might have missed those ideas when doing your keyword research for your Search campaign. Seeing those terms in your Shopping campaign lets you know you should add them as keywords to Search as well.
With Smart Shopping, you won’t be able to do that.
For me, this is the most worrying piece of data that is lost when doing Smart vs Normal Shopping Ads.
And there’s more…
Want to see how much was spent on retargeting vs prospecting?
Or if too much was being spent on YouTube and not enough on actual Shopping ads?
Maybe you want to compare your GDN performance with your Gmail performance?
Unfortunately with Smart Shopping campaigns you won’t easily be able to see any of that information.
#2 Can’t Add Negative Keywords
This is related to the previous point — you also won’t be able to add negative keywords to Smart Shopping campaigns.
When you use Smart Shopping, not only are the search terms invisible to you, you will also be unable to stop the machine from accidentally bidding on the wrong ones.
Most of the time the machine does a great job of figuring out relevant terms to bid on. However, it’s not perfect and it does sometimes mess up, which you won’t be able to spot with Smart Shopping.
You won’t be able to stop it if it’s messed up somehow — OUCH!
The take home message is this: if you are going to use Smart Shopping you’ll have to be prepared to put your faith in the machine.
#3 Can’t Control Budget Splits
The final downside to Smart Shopping is that you can’t control your budget splits.
As you now know, Smart Shopping runs ads on multiple channels for you: Google Shopping, GDN, Youtube and Gmail.
However, you won’t be able to control how much is spent on each channel.
It will also run a mix of retargeting and prospecting for you — once again something you won’t have control over!
Smart Shopping, as with all Google “Smart” products offer automation and ease of use — if you are willing to sacrifice data and control.
Standard Shopping Pros and Cons
Let’s move on to the pros and cons of Standard Shopping.
Pros of Standard Shopping
#1 You Can See the Data
A compelling advantage to using Standard Shopping is all the lovely, lovely data you’ll have access to.
You’ll be able to see how much you’re spending specifically on YouTube, Gmail, Retargeting or GDN.
Most importantly, you’ll have access to the exact search terms that are triggering your Shopping Ads.
This is one of the main reasons why I use a Standard Shopping campaign over a Smart Shopping campaign: this Search Term data is so useful — It can directly lead to more sales and revenue in your account if you know how to use it properly.
How do you use that search term data properly?
For me personally, it means going into Shopping campaigns at least once a week to review the search terms people are typing into Google that trigger the Shopping ads and cause conversions.
Then, I’ll take that list of search terms and add that to Search campaigns.
Here’s the thing to remember:
If a search term leads to sales in Shopping, it probably would generate sales if you set up Search ads for it too.
If you set up that Search Term as a keyword in Search, you will generate more sales than if you only target that Search Term in Shopping.
There’s a couple of reasons for this:
Firstly, Google does often show a lot of Shopping ads when the people searching for E-commerce type in keywords. However, it doesn’t necessarily always show Shopping ads.
Google’s algorithm will determine when or when not to show Shopping ads. Sometimes, it might just show Search text ads. Other times, it might decide to show both the Shopping ads and text ads in the search results.
When it shows both types of ads, sometimes the user will click a Shopping ad. Sometimes they won’t. Sometimes they are going to click on a Search ad instead.
If you are running Shopping ads but you are not adding all your converting terms as keywords and text ads, you’re likely to miss out on clicks and sales in those two situations:
No Shopping ads were shown, but text ads were
BOTH types of ads were shown, but the user decided to click on a Search ad this time.
The fact that Standard Shopping gives you search terms data means you will miss out on less clicks in these situations.
#2 YOU CAN STILL DO SMART BIDDING
Another benefit of using Standard Shopping is that you can STILL do machine learning based bid optimisation.
Google pushes machine learning bidding capabilities of Smart Shopping hard. They use it as a selling point for Smart Shopping.
They tell us:
“With Smart Shopping, you can do machine learning based bid optimisation, which is loads better than manual CPC and will get you more sales!”.
That said, if you set up a Standard Shopping campaign, you can still take advantage of machine learning based bid optimisation.
Here’s how to do it: simply select Target ROAS from the campaign settings and — voilà! — you've got exactly the same AI bid optimisation capabilities as Smart Shopping.
So while Google is making compelling reasons to opt for the machine learning based bid optimisation in Smart Shopping, we can do better than that — we can utilise the same feature while doing Standard Shopping.
#3 PORTFOLIO BID STRATEGIES
Pro number 3 is — portfolio bid strategies.
This powerful feature is often overlooked when people talk about automated bid management. It’s available for Standard Shopping, but not Smart Shopping.
Portfolio bid strategies give you the ability to add your campaign to a portfolio. A portfolio is kind of like a grouping or folder full of campaigns.
This allows you to group multiple campaigns and roll their conversion data up into one big group. The more conversion data you have grouped in one place, the better the bid strategy works.
Machine learning algorithms work by making predictions, and then checking those predictions vs. real world data. This data is used to update the predictions and make better predictions over time.
The more conversions you have, the more often the machine can check its predictions. The more often the machine this happens, the better it gets, and the more money you make.
When we have portfolios, with multiple campaigns grouping conversion data into the same portfolio, you have more conversion data grouped up into one place.
Standard Shopping campaigns can be added to portfolios to group up their conversion data with your Search and other campaigns.
Smart shopping campaigns cannot, their bid strategies optimise in a silo!
#4 MANUAL CPC IS AVAILABLE
The fourth advantage of Standard Shopping is… manual CPC bidding is available.
Sometimes, you might want to use manual CPC bidding. I don’t use it myself, but there are some people who rather take bid optimisation into their own hands, instead of trusting that to machine learning.
My personal experience is that Smart Bidding, when given plenty of conversion data, outperforms even the best manual bid optimiser.
But maybe some people might feel otherwise and for them, having the option to manually control bids is a huge plus point for Standard Shopping.
Even if you’re like me and pro Smart Bidding, there are times when you DO want to use Manual CPC bidding.
For example, if conversion tracking is not set up, is temporarily down, or doesn’t work… You can’t get the conversion data that Smart Bidding needs. Manual bidding is the only way here.
In other cases, there might be important goals you are optimising for that the machine does not know about. For example, maybe you know bidding on certain products always leads to more footfall traffic in your retail store, or more phone call conversions later on.
If that data is not being fed into Google, Smart Bidding can’t optimise for it, and Manual CPC plus human judgement will be required. So it’s nice to have the option for this in Standard Shopping.
Cons of Standard Shopping
We’ve covered all the benefits of Standard Shopping. Now, let’s take a look at the disadvantages:
#1 Longer To Set Up
Standard Shopping takes longer to set up.
You're unlikely to be able to set up all four campaign types in one place, like how you can with Smart Shopping, so it's going to take longer to set everything up.
Furthermore, the setup is more complicated. Unlike Smart Shopping where you just plug in your data feed and give it a few images,with Standard Shopping you’ll have to spend more time on setting up your Shopping campaigns.
After that, you’ll have to set up separate campaigns for retargeting on GDN, Youtube and Gmail.
All this adds complication and effort to the mix. You’ll need to know your way around Google Ads better if you plan on setting this all up in Standard mode.
#2 No Maximise Conversion Value Bid Strategy
A bug bear I have with Standard Shopping is the lack of a Maximise Conversion Value bid strategy.
This is a huge one: when you start out a new Shopping campaign, you're not really going to have enough data to do target ROAS bidding well
You’ll need some other bid strategy to tide you over until you have enough conversion data to switch to target ROAS automated bidding.
In Smart Shopping, you can just use Maximise Conversion Value, which is a pretty handy bid strategy to use when you don't have a lot of conversion data yet.
All you have to do is set a reasonable daily budget, and then you tell it to get as much conversion value as it can for that budget.
This helps you discover what level of performance to expect from your campaigns. It helps you build up those conversions in the first place… So that later on you can switch to target ROAS.
With Standard Shopping you don't have the option to do this. You can't just launch a new campaign and tell Google to maximise your revenue.
Instead, you have two main options:
You can tell it to maximize your clicks. It's not ideal, and I would only do this with a low budget to start with, because it is going to be optimizing just for traffic and not for conversions.
You can send it to manual CPC bidding. Again, this is not ideal because it requires a lot of work and leaves you prone to human error.
For example, it’s difficult to know where to set the starting CPC bids. Initially you might set them too high and spend too much, or set them too low and not get enough traffic.
Neither of these options are ideal. I really wish Standard Shopping had the Maximise Conversions Values bid strategy that we could use on new campaigns that don’t yet have enough conversions for Target ROAS.
#3 May Miss Out On Smart Shopping Features
I mentioned previously that Google is really favouring Smart Shopping right now.
Clearly that’s a significant advantage for Smart Shopping… And a massive disadvantage for Standard Shopping.
Many of the new developments for Shopping campaigns are rolled out first for Smart Shopping, and then later, or even not at all, for Standard Shopping.
As mentioned earlier, the feature to optimise specifically for new customers is currently only available to Smart Shopping.
Well, there’s more.
Earlier in the year Google announced another upcoming feature to Smart Shopping. The details are vague but they said they were “adding more visual features to help users discover retailers”.
It’s not super clear exactly how this would look, but their demonstration seemed to feature some new type of automated video ad that may end up being only available through Smart Shopping.
So if you do Standard Shopping you might miss out on that, on the new customer bidding feature, and on any other future features that may come out specifically for Smart Shopping.
When To Use Smart Shopping
So…. When do you want to use Smart Shopping?
If you don't have a lot of time to set it up, or you don’t have the expertise, Smart Shopping is the way to go. It’s going to simplify things for you A LOT.
If your priority is to get the campaign running as quickly as possible, and you’re not a Google Ads expert and you don’t plan to become one, go for Smart Shopping.
Perhaps you're not going to use that Search Terms data.
Maybe you're not even running Search text ads, and you don't plan to be using the Search Term data to enrich your Search campaign. Or maybe you know you just don't have time review that data all the time and learn from it.
If that’s you, then by all means, use Smart Shopping.
Maybe you are just looking to quickly test out the potential performance of Google Shopping ads, and you only want to invest time and effort into mastering it if there are sure signs that it’ll work for you.
If that’s you, then Smart Shopping is a GREAT way to test the waters.
And hey, if it works out, nothing is stopping you from switching to Standard Shopping later to get the data and control you get there.
Finally, maybe just getting lots of conversions for as little time investment as possible is more important to you than getting data insights.
If you don’t really care about where the conversions are coming from and you just want to make as much money as possible for as little time, then you’re not going to need the extra data insights you get from Standard Shopping.
If that describes you, then Smart Shopping is a better choice.
When To Use Standard Shopping
When should you use Standard Shopping campaigns?
Standard Shopping is for you if you DO want to use the search terms data to enrich your Search campaign.
If you are also running Search ads — which you probably should be — and if you are planning on taking the time to enrich your Search campaign using Shopping search terms data, then you NEED to be running Standard Shopping.
You’ll also want to opt for Standard Shopping when you DO want to have all those other data insights from Standard Shopping.
For example, how much do you spend on retargeting versus prospecting, how much do you spend on Gmail versus YouTube and how many conversions does each channel get. How well is display retargeting performing vs. your shopping campaign.
If you actually want to use that information to increase the performance, then you do need to be using Standard Shopping.
If you plan to invest a lot of time, effort and money into making sure you want to do Shopping as well as possible, then I recommend you do Standard Shopping too.
Standard shopping in general gives you more data and more control. If you are spending a good amount of time on making sure Shopping is as perfect as it can be, you will benefit from the extra controls you get in Standard mode.
Another thing to consider is your bid strategy. As mentioned, Standard Shopping allows you to use Bid Strategy Portfolios.
This one's a biggie. If you're using lots of other campaigns in Google ads and they're all running profitably on a nice big Target ROAS portfolio, then you're going to benefit a lot by adding Shopping to the same portfolio.
The only way you’ll be able to do that is if you are using Standard Shopping.
And finally, if you DO have some level of expertise at Google Ads or you plan to learn it, then Standard Shopping is going to help you learn a lot more about doing Google Ads the right way.
You’ll need to learn how to set up your own retargeting campaign and how to manage your own budgets across multiple campaign types. You’ll have to review the data at a more granular level and make decisions based on that. All of this is going to require some knowledge and expertise.
So if you are comfortable doing all that, or you want to learn how, then go with Standard Shopping.
Conclusion
If you liked this post, you can find more content on my YouTube channel. I'll be releasing more videos on topics like this one multiple times per month.
Also, if you want a free instant automated audit of your Google Ads campaign, head on over here.
Now that we’ve covered both Standard and Smart Shopping, which one do you think you’re going to use? Are you going to use Smart Shopping to save time and effort, or are you going to go on for a full-blown Standard Shopping campaign?
Let me know by leaving a comment below!