If, like us, you are slightly concerned that we will all soon be made redundant by hyper intelligent robots, then you may want to stop here.
While automation is nothing new for display campaigns on the Google Display Network, constant machine learning has made fully automated Smart Display campaigns a reality in 2017.
Once you input a small amount of creative elements, including headlines, descriptions, logos and images, Google gets to work in the “Learning Phase”. Creating responsive text, display and native ads from the smorgasbord of asset combinations. This involves some aggressive spending to determine the optimum marriages of text and imagery, audience targeting and bidding strategy to give you the best return. Once this phase has used your “Learning Budget”, it will slow down and begin delivering the ideal combination for the highest ROI, based on its findings and your budget.
If you are looking for more control over your display activity, then this is clearly not the option for you!
Get on board with Smart Display
If you have conversion tracking set up and received at least 50 conversions on the Display Network, or at least 100 conversions from Paid Search in the past 30 days, then this campaign type will be offered in the “Marketing Objectives”- “Drive Action” section of your new “Display Network Only” campaign.
Make sure you have sufficient daily budget to account for at least 10–15 times your target CPA bid, then gather your ad’s assets and the rest is child’s play. Be sure to also add site-category exclusions that may tarnish your brand or message.
Your assets will include a maximum of 5 of each of the following:
- Headline options – 25 characters each. These need to work well with any of your descriptions, images and landing pages.
- Description – 70 characters. Your descriptions add to your headline and invite people to take action. Make sure they work with any headline, image or landing page.
Prepare as many images as possible. The maximum file size is 1MB, and most common non-.gif formats are accepted. You will need to supply two logos, one 1:1 ratio (1200 x 1200 recommended) and one horizontal logo at 4:1 (512 × 128). A transparent background is best, but a white background will work fine, as long as the logo is centred.
If you’d like to generate a second set of asset pairings, you can create a new ad. The assets you provide in each ad are used interchangeably only within that ad.
To analyse performance, check under the Ads tab to “view asset details”. This table will show data for each asset, including a “best,” “good” or “low” grade based on its ability to generate conversions — note the asset grades are relative to each other. You can get rid of “low” grade assets and replace them.
Follow our series on Display Advertising to learn more about new targeting options, creative solutions and smart optimisation!
