Smart Display: Automated Targeting to Reach your CPA Goals

Google’s latest innovation in the world of Display advertising focuses on automated targeting to help reach your target CPA goals.

Utilising responsive ads to dynamically alter their appearance depending on what format a placement (website) will show, and optimising towards success by constantly changing assets in the creative.

We start by providing the assets to Google, you can enter up to 5 Images, 5 Headlines and 5 Description lines (think Text Ads with a twist) and through the magic of Smart Display, multiple variations are shown to users.

How does the automated targeting work?

Automated bidding

• Target CPA allows the smart bidding algorithms to find the right audience and placement to hit your KPIs.

Automated targeting

• Blending contextual, audience, device and demographic targeting seamlessly and automatically allows the system to find the optimum approach quicker than if you were to do this manually.

Automated ad creation

• This is where the real power comes in, allowing for thousands of different creatives to be tested very quickly in a variety of formats, Image, Native and Text.

Assets

As always, there are limitations so use the below table as your guide.

Source

Source

Tips for success?

1. Make sure you’re taking full advantage of all the available assets. You’re not giving the system enough ammunition if you don’t!
2. We suggest you set your daily budget to be at least 20 x Target CPA. This might seem like a crazy number, but it gives the campaigns enough leeway to be able to test and refine quickly.
3. Don’t panic if you see very little results in the first few days, the system will be testing many different assets, audiences and targeting in general.

It’s important to note that advertisers need to have at least 50 conversions on the Display network or at least 100 conversions from Search in the past 30 days. My only concern would be on smaller advertisers who might not have the budgets, or desire, to have generated this many leads historically.

I’m also very keen on ensuring that Smart Display campaigns only run on accounts where conversion tracking is setup properly. By this, I’m referring to Macro / Micro conversions and ensuring that only those that are truly important to your business or client, such as Transactions, are included in the Conversion column, as this is what Smart Display will focus on. If you have Micro conversions (like page views) then you risk the system optimising towards these.

I expect some PPC managers to find it a difficult concept due to the lack of manual optimisation. I know that I struggled with not having the usual levels of control. That said, results are speaking for themselves with our latest campaign running for the past 6 weeks and delivering conversion rates greater than 20% on some days. We found that Target CPAs were reached within the first week of launch, which meant that increasing budgets and adding more assets into the mix was the best route forward.