Smart Campaigns

Smart campaigns are designed to help small businesses reach more customers online. They require minimal setup and maintenance, relying on the best of Google's advertising technology to automatically optimize the campaign based on the details of your business and your goals, whether that be customer calls, visits to your location, or actions on your website.

The Smart campaign creation workflow requires a few steps that are unique from other campaign types. As a best practice, the entities being added in the steps outlined below should be created in a single GoogleAdsService.Mutate request. The code example at the end of this guide demonstrates how to do this.

Below is a summary of the steps for creating a new Smart campaign. You can also review the code sample in its entirety for more details.

1. Build a list of keyword themes with suggestions from the SuggestKeywordThemes service method, the KeywordThemeConstantService, or with free-form keyword themes. These keyword themes are used to retrieve different tiers of budget suggestions, create keyword theme campaign criteria, and generate suggestions for ad text creatives.
2. Retrieve suggestions for budget amount and ad headlines and descriptions from the SmartCampaignSuggestService. This service uses information about your business, the target geographic location, target language, and keyword themes to suggest a high, low, and recommended daily budget amount, as well as up to three headlines and two description texts for the ad itself.
3. Create a CampaignBudget using the suggested budget amount. It's strongly recommended that you use the suggested budget amount in order to maximize your campaign's performance. A Smart campaign budget cannot be shared with any other campaigns.
4. Create a Campaign and a SmartCampaignSetting. A SmartCampaignSetting cannot exist separate from the Campaign it's associated with, which is why we strongly recommend creating the two entities together.
5. Create a list of campaign criteria. In this guide we will be using the KeywordThemeConstants retrieved from the KeywordThemeConstantService to create keyword theme campaign criteria, but we also describe the other types of campaign criteria that are supported.
6. Create an AdGroup. A Smart campaign can have only one AdGroup associated with it.
7. Create one or more AdGroupAds, each having no more than three headlines and two descriptions.