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.
Campaign creation
The Smart campaign creation workflow requires a few steps that are unique from
other campaign types. As a best practice, add entities in a single
GoogleAdsService.Mutate
request.
Here are the steps for creating a new Smart campaign. Check out the complete code sample for more details.
- Build a list of keyword themes with suggestions from the
SmartCampaignSuggestService
, theKeywordThemeConstantService
, 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. - Retrieve suggestions for budget amount, 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 ahigh
,low
, orrecommended
daily budget amount, as well as up to three headlines and two description texts for the ad itself. - Create a
CampaignBudget
using the suggested budget amount. We recommend 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. - Create a
Campaign
and aSmartCampaignSetting
. ASmartCampaignSetting
cannot exist separately from theCampaign
it's associated with, so we strongly recommend creating the two entities together. - Create a list of
campaign criteria
. In this guide, we use the keyword themes compiled in step 1 to create keyword theme campaign criteria, but we also describe the other types of campaign criteria that are supported. - Create an
AdGroup
. A Smart campaign can have only oneAdGroup
associated with it. - Create an
AdGroupAd
with 3 to 15 headlines, and 2 to 4 descriptions.
Business Profile location
When generating suggestions or creating a campaign, we recommend that you provide your Business Profile location identifier to maximize the performance of your Smart campaign.
Your Business Profile location identifier can be obtained from either the
Business Profile API's name
field
or the
Business Profile UI.
When set on either the
SmartCampaignSuggestionInfo
or
SmartCampaignSetting
object, the identifier should be a string in this format:
locations/locationId
If retrieved from the Business Profile API, the identifier is already in the
correct format. However, if retrieved from the UI, the identifier needs to be
appended to locations/
.