Smart Campaigns

Smart campaigns are designed to help small businesses reach more customers online. They require minimal setup and maintenance. Smart campaigns rely on the best of Google's advertising technology to automatically optimize the campaign based on the details of your business and your goals, whether those 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 different 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.

1. Build a list of keyword themes with suggestions from the SmartCampaignSuggestService, 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, 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, or 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. 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.
4. Create a Campaign and a SmartCampaignSetting. A SmartCampaignSetting cannot exist separately from the Campaign it's associated with, so we strongly recommend creating the two entities together.
5. 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.
6. Create an AdGroup. A Smart campaign can have only one AdGroup associated with it.
7. 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/.