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Google Ads Campaign Types: What’s the Difference?

While Google Ads give you access to the world’s largest search engine and put a large selection of advertising tools at your fingertips.

Morgan Blank

Apr 01, 2021

Google has unique potential to offer services and products to people directly searching for them, and if you're an ecommerce business, it's crucial that you reach their network of your potential customers.

 

While Google Ads gives you access to the world’s largest search engine and puts a large selection of advertising tools at your fingertips, they come with a somewhat steep learning curve. 

 

If you are doing it wrong, you can end up spending your ad dollars without an adequate return. (Which is why you should get Ampd! We take the legwork out of launching, managing, and maximizing your Google Ads for you.)

 

In this post, we're going to talk about different Google Ads campaign types and how they can benefit your business. Dive right into the first campaign type below...

 

Standard Search Campaigns

Standard Search campaign is the epitome of what Google Ads is about.

The concept is simple—choose your target audience and keywords, write up an ad copy, and place your text ads across Google’s broad search network.

With Search campaigns, you can display your advertising to potential customers who are actively searching online for key phrases related to your products or services, meaning that they are already ready to buy.

You can also run Responsive Search Ads (RSA), which adapt to show more text—and more relevant messages—to your customers.

How it Works

With Search ads, you will start by creating a new campaign in your Google Ads account and selecting a campaign goal like Leads, Sales, or Website traffic.

You will also be asked to define your ad campaign’s budget, choose a target audience, and determine whether you want to enhance your campaign with extensions.

Search Campaign Benefits

Standard Google Ads allow you to take advantage of a range of benefits of online advertising:

  • Use Search campaigns to get more leads, sales, or website traffic.
  • Quickly and easily create ads without any special assets.
  • Target potential customers directly searching for your specific services or products.

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Smart Campaigns

Smart search campaigns present an easy, efficient solution for small businesses to get discovered on Google. These ads utilize Google’s advertising algorithms to bring results based on your campaign goal, whether it be visits to your location, customer calls, or actions on your website.

Smart campaigns can be quickly set up in just a few clicks, and then continue to optimize your ads according to a predetermined goal, measure their performance, and display clear and easy-to-understand results.

How it Works

With Smart Google Ads campaign type, you can advertise your website across Google Search results, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, and other Google partner websites. You will write your own ad copy, and, when somebody searches for the selected phrases, your ad will appear above or below the search results.

In a nutshell, with Smart campaigns, Google Ads runs your ads for you. To begin with, you will need to set up a budget, choose a few keyword themes, and the Google Ads algorithm will display your ad to people looking for services or products that you offer. Your search keywords will be maintained and automatically updated over time, meaning that you won’t need to spend a lot of time continuously managing the ad.

Smart Campaign Benefits

Here are some of the benefits of using Smart ad campaigns:

  • Create an online ad easily and quickly.
  • Automatic optimization means that minimal ongoing management of the ad campaign is required.
  • Reach customers in any geographic area you select, through mobile devices or desktop computers.
  • Review your ad performance in a user-friendly dashboard.

Dynamic Search Ad/Site Wide Campaigns

Dynamic Search Ads present the easiest way to find customers that use Google to search for exactly what you have to offer. DSA campaigns use your website content to target your ads, and, as such, are ideal for businesses with a well-developed website or a large inventory.

These ads also make use of your website content to generate headlines and landing pages, which saves you time and keeps your ads relevant: all you need to do manually is to write a creative description.

Dynamic Search Ads can be used to fill in the gaps of keyword-based campaigns. Even well-managed Ad accounts with numerous keywords can miss relevant searches or get out of sync with what products are actually available on advertisers’ websites.

How it Works

When somebody searches on Google with terms related to titles and frequently used keywords on your website, Google Ads will automatically generate a relevant headline for your ad and use these titles and keywords to choose a landing page from your website. This way, the ads can direct potential customers to exactly what they need on your website.

When choosing target landing pages, remember that you will still be responsible for the text displayed on your ad. The most important factor among others considered when generating your ad’s headline is your page’s HTML title.

With Ampd, we supercharge your DSA campaigns and take all the legwork off your plate, amplifying your results to your entire store—and refer to the power of Ampd and Google Ads as "Site Wide" campaigns.

DSA Campaign Benefits

Some of the notable benefits of using Dynamic Search Ads include:

  • Save time with dynamically generated ad headlines and landing pages.
  • Base your ads on your entire website or only specific pages or categories.
  • Gain additional traffic with opportunities that you may have missed with keyword targeting.
  • Display URLs are based on your final URL domain.

Shopping Campaigns

Google Shopping Ads campaign types are ideal for retailers looking to promote their local or online inventory, find better-qualified leads, and boost traffic to their local store or website. Shopping ads appear in a different, more visual format, displaying a photo of a product, its price, title, store name, and more.

These ads give users a strong understanding of the product you are selling even before they click on the ad, which means that you receive more qualified leads.

How it Works

To get started, you will need to submit your product data through a Merchant Center describing the details about the products you are wishing to sell. Instead of using standard keywords, Shopping ads take this product data and decide where and how to display your ads to make sure that the most relevant products are shown in response to the user search.

Shopping Campaign Benefits

Here are a few benefits that distinguish Shopping ads from other Google Ads campaign types:

  • Shopping ads offer easy retail-centric campaign management, - you can browse your inventory directly through Google Ads and define product attributes to be used instead of keywords.
  • Make use of competitive data and powerful reporting analytics.
  • Increase the quality of your leads by displaying product information directly in your ads.
  • Display multiple Shopping ads for a given search.

Which Google Ads Campaign Type is Best for Your Business?

When it comes to Google Ads campaign types, there is no right or wrong answer. It all depends on your brand strategy, marketing goals, and how much time and effort you are able to invest:

  • Standard Search campaigns are a great place to start. With simple setup and standard requirements, they offer a great opportunity to reap the benefits on online advertising.
  • If you want to simplify your Google search campaigns even further, Smart campaigns with their automatic optimization might be the right choice for you.
  • If you have a large inventory or a web-developed website, Dynamic Search Ads might be a good choice to complement your keyword-based advertising efforts.
  • Finally, Shopping campaigns are an optimal choice for retailers looking to promote their local or online product inventory.

Whether you are just starting out with Google Ads or require a comprehensive audit of your existing campaigns, Ampd is a great way to accelerate your business growth by automating and optimizing your ad performance and. Get Ampd today, and we'll help you start Google Ads for free today!

click here to get ampd

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