Do you need a large number of similar campaigns or ads that vary only slightly?
Or do you want ads that update automatically when your automation source has new information?
How about automatically targeting areas around sales points? Or using external data like weather or football game results to change the timing or creatives of your ads?
The answer is YES - you will definitely have a use case for automating your advertising.
Automatic campaign creation makes advertising much easier at scale. It's the greatest benefit you get from creating your campaigns in Smartly. You set up the automation once and let the campaign keep itself up to date while you maintain the feed. Less human input, less time spent - and fewer errors.
Tip To plan a strategy for utilizing feed data and setting up automation, take a look at these articles:
And if you're working with more than one channel, we've got you covered! See here: Scale across channels with automation.
De-mystifying feed-based automation
With campaign automation, you get multiple campaigns, ad sets and ads created and managed automatically from just one campaign configuration.
If that sounds complicated... well, it's not, really.
Think about how you plan campaigns before starting to create them. Quite often you'll have a spreadsheet with all the campaigns and ads laid out, something rather like this:
In that sheet, each row is an ad, each column is an asset, and you use it to make sure each ad has each asset set up. Now with Smartly, all you have to do is take that spreadsheet and use it as an automation feed. Then when you go to create campaigns, you only have to create one campaign, ad set and ad blueprint, plug in the feed, and Smartly creates the whole campaign structure for you.
There are a few tricks to formatting the cells so that Smartly can find the information and the assets, but when you've done it once, it's easy to repeat.
Another type of feed you can create is a list of products. These are commonly known as catalogs, and if you're in retail, you probably already have that, and are using it to pull data to various destinations.
How does feed-based automation work?
Automation takes input from your source (for example, a product feed or a campaign management spreadsheet) to create new outputs (campaigns, ad sets, ads) based on the data and the automation settings.
Smartly connects the information in the data source to how that information is used in ad content and the properties of ad sets and campaigns.
By default, all data in the feed is available for automation. As an example, you could have a feed that contains information on your products. By default, each item in the feed maps to a new ad. Now, if your feed contains 50 data items, you get 50 automated ads—one per product.
You may not always want all those 50 ads though. Maybe you're running a campaign where you only want ads, for example, for products in certain categories. To control what data is used from the feed, you can use filtering and grouping in the ad's automation configuration.
Compared with manual campaign creation
Manual campaign setup involves several stages. You first fill in the information for the campaign, then create individual ad sets for the each placement and targeting, and finally create ads for each ad set. This approach really doesn't scale well.
In Smartly, if you're creating twenty separate campaigns for different markets that only differ in their name and campaign budget, you can create one 'template' campaign, and use automation to fill in the market-specific details for each. You get countless campaigns with the effort of one, not bad!
Automatic creation of campaigns
With Smartly, you can automatically create campaigns, ad sets, and ads based on values from your feed. You can also use feed data to automate their naming. When the data in your feed changes, your campaigns, ad sets, and ads are automatically updated accordingly.
For example, example, you could use automation to quickly set up and maintain campaigns for all the different markets in your feed, and have ad sets created for the different user segments. To name them in an informative way, you could include the market and user segment from your feed in the campaign and ad set names.
Whenever your feed data changes, Smartly changes your campaigns.
How does Smartly detect the changes? Let's have a look:
- If new items with new item IDs appear in the feed, Smartly creates a new ad for each new item.
- If the information associated with an existing ID changes Smartly updates the ad associated with that item.
- If an item is removed from the feed (the ID disappears from the feed), Smartly archives the associated ad.
When a field value changes, the changes is applied in the campaigns, ad sets, and ads when the feed is next refreshed. This happens either based on the update schedule defined for the automation feed or when a user manually refreshes it. See more information on how to manage automation feeds.