You can use Automation Feeds and Creative templates to automate your Demand Gen, App Campaigns, and Performance Max campaigns in Smartly the same way as you would automate social campaigns.

Watch this 10 minute tutorial video to learn how to use Automation Feeds and Image and Video Templates to automate campaign and ad creation with Google Ads Workspaces.

Create automation feeds

Automation feed for Demand Gen Image and Video ads

Feed for Demand Gen Image and Video Ads - Example Feed (Demand Gen Image and Video Ads sheet)

1. Add a column for a unique ID per each row.
2. Add columns for text assets (e.g. headline_1, headline_2, headline_3, long_headline_1, description, etc...).
3. Add columns that will populate your image and video templates with dynamic feed data.
4. To automate targeting inputs:
   1. Add relevant columns in the feed (e.g. location, language, audience).
   2. Add a column to group multiple feed rows into one ad set if you want to get multiple ads under one ad set (one row = one ad).

Automation feed for Demand Gen Carousel ads

Feed for Demand Gen Carousel Ads - Example Feed (Demand Gen Carousel Ads sheet)

1. Create a feed that has column for each asset type that you want to automate (e.g. Headline, Description, URL, Card Headline, Card URL, Landscape image, Square image, Vertical image). 
2. Add a column for a unique ID per each row.
3. Add a column to group multiple feed rows into cards in one carousel ad (one row = one card).

You can use Image Templates to create right size images. In this case you don’t need to have multiple image columns in the feed but instead only the content that will populate your Image Templates.

Automation Feed for App Campaigns

Feed for App Campaigns - Example Feed (App Campaigns sheet)

1. Add a column for a unique ID per each row.
2. Add columns for text assets (e.g. headline_1, headline_2, headline_3, description, etc...).
3. Add columns that will populate your image and video templates with dynamic feed data.
4. To automate targeting inputs:
   1. Add relevant columns in the feed (e.g. location, language, audience).
   2. Add a column to group multiple feed rows into one campaign if you want to get multiple ad sets under one campaign (one row = one ad set).

Automation Feed for Performance Max

Feed for Performance Max - Example Feed (Performance Max sheet)

1. Add a column for a unique ID per each row.
2. Add columns for text assets (e.g. headline_1, headline_2, headline_3, long_headline_1, description, etc...).
3. Add columns that will populate your image and video templates with dynamic feed data.
4. To automate targeting inputs:
   1. Add relevant columns in the feed (e.g. location, language, audience).
   2. Add a column to group multiple feed rows into one campaign if you want to get multiple ad sets under one campaign (one row = one ad set).

Automate the campaigns, ad sets and ads 

Once you have your Creative Templates and Automation Feed ready you can start to automate the campaign inputs in Campaigns, Ad sets and Ads.

1. On the campaign or ad set level, toggle on Campaign Automation.
2. Under Data source, select your feed.
3. Click to open Optional automation settings.
4. Under Filter from the campaign feed, define the feed items (rows) you want to include in your ads.
5. Under Group by, select ID to ensure one feed row creates one ad or ad set
6. Populate text input fields with feed content, click <..> where available to select which feed column to use.
7. To populate image fields with feed content, select Template and pick up to 20 templates to create as many assets in one ad or ad set.
8. Once you are ready providing all the campaign inputs click Review all changes.
9. Confirm the campaign structure is as intended and click Publish. 
   Smartly pushes the changes to Google Ads.

Advanced publishing rules

Under Advanced publishing rules You can choose if Smartly automatically updates your campaigns with every update that involves changes in the feed (e.g. price changes) or if you first want to review the changes and publish manually (e.g. when doing a creative refresh).

You can also define does Smartly override your manual campaign edits with feed values when feed refreshes or if you always want to keep the manual edits. 

Ad updates and archival

Smartly automation aims to minimize archiving ads and creating new ones when feed data changes. Instead, we update the ads whenever possible.

Ads update when:

• Feed content changes (e.g. change in a headline).
• New feed items are included in an existing group (e.g. new headline is included in an existing ad).
• Feed item (row) is removed from a group (e.g. one of the headlines is removed) but the group still has enough items to populate the ad.

Ads archive when:

• Feed item (row) is removed AND grouping is not used.
• Feed items (rows) are removed AND the group does not have enough items to create an ad (e.g. only one carousel card left when at least two cards are needed).

Automation for targeting options

Smartly supports automating location, language and audience targeting from a feed.

For the automation you need to use correct values in the feed to publish campaign without errors. You can find the allowed targeting values for:

• Locations:
  • Google Ads geotargeting values for feeds in Smartly-app or get them through UI (see instructions below)
    • You can use either canonical names or criteria IDs in your feed
  • Coordinates and radius
    • Available on campaign level targeting in Demand Gen, App Campaigns and Performance Max
      • format: {latitude}/{longitude}/{radius}/{unit}
        • unit: allowed values are km or mi
        • radius: allowed values are 1-500 for mi and 1-800 for km
      • feed value example, single item: 60.171441/24.938106/1/km
      • feed value example, multiple items in 1 cell: 60.171441/24.938106/1/km;52.520863/13.388785/1/mi
• Languages: Google Ads language values for feeds in Smartly-app
  • You can use language names ("English"), language codes ("en") or the criterion IDs ("1000") as feed values
• Audience (Demand Gen): You can use an audience name or an audience ID as the feed value
  Note: To create an audience from an audience segment in Google Ads, follow these steps: Tools > Shared Library > Audience Manager > Audience > +. This allows you to transform audience segments into audiences, which can then be used in your feed.
• Audience segments (App Campaigns): You can use audience segment names or audience segment IDs as feed values
• You can have multiple values inside one feed cell by separating those with ; (English;German)

For location identifiers, you can copy paste canonical names after manually adding them: click the three dots menu and select Copy identifiers to clipboard.

Frequently Asked Question (FAQ)

In review I'm having everything as Outdated, what does it mean?

If you're getting in review Outdated for all or some of the items with automated campaign, you probably have had feed processing already happening in the background when accessing review view.

This happens if you have Advanced Publishing Rules (last section of form when automation turned on) set as Republish automatically with every feed refresh and you have Outdated items in review due to processing already happening in the background.

You have two options:

1. Understand how the automatic processing work, wait a bit after refreshing the feed and go to review view when processing has ended. You can also access the automatic processing results form processing history.
2. Modify the Advanced Publishing Rules-settings so that the feed refresh doesn't trigger processing of the campaigns/ad sets/ads but only publish does.