Do you need a large number of similar campaigns or ad sets that vary only slightly?

Or do you want ads that update automatically when your automation source has new information?

Automatic campaign creation makes both much easier at scale. It's the greatest benefit you get from creating your campaigns in Smartly.io. 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.

Understanding campaign automation

With campaign automation, you get multiple campaigns, ad sets and ads created and managed automatically from just one campaign configuration.

How does feed-based automation work?

Automation takes input from a 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.io 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.io, 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.io, 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.io detect the changes? Let's have a look:

• If new items with new item IDs appear in the feed, Smartly.io creates a new ad for each new item.
• If the information associated with an existing ID changes Smartly.io updates the ad associated with that item.
• If an item is removed from the feed (the ID disappears from the feed), Smartly.io 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.

Automate field input

You can use data from your feed in the different fields and settings in your campaigns, ad sets, and ads. Again, you maintain the data in the feed and the campaigns, ad sets, and ads are updated automatically.

For example, you could have ad sets pull their custom audiences, interests, or behaviors from the feed. Or you configure ads to pick up the product set, Image or Video Template, or ad texts or image links from the feed.

This example ad image uses an Image Template and shows information from a feed: