Smart campaigns – let me first of all introduce you to them – they are a fully automated kind-of Google's black box kind of campaigns. That means that you don't really choose your own targeting , you barely do anything after opening this campaign up , and just let it run and optimize itself.
There is a number of situations or reasons why you wanna use it
The first one – is only when you have a really broad appeal , ever-green type of product that's not really going to be cut soon.
Second – you don't really have the time to manage your campaigns or you're not really sure of your google skills
Third – and this is the biggest reason for using it – if you've already ran your campaigns for a while, there should be an option open for you to just pay for conversions , if this option is opened for you – that's amazing because you get to test the traffic you don't wanna test normally like the mobile apps traffic and let google optimize and pay for this traffic for you, this means that you're not going to pay for those clicks, get a ton of clicks and start paying for conversions.
The main downside to these smart campaigns – and that's something you need to know – is that when they are running – they would take A LOT of the focus from other shopping or GDN campaigns – meaning the other campaigns are likely to shut down, this is the type of campaigns that doesn't really like to run and play with others I guess, so my main tip is that you might wanna consider running it on another account but that kind-of loses the whole point of paying just for conversions – which is the main reason for using it In the first place I guess.
Having said that – this is one of those campaigns that it's just a hit or miss because it could get you traffic you wouldn't normally test out and start getting tons of conversions from it so that would be an amazing source to test and start scaling from.