Location targeting available in Google Smart Shopping campaigns

Smart Shopping campaigns are Google’s machine learning-driven campaigns for product ads. They automatically optimize ad delivery across Google’s properties. As a newer campaign type, there have been settings and reporting limitations that have kept many advertisers on the sidelines. Until very recently, advertisers could not control location targeting.

What changed. Smart Shopping campaigns used to target all countries and territories. Now, if you go to the Settings tab within a Smart Shopping campaign, you’ll have the option to narrow that targeting, including the ability to set radius targeting from the Advanced search link.

You can exclude specific locations as well.

Location reporting. From the Locations section, click on the Geographic Report tab to drill into Smart Shopping campaign performance by the locations that triggered your ads. Just as you can with regular Shopping and Search campaigns, reporting starts at the country level. Click on a country to get more granular regional performance reporting.

The user location and per store reports are also available.

Why we should care. The location reporting can help inform whether you should adjust your location targeting in Smart Shopping campiagns.

Annectodely, looking in a handful of Smart Shopping campaigns that would have been set to target only the U.S. if it had been possible, Google did a good job of doing just that. There were a small number of impressions in other countries, but no more than a handful of clicks. This is just a small sample size, of course, and you should look at your own campaigns. Still, in these cases, it’s reassuring to see Google’s systems overwhelmingly showed the ads in the region where people were most likely to convert.

You still won’t find any keyword or audience reporting in Smart Shopping campaigns, and aren’t likely to any time soon.

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About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day to day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin writes about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.