Last year, Google announced Smart Goals, a nifty product that can help advertisers create programmatic conversions when a true conversion hasn’t been set up. Over the coming weeks, this new type of conversion, driven by machine learning, is now open to a whole new set of advertisers.
Previously, advertisers needed to have 1,000 website visits in the past 30 days to be eligible for the program. Now, the requirement is being slashed to 500. Furthermore, the ceiling for advertisers who are eligible to use Smart Goals has increased to allow for more adoption. Smart Goals are now eligible for up to 10 million website visits over 30 days — a 3x increase over previous limitations. This places the range of eligible websites to those with between 500 and 10 million website visits from advertisers over the past 30 days.
The Smart Goals are designed for those not tracking conversions. Thanks to machine learning, Google will infer which traffic may correlate with folks who could convert. This means looking at pagers per session, location, device, duration and more.
While more advertisers can now use Smart Goals, it doesn’t mean that they should. Smart Goals has been created for those who haven’t (or cannot) set up website goals.
In an ideal world, advertisers would invest in an effort to set up their own real goals instead of having a machine guess what traffic may be best. Smart Goals should really be seen as a last resort, not a magic bullet for goal tracking.
To set up Smart Goals in AdWords, simply:
Activate Smart Goals in Google Analytics.
Import Smart Goals into AdWords.
Optimize to Smart Goals in AdWords.
For more information, see the official post from Google Analytics.
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