Google rolls out Smart Goals for advertisers

Google AdWords is a helpful tool for attracting more web customers, and the newest addition to the platform makes it even more effective.

Google launched Smart Goals a few weeks ago, which is intended to attract site visitors who are more apt to purchase something. The program uses machine learning and Google Analytics data to help businesses recognize site visitors who are low-hanging fruit, then helps them optimize the AdWords campaigns that attract those customers.

Software Engineer Abishek Sethi and Product Manager Joan Arensman wrote the following in a blog post to explain the program:

“To generate Smart Goals, we apply machine learning across thousands of websites that use Google Analytics and have opted in to share anonymized conversion data. From this information, we can distill dozens of key factors that correlate with likelihood to convert: things like session duration, pages per session, location, device and browser.”

If you already use Google Analytics, you may have noticed the Smart Goals report in the Conversions section of your analytics. These metrics show the engagement level of Smart Goals visits compared to other visits. Sethi and Arensman claim this will help businesses test the efficacy of the program before dedicating to it.

Opinions on Smart Goals have varied, but this blog post highlights some of its biggest pros, among which are its ability to allow smaller advertisers to get some form of conversion tracking, which is really important for any marketing plan in 2016 if you want it to be successful.

If you haven’t experimented with Smart Goals yet, I would highly recommend it. It has a lot of potential to help the little guys perform at a conversion rate that rivals bigger players.