Automated campaigns are formats in which the advertising system itself decides on placements, audiences and the combination of creatives across multiple channels. The advertiser supplies the inputs – a product feed, texts, images and videos, the campaign goal, and signals about valuable customers. The advantage is simplicity and use of the platform's data; the disadvantage is limited visibility into where the budget actually goes, and the risk that the campaign absorbs branded queries that would have come in for free anyway. It can be steered through the quality of the inputs, exclusions, segmentation by product margin, and goal settings. The only way to verify the real contribution is an experiment that pauses the campaign and compares total revenue, not the figures reported by the platform itself. The inputs should therefore also include a signal about which customers are valuable to the business, otherwise the campaign is optimised for the cheapest conversions.
See also: Product feed, Incrementality, Branded campaigns.
