Should you pause your ads when products go out of stock? That was the question raised on Search Engine Land recently. I explained that as with any answer in PPC, it depends.
If you’re used to being in a top ad slot for a query, it’s worth defending your position by keeping ads on, even when the exact product the consumer searched for is temporarily unavailable.
If, on the other hand, you’re not usually the best match for what the user searched for, it’s fine to pause the ad to preserve the budget for your other conquests.
Sidenote: If you just want to pause ads for broken landing pages, or landing pages with text that indicates a product isn’t available, you can use our Broken URL Checker tool.
But if you want to do better, you can use our Campaign Automator solution. In this post, I will share the quickest and easiest way to use that tool to keep ads running all the time while automatically directing clicks to an alternative page on your site when a product goes out of stock.
Our solution can be managed completely by the person in charge of the Google Ads account and doesn’t require any technical assistance from your web development team.
Send users to a backup landing page when products are out of stock
Step 1: Create the Campaign Automator template for in-stock products
Connect your inventory data, like that in a Google Merchant Center feed, to Campaign Automator.
Then, set an inventory condition so that only products that are in stock will be processed by the template.
Now, create your template as you normally would with Campaign Automator. Add campaigns, ad groups, ads, extensions, keywords, bids, etc. Check out our help article for Campaign Automator if you’ve never done this before.
Because you’re going to take users to the specific landing page for the product they searched for, this template’s landing pages will use the product detail pages on your site.
Step 2: Duplicate the template you just created
To duplicate the template, use the hamburger menu to the right of your template name and select the option ‘Duplicate’.
Step 3: Change the inventory conditions and landing pages
Because you want this template to be used ONLY when the other template you just made is not used, you’ll have to swap the inventory conditions. So where before we said ‘Units in stock’ had to be greater than 0, now we should set a mutually exclusive condition, in this case: ‘Units in stock’ is equal to 0.
Finally, go to the ad group settings and change the landing pages. In this case we want the landing pages to be the product listing pages or category pages. So for example, if the user searched for a specific type of flatscreen TV which is out of stock, you can show them a page of similar TVs that are in stock.
Step 4: Automate both templates
To make sure consumers always have the best experience with your ads, it’s best to automate both Campaign Automator templates so that they will create, pause, and re-enable the right dynamically generated ads in your account as inventory conditions change.
Conclusion
Because the inventory conditions you’ve set up in your two new Campaign Automator templates are opposites, only one condition can be true at a time so only one of the two templates will enable an ad at any time.
This means that you will always have an ad for all your selected keywords, but when the keyword is for an in-stock product, it will lead users to the product detail page where they can purchase exactly what they wanted, whereas if the product is out of stock, they will be presented with great alternatives and perhaps still make a purchase from your site.
If you don’t subscribe to Campaign Automator, let us know and we’ll be happy to show you all it can do to make your PPC ads more effective.
Pay-Per-Click seems to undergo a revolutionary change every 15 minutes or so these days. Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but advancements in automation, AI and machine learning are driving dramatic changes for PPC pros, and we know it can be difficult to keep up with the changes.
“Automation” can be a frightening word for people, possibly indicating one is on a road to their own obsolescence. But at Optmyzr, we see automation (and its cousins, artificial intelligence and machine learning) as empowerment for smart PPC pros who want to become PPC rockstars.
Today, our view of automation is manifested in our newest product to hit the market – Optmyzr Campaign Automator. We formally introduced this standalone SaaS-based software offering via a news release and social media. Campaign Automator is ideal for building and maintaining campaigns based on a feed of structured data (think about inventory feed and the value starts to become quite clear).
Campaign Automator is an exciting new tool in the PPC expert’s toolkit, and it dovetails elegantly with our broader PPC Management Suite. Campaign automator allows you to build and maintain PPC campaigns, particularly for inventory-specific initiatives. Consider businesses such as auto dealerships, travel agencies, home goods retailers, or eCommerce programs that have constantly changing, deep attribute-based aspects that impact what, how, when, and to whom you market.
A sudden jump in SUV or truck inventory means a car dealership will want to reach those buyers actively searching for specific attributes about heavy duty vehicles. You’ll want to advertise only those vehicles that are in stock or be more aggressive on perhaps those that are overstocked. Similarly an eCommerce provider that has a surge (or slump) in inventory for very specific product sets may have a sudden need to sell more window fans and patio furniture as opposed to last week’s surge in loveseats and ottomans.
Campaign Automator at a glance
Here’s a quick view of how campaign automator works: We start with specific templates for the business or product type. It builds all the necessary elements, including campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords and extensions.
Simply connect your data source with one of our templates. Your feed could be an inventory spreadsheet in Google Sheets or a Merchant Feed or multiple other sources such as an XML feed, FTP or even Amazon S3.
A really intuitive UI makes setting up campaigns a snap.
Then continue through the setup process to easily define the campaign, keywords and ads – all of which is template driven.
Campaign Automator also allows you to set up very specific inventory-based conditions to help manage the data in the spreadsheet.
You can manage campaigns based on any attribute that is part of your source data – product type, color, discount amounts, geographies, and many others. These conditions can automate pauses in ad groups, keywords and ads when certain thresholds are met, such as inventory = 0 or a specific color is out of stock or you’ve run through the inventory you want to discount.
Here’s an example of how one can quickly create dynamic PPC ads for a car dealership.
Integration with other Optmyzr tools
Yes, it’s standalone – but Campaign Automator integrates with other Optmyzr tools, such as Rule Engine and Bid Management. It even integrates with Google Smart Bidding tools. The result is a powerful set of tools that allows the PPC pro to get campaigns up and running faster, make bulk changes quickly and accurately, and advertise only those items that meet specific criteria.
Campaign Automator also provides significant manual override, allowing the PPC pro to put his or her expertise to work quickly and easily. You’ll get better ads – faster – when you take advantage of the automation and unprecedented control. PPC pros can cut out wasted ad spend and gain flexible, powerful reporting to make smarter decisions, faster.
Automation and your future
We’ve been talking about automation a lot over the last several months, because it has such a tremendous impact on our ability to market smarter, faster and more effectively. It’s also important to note that we don’t envision a future where machines do everything in PPC. But by automating tasks and the busy work of search marketing, we encourage PPC pros to up their strategic game and demonstrate a more holistic value to the organization.
Our automations help you take advantage of the advancements happening at Google and Bing – but they also help you focus less on the tasks and more on the strategy. Machines are great. People are great. But people + machines is always better.
Ride the wave of automation. It’s not a threat. It’s an opportunity.
Should you pause your ads when products go out of stock? That was the question raised on Search Engine Land recently. I explained that as with any answer in PPC, it depends.
If you’re used to being in a top ad slot for a query, it’s worth defending your position by keeping ads on, even when the exact product the consumer searched for is temporarily unavailable.
If, on the other hand, you’re not usually the best match for what the user searched for, it’s fine to pause the ad to preserve the budget for your other conquests.
Sidenote: If you just want to pause ads for broken landing pages, or landing pages with text that indicates a product isn’t available, you can use our Broken URL Checker tool.
But if you want to do better, you can use our Campaign Automator solution. In this post, I will share the quickest and easiest way to use that tool to keep ads running all the time while automatically directing clicks to an alternative page on your site when a product goes out of stock.
Our solution can be managed completely by the person in charge of the Google Ads account and doesn’t require any technical assistance from your web development team.
Send users to a backup landing page when products are out of stock
Step 1: Create the Campaign Automator template for in-stock products
Connect your inventory data, like that in a Google Merchant Center feed, to Campaign Automator.
Then, set an inventory condition so that only products that are in stock will be processed by the template.
Now, create your template as you normally would with Campaign Automator. Add campaigns, ad groups, ads, extensions, keywords, bids, etc. Check out our help article for Campaign Automator if you’ve never done this before.
Because you’re going to take users to the specific landing page for the product they searched for, this template’s landing pages will use the product detail pages on your site.
Step 2: Duplicate the template you just created
To duplicate the template, use the hamburger menu to the right of your template name and select the option ‘Duplicate’.
Step 3: Change the inventory conditions and landing pages
Because you want this template to be used ONLY when the other template you just made is not used, you’ll have to swap the inventory conditions. So where before we said ‘Units in stock’ had to be greater than 0, now we should set a mutually exclusive condition, in this case: ‘Units in stock’ is equal to 0.
Finally, go to the ad group settings and change the landing pages. In this case we want the landing pages to be the product listing pages or category pages. So for example, if the user searched for a specific type of flatscreen TV which is out of stock, you can show them a page of similar TVs that are in stock.
Step 4: Automate both templates
To make sure consumers always have the best experience with your ads, it’s best to automate both Campaign Automator templates so that they will create, pause, and re-enable the right dynamically generated ads in your account as inventory conditions change.
Conclusion
Because the inventory conditions you’ve set up in your two new Campaign Automator templates are opposites, only one condition can be true at a time so only one of the two templates will enable an ad at any time.
This means that you will always have an ad for all your selected keywords, but when the keyword is for an in-stock product, it will lead users to the product detail page where they can purchase exactly what they wanted, whereas if the product is out of stock, they will be presented with great alternatives and perhaps still make a purchase from your site.
If you don’t subscribe to Campaign Automator, let us know and we’ll be happy to show you all it can do to make your PPC ads more effective.
Pay-Per-Click seems to undergo a revolutionary change every 15 minutes or so these days. Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but advancements in automation, AI and machine learning are driving dramatic changes for PPC pros, and we know it can be difficult to keep up with the changes.
“Automation” can be a frightening word for people, possibly indicating one is on a road to their own obsolescence. But at Optmyzr, we see automation (and its cousins, artificial intelligence and machine learning) as empowerment for smart PPC pros who want to become PPC rockstars.
Today, our view of automation is manifested in our newest product to hit the market – Optmyzr Campaign Automator. We formally introduced this standalone SaaS-based software offering via a news release and social media. Campaign Automator is ideal for building and maintaining campaigns based on a feed of structured data (think about inventory feed and the value starts to become quite clear).
Campaign Automator is an exciting new tool in the PPC expert’s toolkit, and it dovetails elegantly with our broader PPC Management Suite. Campaign automator allows you to build and maintain PPC campaigns, particularly for inventory-specific initiatives. Consider businesses such as auto dealerships, travel agencies, home goods retailers, or eCommerce programs that have constantly changing, deep attribute-based aspects that impact what, how, when, and to whom you market.
A sudden jump in SUV or truck inventory means a car dealership will want to reach those buyers actively searching for specific attributes about heavy duty vehicles. You’ll want to advertise only those vehicles that are in stock or be more aggressive on perhaps those that are overstocked. Similarly an eCommerce provider that has a surge (or slump) in inventory for very specific product sets may have a sudden need to sell more window fans and patio furniture as opposed to last week’s surge in loveseats and ottomans.
Campaign Automator at a glance
Here’s a quick view of how campaign automator works: We start with specific templates for the business or product type. It builds all the necessary elements, including campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords and extensions.
Simply connect your data source with one of our templates. Your feed could be an inventory spreadsheet in Google Sheets or a Merchant Feed or multiple other sources such as an XML feed, FTP or even Amazon S3.
A really intuitive UI makes setting up campaigns a snap.
Then continue through the setup process to easily define the campaign, keywords and ads – all of which is template driven.
Campaign Automator also allows you to set up very specific inventory-based conditions to help manage the data in the spreadsheet.
You can manage campaigns based on any attribute that is part of your source data – product type, color, discount amounts, geographies, and many others. These conditions can automate pauses in ad groups, keywords and ads when certain thresholds are met, such as inventory = 0 or a specific color is out of stock or you’ve run through the inventory you want to discount.
Here’s an example of how one can quickly create dynamic PPC ads for a car dealership.
Integration with other Optmyzr tools
Yes, it’s standalone – but Campaign Automator integrates with other Optmyzr tools, such as Rule Engine and Bid Management. It even integrates with Google Smart Bidding tools. The result is a powerful set of tools that allows the PPC pro to get campaigns up and running faster, make bulk changes quickly and accurately, and advertise only those items that meet specific criteria.
Campaign Automator also provides significant manual override, allowing the PPC pro to put his or her expertise to work quickly and easily. You’ll get better ads – faster – when you take advantage of the automation and unprecedented control. PPC pros can cut out wasted ad spend and gain flexible, powerful reporting to make smarter decisions, faster.
Automation and your future
We’ve been talking about automation a lot over the last several months, because it has such a tremendous impact on our ability to market smarter, faster and more effectively. It’s also important to note that we don’t envision a future where machines do everything in PPC. But by automating tasks and the busy work of search marketing, we encourage PPC pros to up their strategic game and demonstrate a more holistic value to the organization.
Our automations help you take advantage of the advancements happening at Google and Bing – but they also help you focus less on the tasks and more on the strategy. Machines are great. People are great. But people + machines is always better.
Ride the wave of automation. It’s not a threat. It’s an opportunity.
