Shopping campaigns have to be managed differently from Search and Display campaigns in order to improve their performance. We spoke to some of our customers and learned that leveraging shopping campaign priorities is one of the best strategies to do that.
Here we’ll share those best practices with you. But first, a bit about campaign priorities.
What are campaign priorities?
Campaign priorities in Google Ads are used to select the bid when a product is advertised through multiple campaigns. Though every new shopping campaign is automatically created on “low priority” as a default setting, you can modify this and set your campaigns to either high, medium, or low priority.
Keep in mind that campaign priorities are not the same as using negatives, as you aren’t driving or excluding traffic, but rather giving first or second priority for participation in auctions.
Priority levels outweigh the bid amount at auction time, so if a campaign on high priority has a lower bid than a campaign on medium priority, the high priority campaign’s bid will be used. In another case, if multiple campaigns have the same priority, then the campaign with the highest bid is the one that will be used in the auction.
Note that budget issues can cause the priorities to be ignored. For example, if the highest priority campaign runs out of budget, then the bid from the runner-up in terms of priority levels will be used.
When are campaign priorities useful?
Campaign priorities are mostly useful when you’re advertising the same product, for the same country, in multiple Shopping campaigns.
How to use Campaign priorities
1. Prioritize best sellers for generic searches
Campaign priorities can be used to give first participation in the auction for a campaign with your best sellers, or a campaign with the products you want to prioritize or highlight in appearing.
To avoid your shopping ads showing up for unqualified searches you can make your campaigns “compete smarter”, as detailed in this CPC Strategy article.
Example:
Let’s say your inventory contains a variety of wireless speakers. You have different brands and models, but the Bose Minilink II and the JBL Flip speakers are your best-selling items. And as bestsellers, you want to make sure that they have first participation in auction upon a generic “wireless speakers” search.
The way to do this would be to create a campaign for best-sellers and include the Bose Minilink II and the JBL Flip speakers, and then set the priority of this campaign to “High Priority”.
This doesn’t exclude any campaigns from participating, it just helps you define where you first want to place the bid from.
2. Prioritize flighted budgets
Another case would be to use campaign priorities to spend flighted or seasonal budgets before spending evergreen budgets.
Example:
Say you are creating a winter campaign that runs on a specific budget and focuses on winter clothing items only. One of the products in this campaign is a jacket, which is also included in the outdoor apparel campaign that runs year-round.
Considering the winter campaign has its own specific budget, you can make sure that budget is used first, before that of the outdoor apparel campaign.
To do this, you’d set the winter campaign on a high priority, and the outdoor apparel campaign with a medium or low priority.
3. Bid less for generic searches and more for product searches
Somewhat counterintuitively, CPCs for generic queries tend to run higher than those for specific product searches.
Here’s an illustration of that effect from Andreas Reiffen and Crealytics:
The higher the bid, the more one-word (generic) queries the ad is shown for.
This is generally bad because generic searches tend to happen long before the conversion. The more specific, multi-word queries tend to immediately precede the sale. So ROAS-focused advertisers will want to bid more for specific queries and less for generic queries but that’s the opposite of what happens when you have just one campaign for your products.
A strategy that lets you bid more for specific product searches involves a mix of campaign priorities, different bids, and different negative keywords. Kirk Williams wrote a detailed step-by-step article on the benefits of setting up an SKU-level shopping strategy.
This strategy was pioneered by Martin Roettgerding. Here’s how it works:
So for the Generic Campaign, the one that is supposed to attract clicks for the most generic queries related to what you sell, you set high priority, low bids, and add negative keywords for the brands and product names.
Now if a branded search happens, the high priority campaign is skipped because it has a negative brand keyword so the medium campaign will pick up the traffic with a reasonable bid.
Closing thoughts
If you’ve tried some of these techniques or explored others that leverage shopping campaign priorities, let us know. We’d love to feature your story in an upcoming blog post.
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Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
2020 was anything but a normal year. The pandemic slowed day-to-day life as we know it, but it sped up years of e-commerce growth in just a few weeks. This acceleration is so huge that we can expect it to continue this year and beyond. Consumers are now looking for solutions online due to lockdowns, travel restrictions, and the unavailability of products in physical stores. While most retailers and businesses welcomed this shift to online shopping, many weren’t ready to cater to a virtual store experience.
To get a better look at the past year and discuss what to expect in 2021, we invited over some of our friends from Google and asked for their insights. We also heard from Andrew Lolk, an industry veteran and leading e-commerce expert, on his agency’s findings of what really works when the rubber meets the road.
Emi Wayner, Platform Partner Lead, Google
Peter Oliveira, Partner Development Analyst, Google
Andrew Lolk, Founder, SavvyRevenue
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights on tackling shopping ads and e-commerce in 2021.
1. Shopping & e-commerce predictions for 2021
Emi: As we all know, we have already shifted a lot since COVID happened. Digital is going to be a critical touchpoint for many shoppers. Searching locally and then confirming in-store availability. Consumers will also be looking to try new and safer services this year. We are also expecting a 600% increase in searches for ‘click + collect’ services.
Marketers can help raise awareness of differentiated omni-channel offerings and provide a great end-to-end experience for users who are increasingly selecting store pickup as their preferred fulfillment option. ‘Curbside Pickup’ and ‘Pickup Later’ are also useful to meet the needs of consumers. We have noticed that when you have ‘Pickup Today’ extension, the CVR increases 13% in ads while the CTR spikes 2%.
Andrew: It’s been interesting to see how lockdowns have affected the different markets around the world. As we have multiple office locations, we operate with e-commerce brands across the US, Europe, and Scandinavia. While we keep seeing different numbers and charts, we have seen e-commerce growth across all categories in different countries.
The interesting part is how in all the countries we’ve seen, the e-commerce levels almost stay at the same level even post-lockdowns. So the new e-commerce levels appear to be here to stay!
2. Thoughts on e-commerce in 2020
Emi: I think overall all categories went up in terms of purchase online. But we have particularly seen good growth in electronics, clothes and home furniture. Other categories like health and personal care also saw an increase in sales. On the search terms side, we noticed that people were more comfortable with purchasing non-brand items as they were more focused on inventory, looking for available items.
A lot of this can be based on ‘social e-commerce’. When you’re watching YouTube, you’d find a lot more advertising and useful information present that influences consumers to shop. Moreover, we have also observed a trend of personal services like fitness training, consulting, etc being offered online.
3. Smart vs Regular Shopping Campaigns
Peter: The key difference between the two is that Smart Shopping dynamically allocates your budget using machine learning across different channels and formats. So whereas in a traditional shopping campaign, you’d have a separate display campaign or a dynamic remarketing campaign, Smart Shopping is gonna do all that automatically for you. The good thing is that it still keeps your goal in mind while tapping into those additional formats and services to bring you more leads or sales.
The core levers that we have for scaling Smart Shopping Campaigns, in general, are ROAS, the budget, and also how many products are in the feed. The more products you have, the more inventory you get, which is similar to adding more keywords to your search campaign in order to generate more reach.
4. Smart Shopping outperforms Standard Shopping setups 9/10 times
Andrew: For in-house teams, or full-service agencies, Smart Shopping wins almost every time. Where we see Smart Shopping work really well is when we don’t have anything better to come up with. So let’s say a DTC advertiser that sells socks. We have little search term data, no price comparison data, no significant brands, etc. The complexity overall is almost non-existing. Smart Shopping does really well in those cases.
If you use external data like price comparison data, proactive seasonal bidding, weather data, inventory levels, promotions, etc, or have been running another more complex setup for a longer time, then making the switch will make Smart Shopping relearn some (maybe all) of those things again.
For Google Shopping campaigns to beat Smart Shopping, it’s paramount to use the priority levels to help it prioritize products is really the key to success:
The old school / easiest example to understand is using bestsellers in a high priority campaign, and others in a medium priority
But the sky’s the limit really, and we’ve tried a lot of different setups that all work well depending on the scenario.
5. Making Smart Bidding and Smart Shopping work for you
Peter: The core levers that we have for scaling Smart Shopping campaigns, in general, are ROAS, the budget, and also how many products are in the feed. The more products you have, the more inventory you get, which is similar to adding more keywords to your search campaign in order to generate more reach.
Andrew: For Smart Bidding to work optimally you have to keep optimizing your overall campaigns, but more importantly, you need to keep updating the ROAS/CPA targets. Not daily, not weekly, but only when you notice performance changes. This can be after a really good sales period where you’ve been hitting targets and then go into a slump. The algorithm will lower your bids to hit your target ROAS - but that might push you out of the auctions, which will start a negative spiral of you getting less and less data, which makes the algorithm work poorly.
Conclusion
The shift to an online shopping experience is a long pending one. We might see many businesses and buyers preferring the old-school brick-and-mortar stores. But due to health concerns, the necessity of having a fluid online shopping experience is now more prevalent than ever. PPC professionals and business owners need to re-assess, analyze and streamline their approaches to e-commerce in the upcoming months.
Using Google’s new setups and extensions, like Pickup Today, can only leverage us in the long run. Relying on automation, machine learning, and good data are sure to help us navigate new e-commerce and shopping trends in 2021. Now, you can get the slides from episode 32 of PPC Town Hall on optimizing shopping ads right here.
The holiday season is the busiest time for e-commerce and with just days until Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, everyone in the search marketing community is knee-deep in last-minute preparations for the sale of the year. Considering what 2020 has been like so far, what else should we expect to be different? We can’t predict the unexpected, but we can point out some new trends that you should be prepared for.
More even than in previous years, we have seen a bigger rise in the number of online shoppers. Owing to health restrictions and lockdowns, people have turned online to look for products and services. We need to look at audience behavior, pay close attention to logistics, and keep a close eye on our messaging. And because we are living in such an ‘unprecedented’ year, we are bound to see some ‘unexpected’ things in the upcoming weeks.
Here’s my take on 7 such things that we need to be prepared for this Holiday season.
1. Holiday shopping will start sooner
Holiday shopping started early this year and that’s backed up by Microsoft research showing that over 40% of shoppers intend to start earlier this year. Due to the pandemic, a lot of retailers have been very aggressive with deals throughout this year and that may have reset some expectations with consumers. We may now see deals lasting longer and pop up more frequently than before.
While Black Friday is usually the unofficial start to the Holiday shopping season, this year shoppers won’t be waiting that long. Counting the fact that there are around 50 days between Amazon’s Prime Day (Oct 13) and Cyber Week, shoppers will have begun planning and purchasing for the Holiday season from early October. Moreover, considering the current health regulations, social distancing, and movement restrictions, shoppers might be looking towards a safer way to continue their shopping. This will prompt them to be less spontaneous and instead better plan their in-store visits, and even space them out over a few months to lessen the stress related to the circumstances of this unusual year.
2. Most shopping will be done online
E-commerce is going to be huge in the upcoming months. Even in Q1 & Q2, we saw an unprecedented push towards digital shopping and e-commerce. So the same wave is expected to follow through till the end of the year. According to a report published by Statista Research Department (Aug 10, 2020), titled United States: retail e-commerce sales 2017-2024, US online retail sales are projected to reach 476.5 billion US dollars by 2024.
E-commerce has accelerated ahead of where everyone expected it to be. For example, the Snacks Daily podcast reported that the Disney+ streaming service has reached its 5-year goal for subscriptions just 7 months after launch, more than 4 years ahead of schedule!
Another thing we are expecting to see is a constant rise in the number of online shoppers post-pandemic, relying on e-commerce stores for their purchases. Data from IBM’s US Retail Index supports this and shows that the pandemic has quickened the transfer from physical to digital stores by 5 years!
3. BOPIS will be popular with customers
BOPIS (Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store) is going to be a huge hit. People who never dreamed of buying online may now use this hybrid approach. But for retailers, this brings a shift in the competitive landscape. Earlier, brick-and-mortar stores were just competing against pure-play e-commerce shops where consumers liked their convenience and low prices. Now they also have to compete against hybrid players with a strong BOPIS model, like Target and Walmart instead of just Amazon.
While it’s true that physical stores were already competing with brands like Target and Walmart, that was based more on local convenience and low prices. But with consumers relying on the added convenience of shopping in apps and opting for BOPIS, things may get even tougher for old-school brick-and-mortar stores with no digital capabilities.
4. Holiday 2020 will be celebrated differently
Microsoft’s research data indicates that people will be celebrating differently than before.
More people will celebrate at home (40% will change usual holiday plans according to Microsoft’s data), with smaller groups. Which means less travel but more first-time chefs cooking their first-holiday meal. This in turn is a big boon for food delivery services like DoorDash which, driven by the pandemic, turned a profit for the first time and will have its IPO soon.
Moreover, with people deciding to stay home, they might be more inclined to invest in self-pampering products like fitness equipment, beauty products, or even streaming subscriptions. So those industries will continue to see an increase in sales as the holidays roll around.
5. Figuring out shipping & delivery
Free shipping, which has long been a staple of e-commerce deals, is likely to take on a new meaning. With higher e-commerce sales, shipping logistics are more strained than ever and that’s on top of pandemic-driven supply-chain issues that have created empty shelves and shortages of a variety of products over the past months. According to a Salesforce report — traditional delivery providers (like FedEx, UPS, DHL) might face issues with capacity (by 5%) between the week before Cyber Week and Boxing Day. Consumers may be surprised when they have to order much earlier than before to get their gifts on time for their celebrations.
And in turn, retailers and service providers will have to keep a lookout for unanticipated delivery delays of inbound and outbound goods, shipping surcharges imposed by carriers, and potentially higher than usual returns from consumers who are panic buying.
6. Sale events will be game-changers
Contrary to previous years, Black Friday 2020 might not be able to get much in-store action, courtesy of the pandemic. And while Black Friday has been associated with big-item sales which require a lot of planning and intent, Cyber Monday has always been about online-shopping.
In-person Black Friday shopping used to appeal to consumers for 3 primary reasons:
• Great deals and discounts • Multiple gifts can be bought in one shopping trip • Chance to discover new gift ideas
But things are different this year and despite the usual appeal of Black Friday, according to Microsoft, Cyber Monday is the sales event to be on the lookout for this year. If your Black Friday follows the trend and is lower than expected, it’s not too late to shift that budget to Cyber Monday over the weekend.
And for international marketers, the following data might be much insightful. In the US, these sale events might bring in consumers, UK & AU report lower numbers of shoppers attending them.
7. Rise of the gift cards
Microsoft says gift cards are growing faster than other categories this year. They are an ingenious solution to a big Holiday problem for consumers – choosing a gift and delivering it on time, even for procrastinators who waited too long! They can even help small businesses market their products and gain stability in the Holiday season by bringing in steady revenue with minimal investment. Consumers have been buying gift cards to support their local businesses in the pandemic.
As gift cards are traditionally excluded from sales events like Black Friday, that may explain why some people don’t intend to participate in the event this year (as explained in the point above).
The other items that are on shoppers’ lists are apparel, toys, electronics, and self-care products.
Conclusion
2020 has been a year with many ups and downs. Unlike earlier years, this year consumers won’t be crowding aisles for Black Friday sales, but rely on purchasing from the comforts of their homes. Since we only have a week to Black Friday, most marketers would have already put their plans and strategies in place.
While you might not be up for making major changes directly to your ads right now, you can still create last-minute monitors and alerts so that you get some help staying on top of things during your busiest time of the year. If you don’t have these set up, do so now! Also, check out the tips we shared from speaking to 14 PPC experts about their advice on navigating Holiday 2020 and winning e-commerce sales.
As a PPC professional, you’d have often wondered which campaign type would best suit your goals and business objectives. While it can’t be denied that Performance Max for retail is less time-consuming it doesn’t provide the control you need.
Standard Shopping campaigns can also be quite beneficial if used efficiently. Not only will you be able to have full control over your campaigns, but direct the adjustments more effectively without compromising on the target.
This means that you can run efficient and profitable campaigns with Standard Shopping if you want to! Here are some tips to structure Standard Shopping campaigns to make them profitable with insights from Optmyzr products.
1. Campaign Structure
If you have a feed with varying products, it’s a good idea to have a multi-campaign structure. For example, you can choose to have different campaigns by different categories of products or brands. This enables you to allocate budgets by product type or brand. You can also build campaigns by attributes like ROAS or profit margins if you are passing this data to the feed using custom label attributes. Optmyzr can help build campaigns based on ROAS.
Ad groups: Inside the campaigns, you should further segment products at the ad group level. There are two advantages to doing that:
Having different ad groups gives you the option to sculpt traffic by adding negatives. For example, if you are selling shoes and have different campaigns for different brands, segment your ad groups by shoe types like running shoes, walking shoes, etc.
With different ad groups, you get the opportunity to optimize campaigns running on the target ROAS automated bidding strategy, as you can set a different target ROAS for different ad groups based on performance.
Product groups: We recommend having a GRIP (group of individual products) structure where you have one product group for each item in your feed. This structure gives you the flexibility to set bids for each product group. You can analyze data aggregated by different attributes like price, color, size, and item group id in the feed using the Shopping Attribute Bidder, and set bids based on that. If you are running on an automated bidding strategy, it gives you the option to exclude unprofitable products.
Pro Tip: If you have an existing shopping campaign, use the Shopping Analysis Tool to see performance aggregated by different product attributes. This can help you decide on the best structure for your campaigns and ad groups. We recommend choosing attributes that have 100% coverage in the feed because it prevents products from falling into everything else in the product group. The feed analysis feature from Optmyzr can give you an overview of attribute coverage.
Using inventory filters for campaign settings can help you make sure that you’re not advertising the same products in multiple campaigns. You can define inventory filters in the Google Ads interface in the campaign settings. Also, when you create shopping campaigns using Optmyzr’s Shopping Builder 2.0, these inventory filters are set up automatically based on the structure you choose.
2. Search Query Management
Shopping campaigns do not have keywords so it is not possible to tell Google which queries you want your ads to show for. However, you can tell Google which queries you don’t want to show your ads for by using negative keywords. Negative keywords can also help sculpt traffic to direct traffic to more profitable ad groups. This makes sure that queries are more accurately matched to products that help maximize ROAS.
Pro Tip: Use the Shopping Negatives tool from Optmyzr to send traffic to more profitable ad groups or to add unprofitable queries as negatives to save cost. You can also use the Rule Engine to automate this process.
3. Bidding
Standard Shopping campaigns give you a lot of flexibility with bidding strategy and that is one of the reasons we prefer them over Performance Max campaigns for retail. You can either choose to use a manual bidding strategy or put the campaigns on an automated bidding strategy like target ROAS (tROAS).
Automated Bidding (tROAS)
You can set your shopping campaigns to run on a tROAS automated bidding strategy. We recommend using standard automated bidding instead of portfolio automated bidding. This way you will have the opportunity to tweak the target ROAS at the ad group level when you use standard automated bidding. In fact, this is one of the ways to use automation layering to get better performance and benefit from Google’s automated bidding.
You can use the Optimize Target ROAS optimization that helps increase conversions and increase ROAS. This optimization was built using the Rule Engine so you can build your own version of it as well and automate it.
Manual Bidding
You can also use manual bidding which will give you more granular control over bids. Apart from making bid changes at the product group level, you can also set bid adjustments by time, geography, audiences, and devices. While it requires a higher level of monitoring than automated bidding, it can be quite rewarding.
Optmyzr has a whole suite of tools to help you manage hours of the week, geo, audience, gender, and device bid adjustments. You can also use the Rule Engine to automate your strategy which reduces the day-to-day overhead. When you are running on manual bidding, analyze the benchmark CTR and benchmark CPC metrics to see how your products are performing against your competitors. This information can come in handy when you’re setting bids.
4. Budgets
When you have a multi-campaign structure, make sure to allocate budgets in a way that maximizes performance. For example, if your most profitable campaigns are losing impression share due to budget, reallocate the budget from other campaigns. The Optimize Budget tool from Optmyzr can help you do this very easily.
Points to remember
Make sure to note the following points to maximize the profits and efficiency of your Standard Shopping campaign:
Create a multi-campaign and multi-ad group structure
Create product groups at the item id level
Choose the right bidding strategy – automated or manual, based on the amount of time you have to manage the campaigns
Manage search queries closely and add negative keywords
Make sure your most profitable campaigns have enough budget
When you choose to go with Standard Shopping campaigns, you’d have full control over your campaigns, making every decision based on your own business choices. You can structure campaigns to have separate ad groups and product groups which will give you the flexibility to manage their bids, ROAS targets, and negative keywords. Performance Max campaigns for retail don’t give the user control to manage any of these things.
If you are an experienced professional, working with Standard Shopping campaigns can help you analyze and experiment with your accounts. Using predictive tools like Optmyzr can help you hone your campaign objectives and give meaningful suggestions to better optimize your PPC accounts.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
The holiday season is no longer upon us — it’s here. With Amazon kicking off Prime Day last week, the US market has entered the busiest time of Q4. And if you’re a search marketer, you’re probably still looking for ways to adapt to the new game that is e-commerce in 2020.
We spoke to 14 PPC experts to find out what advice they have for fellow search marketers to crush holiday sales and win big at e-commerce in Q4 2020. Here are their tips (in no particular order)!
Focus on profits rather than Google metrics like target ROAS. Remember that a higher ROAS does not automatically mean a higher profit so it’s important to find the sweet spot for your accounts.
Better yet, split up your shopping campaigns so that products are grouped by profit margin and then set a different tROAS for every campaign so that it achieves profitability. This works with standard and Smart Shopping campaigns, and it’s a great way to take back some control while still using Google’s amazing capabilities in automated bidding.
2. Optimize your data feed
Ed Goss, Managing Director, Ten Thousand Foot View
We’ll all be running Smart Shopping campaigns sooner or later. Focus on data feed optimization as this evergreen strategy will become your primary differentiator. With Google ramping up product disapproval thresholds, a high-quality feed can also save you from constant troubleshooting.
At my agency, we’ve found many advertisers haven’t spent any time optimizing Merchant Center. Activating features like feed rules, promotions, product ratings, and even automatic improvements can substantially boost click share and ROAS performance.
3. Don’t break or lose trust
Navah Hopkins, Director of Paid Media, Hennessey Digital
If online retailers do just one thing to bolster their performance, it’s to ensure they’re not losing the sale because of lack of trust.
Customers expect trust symbols:
• SSL certification • Detailed product descriptions/specs on technical products • Photos of the product • Reviews
The unspoken expectation is an online store will have more than one product unless the brand is clearly direct-to-consumer (DTC). If there aren’t a lot of products on offer (or if there isn’t a cohesive theme behind products being offered), it can deter prospects from going ahead with the purchase.
Q4 is the quarter of the year for most e-commerce. It’s Black Friday, the Christmas season, and sales. You have high expectations. Your product promotions are ready. Discount codes and campaigns are ready. Marketing budget is increased. But so is your competition as well.
Q4 is an e-commerce dogfight and the complexity of handling promotions, discount codes, free shipping, increased CPA, etc leaves you open to decreased profits even if turnover goes up. My advice is to track your profitability every day, on every order and every online ad, and get going with profit-bidding. No more guessing about profitability.
If you want to learn the difference between ROAS and POAS, click here.
My tips come in the form of three simple yet highly effective areas:
• Smart Bidding adoption • Merchant Center promotions • A budget to match your ambition
If you’re not using proactive Smart Bidding (rather than reactive manual bidding), you’re missing out on thousands of signals that Google can be responsive to in a split second.
Secondly, utilize promotions in the Merchant Center. If you or your client are running a Black Friday or Christmas sale, the world needs to know!
Finally, make sure that you’re not missing out on traffic (and therefore sales) because of something as simple as being limited by budget.
Check your creatives and keep your messaging seasonal! In the new automated landscape of PPC it’s sometimes easy to forget the basics. In Q4 refresh your smart shopping ad images, remarketing, and even your product descriptions to make sure you are shouting about your USPs and standing out from the crowd with seasonal content. In the Northern Hemisphere, think roaring fires and festive scenes, no ice creams or sunbathers. No group shots either resonate by reflecting current COVID guidelines.
Top Tip: If you are looking for volume and reach try adding generic phrases to product descriptions “a perfect stocking filler”.
We are about to enter a period of time in e-commerce that digital marketers have never before faced. I believe the most practical thing we can do as marketers is to seek “stability” in our efforts. In Google Ads, I believe this stability can take 2 routes: algorithm stability and bandwidth stability.
By seeking algorithm stability, we need to give the machines the best shot at helping us in this time of potential upset. This means, we should minimize the amount of unnecessary changes we are doing too close to BFCM. My recommendation is to have your feed data locked down by October 31 so you are making no changes (other than normal pricing or stock changes, of course) in November as you approach the core season.
By seeking bandwidth stability, you are addressing the human side of PPC in ensuring you and your team have the ability to account for the unknown. If you are continuing to do normal sets of optimizations through the BFCM period, then not only are you potentially throwing off machine learning, but you are putting the pressure of normal changes on your team in a time that is sure to have additional pressures added at the last minute.
Since 2020 has already been an off-the-charts year in craziness, it is best to go into Q4 expecting at least more of the same! Get your strategies and ads in order as early as possible – both to ensure delivery delays don’t derail everything and in case ads start taking a lot longer to get through approvals. Talk with clients about expectations too and make sure they understand that things could get disrupted from any direction this year so there should be contingency plans in place for as many aspects as possible.
In my opinion, the key for success in Q4 campaigns for shopping & e-commerce in this strange year is in the general marketing strategy we all should set up to ride the long wave of incremental online purchases created by 2020.
We all know very well how important it is to set new ads (and extensions) and to push budgets on the right promotions when people are more willing to buy online, but the real challenge here is to turn a cash-flash into a structural and steady sales growth.
The key to all this is to deseasonalize the demand. And you can do it only partially by acting on campaigns; you have to change the structure of your promotions. From Black Friday to a week or even a month, let people know that they have not to wait till November 27th to have their discounted El Dorado and that they will find good bargains long after it.
Learn more about PPC in Europe by reading this blog post.
10. Look beyond just ads
Elizabeth Marsten, Senior Director of Marketplace Strategic Services, Tinuiti
The array of options for e-commerce right now are pretty dizzying and even more so at a time when traffic is high and add in a marathon of shopping dates into Q4. So to get to it — if you are in-store and haven’t checked out Instacart, you definitely should.
Shoppers are going beyond groceries and the self-serve platform makes it easy. If you are in retailers like Walmart or Target, there are sponsored product options that may be a fit with low or no minimum budgets to give it a go. If you’re DTC, definitely check out some of the lesser crowded options like eBay or Etsy to promote items often at a lower cost than you would on more popular channels. And of course, Google Shopping, Shopping Actions, Buy with Google. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a no commission platform right now.
11. Go beyond on the customer experience
Duane Brown, Founder & Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk
If you are in e-commerce, DTC, or even in B2B and sell a physical product, making sure you can deliver that product and make the last mile work for your brand is something all marketers should care about. If we can not get our brands to deliver a product in people’s hands, we won’t have anything to sell. We won’t have a reason to run PPC ads.
The battleground for Q4 2020 will be in the streets and in the warehouses across this country and around the world. This may not be the job we signed up for but if there is a roadblock stopping customers from having the best experience possible after clicking on our ads, we need to help brands remove that roadblock.
2020 has been a whirlwind experience. It can be hard to think about let alone predict the future. However, I truly believe that making sure we can get our products into the hands of customers is going to be a challenge this year and all brands need to plan for it. We can not run ads, spend tons of money, and then not deliver on our brand promise to get that item someone bought.
To ensure Q4 success, we review performance trends and predict where the best opportunities will be relative to auction competition. This includes factoring in prediction forecast ranges where shoppers start earlier than last year. We build out promotional calendars and prepare in good time. Simple, basic tasks that might seem obvious still need to be triple checked to avoid missing out. This includes ensuring customer match lists are up to date, and that product feeds are in good health.
The competition will be fierce this year. Many omnichannel e-commerce companies will be chasing revenue online. Q4 accounts for 20-50% of most e-commerce revenue and with Covid-19 not being over by a long shot many will have to shoot for the stars.
Here it’s important to distinguish between DTC and “retail e-commerce” companies. DTC will experience more competition, but overall do great. They have seen a much bigger appetite for e-commerce and are living high off this. Retail e-commerce is trying to play catch-up, which is close to impossible.
I’m therefore predicting a mad dash for revenue in Q4 across the US and Europe. Be ready to change course, lower ROAS targets, and come up with better strategies during Q4. Only the best survive.
I feel like a bit of a broken record, but Q4 2020 is going to be different than any Q4 we’ve had before. The keys to winning this year are expectation setting, transparency, and patience.
The fast rise in e-commerce and reticence to visit stores in person means shipping delays and curbside pickup. Companies will win with an omnichannel strategy (leveraging in-store pickup options in Merchant Center) and transparent shipping timelines to ensure consumers will get their gifts on time.
The other challenge to be cognizant of is slowed approval timelines within Google or Microsoft. Both have had resource issues (along with the rest of the world), meaning your ads for a 1-day sale may not get approved as fast as they would before. Get your sales planned well ahead of time, and leverage extensions to ensure ads show rather than fully swapping ads for every promotion.
Conclusion
In the coming months, we’ll all need to put more thought into everything that’s important to meet business goals. Whether it’s logistics, automation or bidding strategy, keep your audience as your focus.
Share the right messages to the right people. Regularly monitor and update your accounts. And above all, be prepared yet flexible. Resources like Ignite Visibility’s e-commerce study can keep you on the right path.
More importantly, make note of what experts and your peers have to say about the upcoming season. Gain multiple perspectives and apply those which help you fulfill both yours as well as your clients’ goals.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
While many marketers and agencies might prefer Smart Shopping campaigns for its ease of use, some still prefer Standard campaigns because they feel more in control. One question that we hear from e-commerce advertisers time and again is what works better: Smart or Standard Shopping campaigns?
You’re in for a surprise if you think we advocate for one over the other.
To be honest, there’s no universal ‘right answer’ to which campaign type is better. It all depends on your vertical, business goals, and the strategy for your PPC campaigns.
In some cases, Standard Shopping campaigns outperform Smart ones in terms of ROAS; other times, a purely Smart campaign strategy can deliver better performance; or you can deploy a hybrid strategy, like using Standard campaigns with automated bidding.
In this article, we’ll take you through some use cases to help you better understand which Google Shopping campaign type will work better for your needs.
1. Feed size and variety of products
If you have a small feed with products that are very similar to one another, then combining all of them in the same campaign will probably work well. For example, if you’re only selling custom shoes that are all priced between $100-150, running a single Smart Shopping campaign may be a good idea. This is because the expected return on ad spend (ROAS) for all products in the campaign is pretty much at the same level.
Optmyzr Tip:OurShopping Analysistool can help you see if products in your Smart Shopping campaigns have varying performance.
However, if you have a large product feed with varying products, a single Smart Shopping campaign will not yield the best performance.
Consider the example of a large clothing retailer who sells a variety of apparel like t-shirts, shoes, ties, shirts, and socks. A single Smart Shopping campaign is not the best strategy since different products will have varying manufacturing costs and price points, and you may wish to allocate different budgets to different categories of products based on what you want to advertise more.
If everything is in one Smart Shopping campaign, the performance will average out and won’t be optimized for profitability. In cases like these, we recommend either multiple Smart Shopping campaigns or multiple Standard campaigns.
Optmyzr Tip:OurShopping Builder 2.0tool can help you create multiple campaign structures for your feed very easily.
The proof is in the pudding. Shopping Builder 2.0 is a great way to create Shopping campaigns faster and get straight to selling.
2. Niche products or seasonal products
If you are selling niche or very seasonal products, like highly specialized tools or Christmas ornaments, it would be wiser to avoid Smart Shopping campaigns. This is largely because there may not be enough data for Google’s machine learning algorithms to make smart decisions.
In this case, a Standard Shopping campaign with manual bidding or target ROAS/target CPA bidding strategy will work better.
3. Scarcity of time
When you don’t have much time to manage your Shopping campaigns and the choice boils down to either running a campaign or none at all, pick a Smart Shopping campaign. However, if you do have some time to manage your campaigns and your feed has different kinds of products, choose a multiple campaign structure.
4. Control & Visibility
Let’s face it: Smart campaigns don’t give you much control. If you want more granular command over different attributes — bids, target ROAS, search queries, networks, and devices to name some — then consider switching to Standard Shopping campaigns.
With Standard campaigns, you have the flexibility to choose which parts of the campaign management process you want to automate.
For example, you can use automated bidding strategies like target ROAS that automate the bidding process, but you can still retain control over other things like search queries and negative keywords.
When you need more visibility into your campaign’s performance, Smart Shopping may not be the best option. If you want to see which search queries drive the most sales — or even which ones are not profitable and should be added as negatives — Smart Shopping won’t give you that data while Standard ones will.
What can you do in each type of campaign?
To wrap things up, here is an overview of the levers you can pull to optimize both smart and standard shopping campaigns.
For Smart Shopping campaigns:
Manage budgets for each campaign
Manage target ROAS at the campaign level
Manage seasonality adjustments
Exclude products you don’t want to advertise
For Standard Shopping campaigns:
Manage budgets at the campaign or shared budget level
Set bids based on performance at product group, ad group and/or campaign level
Use automated bidding and set ROAS targets at the campaign/ad group level
Manage bid adjustments for device, location, time, and more
Use inventory filters to target a particular set of products
Access search query data and add negatives keywords to sculpt traffic and increase profitability
Manage placements and ad schedules
Set campaign priorities: low, mid, high
Exclude products you don’t want to advertise on
Both Smart and Standard campaigns have their pros and cons, so choose what suits the campaign you’re running, your line of business, your marketing strategy, and how much time you have.
At the same time, stay mindful of your clients and their business goals while choosing a strategy. If your clients are focused on profitability and not ROAS (as we all should be), then adapt accordingly.
One recommendation we make often is to run Standard Shopping campaigns with an automated bidding strategy like target ROAS, as it brings together the best of both worlds — the power of automation without sacrificing insight and control.
There’s no doubt that 2020 has been an unusual year for all of us. Even though we’re just in the middle of October, people have already started shopping for the upcoming holidays.
Supply chains, delivery, and in-store experiences aren’t what they normally are, yet consumers are buying and spending more — which has forced marketers and agencies to run offers and deals a bit earlier than usual.
But even with so much uncertainty and change, e-commerce has been ahead of what we expected at the start of the year.
So this week on Episode 25 of PPC Town Hall, we wanted to gain a perspective on how we all could navigate the coming Holiday season and make the most of it. We talked to two amazing PPC experts from OMG Commerce, an Optmyzr user, who shared their insights on all things e-commerce and shopping.
Our panelists for the week:
Brett Curry, CEO, OMG Commerce
Greg Maycock, Sr. Google Strategist, OMG Commerce
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are the top 5 insights from this week’s PPC Town Hall with OMG Commerce to help you make the most of Holiday e-commerce this year.
1. Changes in the last few years
Brett: One of the things that we did early on was manual bidding. In fact, as an agency, we were really good at it. So, we had some non-automated options where we were doing things with spreadsheets. We used formulas to sort our products and create bidding recommendations.
When Google launched Target ROAS, we were hesitant to try it out. But as it got better and better, we decided to test it out with a few of our campaigns. It took a little bit of convincing, but we slowly started to transition. I think that if there is some new tool that is better than our current approach, we need to embrace that!
One thing that we have to look at is how shifting our segmentation, breaking out campaigns, or even changing our targets can impact the full product-line visibility and sales. While we have come a long way from spreadsheets, we still have to think strategically and dig into the data regularly.
Greg: The smart bidding strategies have created opportunities to scale in terms of having multiple campaigns with multiple strategies. It has definitely changed how we look at campaign structures. In fact, I don’t think we have any accounts which don’t have three or more shopping campaigns. Earlier, with manual bidding, we ran a lot of campaigns with single product ad groups to focus our optimizations manually at the sku level. Now, it’s more about creating campaign structures that feed the smart-bidder the data and focus on what you want to optimize for.
2. Aligning PPC outcomes with business goals
Brett: As we do a lot of Youtube ads, we have all sorts of in-depth discussions with our clients. Usually, we have to ask them questions, about three or four times, in different ways with projected illustrations of results. We talk a lot about portfolios and how different campaigns work together. We also have to ask probing questions to really understand the client’s goals. In my opinion, we have to over-communicate.
Our role, as an agency, is to think strategically, ask questions, and revisit all of our findings. Ask a lot of questions so you get as much clarity as possible and keep evaluating what you’re doing. Eventually, this will help you align with your client.
3. Understanding YouTube campaign structure and formats
Brett: We primarily focus on Trueview for Action campaign where we can bid on a Target CPA basis. We found that if you give Google the goal of conversions, the smart-bidder becomes pretty good at finding people who convert. If you use Cost Per View as your bid strategy, Google’s pretty good at finding people who watch YouTube videos. So with CPV, your views will go up but your conversions will go way down. If you transition to Trueview for Action, you’ll get more clicks and certainly more conversions.
While we are looking for direct conversions through YouTube Trueview ads, we are also looking at the brand lift and Google trends to see the impact of our campaigns.
Greg: When we are retargeting viewed video audiences, who are still in the acquisition funnel, we turn to Trueview for action campaigns to re-engage people who saw the initial video. But we are also running YouTube for shopping campaigns, remarketing to people who did engage with the website but didn’t convert.
4. How to leverage audiences
Brett: Now’s the time to get your brand’s (or business’) message out there to drive not only conversions but build other kinds of audiences as well. We have a four-pronged marketing approach that can guide you better.
I think that this year, customers will be more interested in on-time delivery and getting the product they want than deals alone. It’s safe to say that most people also want deals or discounts. Done right, you can offer a deal that doesn’t negatively impact your brand. You can also look at free gifts, which is kind of like discounting but while making use of some unsold inventory.
5. Free PLAs and Deep Feed Analysis
Brett: In order to fill the gaps in your Search and Shopping, all you’ve to do is enable a setting inside Google merchant center to get free listings on surfaces across Google.
Most people search for a product on Google and then click on the Shopping ads on the main SERP. But some shoppers click through to the shopping or image tabs. Your free listings can appear on these tabs. If you’re paying for Google shopping ads, then surfaces across Google can deliver a 3-5% increase in conversions and clicks.
We do a deep feed analysis when we start with a client. This is compared with our keyword research and evaluated. After this, our feed specialist would craft the updated titles, descriptions, product categories, and even product types.
Conclusion
The way ahead for the world might be uncertain but it’s also exciting, and that’s true for PPC and e-commerce as well. As we get used to these regular changes, we also need to keep a strategic eye on everything we’ve done in the past.
Make informed decisions and align your PPC goals with what your clients want to achieve for their businesses. Re-check data, run tests, and communicate with your client to start the right way and keep the relationships strong.
Focus on the right messages to the right audience at the right time — the essence of Google Ads and PPC in general — and stay in touch with trends and updates to how search engines work for advertisers and users alike.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
In the past couple of months, more and more retailers have gone online to reach wider audiences. To get (or keep) an edge over newfound e-commerce competitors, businesses need to make the most of their proprietary data to optimize their Google Shopping campaigns.
One way to do that is by using a supplemental feed to complement the primary feed.
Supplemental feeds are an excellent way of managing your product listings with added information. Essentially, it’s secondary data that can be used to update a Google Merchant Feed without tampering with the primary feed.
One example is using a supplemental feed to temporarily adjust sale pricing, without having to undo the standard price categorization that’s built up in a primary feed. So while you can’t use supplemental feeds instead of a primary one, they can provide helpful layers of data that can optimize your shopping campaigns.
Why search marketers should consider using supplemental feeds
While the primary feed contains basic product details, supplemental feeds can be used to enrich that with more detail or alternative ones. They’re the perfect way to update listings without messing with your primary feed. And you can also avoid any extra client-developer work, as practically anyone can deploy them.
You can layer additional information in the form of custom labels, promotions, or even altered descriptions and titles. All you need to do is provide the additional information with the product IDs in Google Merchant Center, and it enriches the product data in the primary feed.
A supplemental feed can only be used with primary feed and cannot be added to the Google Merchant Center as the main data for products.
Let’s take a look at how to use supplemental feeds during the rush of holiday e-commerce that’s headed our way.
Use cases for Q4 Shopping campaigns
1. Announce promotional items.
During the Holiday season, you would want to advertise some items exclusively as on ‘sale’ or ‘New Arrivals’. As smart shopping campaigns don’t allow inventory filters, you can use a supplemental feed to add additional details about the product like promotional messages using custom label field.
Once you identify the items you need to highlight, use a custom label field to mark them. Now, use the supplemental feed with the product IDs with the custom label field you created to set up a new campaign!
2. Modify titles to match seasonal search trends.
Let’s say you sell different types of sweaters and other winter clothing. During the holidays, you notice that customers are using search terms like “Christmas sweaters” or “Christmas pullovers”.
If your product titles don’t contain these keywords, your ads may not be getting the traffic they should. To maximize exposure without increasing bids, you can alter your product titles to include the word “Christmas”.
Use the supplemental feed to create a new custom label and upload a list of product IDs with the updated titles, replacing earlier keywords and creating a new campaign. Once your promotion ends, you can simply remove this field, revert to earlier product titles, and your feed goes back to the previous setting.
3. Fix errors in Google Merchant Center.
Google Merchant Center often flags your products and disapproves them due to missing GTINs or Google Product Category. Imagine if this were to happen in the weeks before the BIGGEST sale of the year. Your developer will need loads of time to fix these issues and may not get it done in time.
However, if you have the details required by Google Merchant Center, you need not wait that long. Use a supplemental feed to add the necessary information and not only will you have your whole inventory live, but also avoid account suspensions during the holiday rush.
Using supplemental feeds with Optmyzr
We all know how Smart Shopping campaigns provide almost no control over product ads. You can try optimizing them by clubbing together products in different campaigns based on profit margins, high-selling products, or even ROAS goals.
The additional details for customizations can be fed to the merchant feed as a custom label. From there, you can use Optmyzr’s Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0 for each separate custom label value and create different smart shopping campaigns.
Also, check out this article where we busted some common Smart Shopping myths to show you the path to better optimization.
Conclusion
As businesses start gearing up for Q4 and the holiday season, marketers need to be mindful of changing shopping behaviors and be ready to pivot quickly. Considering the scope of e-commerce in the next few months, optimizing your product listings using supplemental feeds feels almost like a must-do.
While seasoned PPC experts might turn to feed management tools, taking a look at supplemental feeds for quick and easy fixes is still a good idea. Start with these, improve the feed with new data for seamless campaigns, and maximize reach.
If you want to try Optmyzr and experience our Shopping capabilities for yourself (get a new campaign live in as little as 5 minutes), sign up for our 14-day free trial. No credit card required, and full access to all our features!
As a leader in search advertising, Google is constantly innovating and developing new ways for advertisers to showcase their products and services. One long-standing feature, Showcase Shopping Ads are core to retail advertising and have helped businesses target top-of-funnel audiences.
Similar to product ads, Showcase ads appear at the top of a search engine results page (SERP) above any search ads. Clicking them shows products matching the broad search query, with an expanded catalog of products that matches search terms. Active since 2017, Showcase ads are almost like a virtual storefront for retailers.
Let’s take a look at a few recent changes to Showcase ads to see what they mean for the search marketing community.
1. Redesigned Showcase format
In order to provide more engagement from users and drive better performance, Showcase Ads are getting a total redesign. The new format has been expected to fully roll out by August.
With this restructuring, brand names have become clickable, which means that users can easily switch between retailers to view their group. Google has also added a description input space for the advertiser in the ad creation process.
The new update will also help users see a carousel of retailer offers that are most relevant to the query. Marketers can also input the Category Page URL during the ad creation process.
Image courtesy Google.com
2. Dynamic Showcase Ads: Ad variation reporting no longer available
In July, Google stopped providing the monthly reports on ad text variation metrics. To report on the performance of Dynamic Showcase ads, advertisers can measure pre/post-pilot activation. You can also reference the Google Ads landing page report to measure traffic to dynamically populated URLs in the whitelisted ad group.
3. Showcase Ads fully launched in Sweden & Netherlands
Showcase ads have been fully available to advertisers in Sweden & Netherlands since this past summer. Existing advertisers in these markets should expect a 2-3x increase in volume with this introduction.
Optmyzr’s take on the updates
Source: Merkle’s Digital Marketing Report Q1 2020
Shopping ads are one of the main sources of search clicks for e-commerce. And while they’re great to connect consumers with merchants when they’re looking for a specific product, they’ve been less useful for consumers who are at the beginning of their buying journey. Showcase ads help with this by letting advertisers display a variety of their products when the user’s query is still fairly generic.
Source: AdHawk
On the topic of ad variation reports going away, we can say this is another example of a move towards hands-off automation where Google wants to automate the whole process and avoid interference from humans. You could say that this reminds us of Smart Shopping Ads where there is very little to manage.
At Optmyzr, however, we see better results when advertisers create multiple Smart Shopping campaigns with different ROAS goals that are based on profitability targets and margins. We also see that with our Shopping Analysis tool, we can still help advertisers get insights on things like which product mix is most effective.
This insight can then be turned into an optimization where underperforming products are excluded from the Smart Shopping campaign. So even when it seems like there is little left to manage, the best advertisers will still find ways to use tools like Optmyzr to eke another bit of efficiency out of their campaigns, thereby allowing them to stay ahead of the competition.
As the holiday season approaches, search marketers are busy preparing for a rush of shopping and e-commerce activity in Q4. You need to be ready to navigate the next few months with expert planning and monitoring to deploy successful PPC campaigns.
This year more than ever, it’s important to arm yourself with tips and tricks to crush holiday sales. So for episode 21 of PPC Town Hall, we brought in a couple of experts in the space to talk about best practices in all things shopping and e-commerce:
Purna Virji, Senior Manager of Global Engagement, Microsoft
Anders Hjorth, Digital Marketing Strategist, Innovell
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 6 insights that can help you top the e-commerce charts during Q4, Black Friday, and the holiday season.
1. Search is going to be a big place to be
Purna: In 2020, we have been seeing three proverbial ‘elephants in the room’ – the economy, the COVID-19 crisis, and the upcoming elections in the US.
1. Recession: During the last financial crisis in 2008, consumers reported that they would pull back their holiday spending by 29%. However, these claims proved overly conservative as sales dipped by only 4.7% YoY. Even during the .com bubble, Retail sales continued to grow.
Search will be this big place where everyone will come to look for gifts. While retailers continue to cut back on budgets for other channels, Search seems to be least affected.
2. COVID-19: With 75% of U.S. consumers avoiding in-store shopping malls and 53% avoiding shops in general because of COVID-19₂, in-store holiday traffic will likely decline this year.
Online sales, however, are projected to astronomically increase this holiday season as COVID-19 continues to boost eCommerce activity. Anticipate holiday shopping to begin earlier as both retailers and customers offset the unprecedented shipping delays unearthed by COVID-19.
Even as the economy re-opens, and physical stores allow for customers to return, we expect BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store) interest to remain exponentially higher than it would have without the health concerns related to physical distance.
3. Election: The election in 2016 did not impact search, yet we expect 2020 to perform very differently based on a multitude of factors
Moreover, with physical locations being restricted, more and more people have been coming online to find things. Due to this, we are expecting a double-digit growth to online sales for the Holiday season.
2. Shifts in Search Advertising don’t give a solid outlook
Anders: While analyzing Google’s quarterly reports, I saw that Google had negative growth in Q2 2020 compared with the year before, something which we have never seen before. Combining this information with the rumors of reducing search term reports or negative keywords, I believe that they might be panicking a bit.
3. Seeing the pandemic as an opportunity
Anders: I think people are very uncertain about the current situation. While certain brands closed up and waited for the changes to still, others took this up as an opportunity to talk and communicate with their audience. We have seen brands emerging, others pulling out of auctions, or bidding higher to get all the attention. So if you are a brand that hasn’t interacted at all, take this chance to tell the community that you are still around.
4. Impact on data analytics and audiences
Anders: One of the things that we noticed while talking to some of the big names of the industry, is that bidding strategies were radically changed in about 25% of all projects they managed. But even with the data, you simply can’t predict in the same manner as you did before. Depending on the circumstances, you may have to reset the data, or even set a ‘before’ and ‘after’ lockdown, to learn user behaviors.
I remember what Fred says in his book (Digital Marketing in an AI World), that we need to take a step back to look at the data. I think this is the time that we need to step back and look at things. Earlier on, we could trust the machines for the data they had and their ability to predict, but it might not be so reliable right now, as the data is changing. You need to be extra careful before fully trusting the algorithms.
5. Rely on Machine learning and add your insights
Purna: It’s true that the old models and strategies have somehow seen huge changes from predictable patterns. But I think there’s still a strong case for things like automated bidding. eCPC bidding can work well for Product Ads, and Microsoft recently launched Target ROAS bidding for shopping as well, and we have been seeing some really good performance there.
So with so much unpredictability, leave some of the signals to the machine. But wherever you can put in your own inputs, give the system the best information possible such as through Custom Labels to manage campaign/product group optimization.
You can download Microsoft’s holiday shopping checklist as seen during Purna’s segment by clickinghere.
6. Microsoft recommendations for feed management
Purna: Remember to check the following things:
Be sure to add an email address in the Microsoft Merchant Center – even if you work with a third party feed management system- to keep track of feed rejections and notifications such as alerts if your feed is going to expire or if there’s a sudden increase in rejected offers.
Audit duplicate titles. (Considered duplicate titles only if the entry has both the same title and the same price.)
Pay attention to your descriptions as they show up on shopping tabs.
Optimize for the shopping tab for it can help boost CTRs and Conversion rates.
Don’t ignore optional columns like Product Variants and Product Categories, as adding these can give the search engines more information to help show your SKUs for higher relevancy searches.
Conclusion
As we near the end of September, last-minute preparations for the coming quarter are in full swing. Search marketing has changed, and we need to be watchful of these changes as they affect data analytics and audience behaviors.
At Optmyzr, we’ve seen a massive shift across industries as businesses took recent months as an opportunity to go online. More and more marketers and agencies are starting to trust machine learning, automation, and data-driven optimizations.
One thing is clear: In order to thrive in Q4, PPC professionals need to look for powerful search systems and highly effective management tools. Being careful of the minutiae like descriptions or optional columns could prove to be game-changers.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
While many locations are exiting lockdown restrictions and business has been allowed to resume, the realities of the pandemic mean that many people are still unable or unwilling to shop in person. But that doesn’t necessarily mean demand is lower.
Enter e-commerce: the reigning champion of helping businesses make money through the internet.
This week on PPC Town Hall, Optmyzr CEO Frederick Vallaeys spoke to a couple of the world’s sharpest minds on the subject:
Duane Brown, Founder and Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 tips from this week’s panelists on how e-commerce done right can make more money for your clients and your business.
1. Build a robust product feed
Every digital marketer knows that e-commerce success begins and ends with the product feed, so it’s paramount to get this in order before even trying to get creative with placements or extensions.
“We’ve seen big e-commerce stores come in and do really well with a feed where the titles are optimized for organic traffic. At the same time, we’ve seen time and time again that if you take the time to really build out the rest of the feed values so that your feed is as good as it can be, it can drastically improve Google Shopping results over time,” Andrew shared.
“The problem is this improvement doesn’t happen from one day to the next. With some of the stores we’ve worked with, where the product feed was very weak and where we optimized the feed (added keywords to the titles, etc.), it took months for it to actually show overall great results.
“My takeaway from this is that the feed really has a quality factor to it; we can’t see it, it’s not listed like Quality Score, but there is a component that determines how many searches you get shown for. It won’t necessarily boost your rank for a single keyword, but how far and wide Google can and will spread your product exposure.”
2. Give your products visibility
On the other hand, building a good feed means nothing unless you utilize it the right way.
“The vast majority of our clients are on Shopify, but we also work with businesses that are on WooCommerce and Magento as well. One of our clients on WooCommerce uses their app, and we used a supplemental feed to augment/change the product titles. It was easy to do because they only have 74 SKUs, so I was able to build out what I wanted in 5-6 hours. We push clients until they make the changes we want,” Duane shared.
“We’re not going to do subpar work, so if you’re not going to let us use Feedonomics, we don’t want you as a client. We don’t have time to waste building out feeds when we can think more strategically about how to use that feed to make our clients more money.”
3. Know when to use Smart and Standard campaigns
If you’re listing your products via Google Shopping campaigns, you have a choice to make: control the parameters yourself via a Standard campaign, or let Google use its machine-driven Smart campaign to optimize things for you.
“My recommendation depends on who you are. If you’re an in-house marketing coordinator and need to run your Google campaigns because you’ve had a bad experience with several agencies, Smart Shopping usually outperforms anything average PPC managers can do by themselves,” Andrew said.
“If you’re on the agency side or have a lot of experience, then you can usually utilize more of the complex structures to generate better results than Smart Shopping can. That said, I think it’s one of the best things to come out of Google in a long time.”
Duane had a word of advice for anyone leaning toward a Smart campaign.
“You can only use Smart Shopping if you have enough data in your Standard campaigns, so you can’t just launch a Smart Shopping campaign on day one even if you wanted to. I would recommend hitting a consistent 75-100 conversions per month before moving to Smart Shopping.”
4. Look beyond Google
While Google offers many effective ways to advertise, over-reliance on one platform can be limiting.
“I love Google, but sometimes people get so focused on Google and forget that there’s so much other opportunity in the world,” Duane said. “This article from Modern Retail talks about Levi’s doing a test with TikTok — an app that’s very big with influencers, celebrities and content creators. They have shopping ads now and around 200-250 million users in the US; so does Snapchat with its 229 million users.”
Duane knows other opportunities exist — and he’s already taking advantage of them.
“We’re making shopping work on Google; where else can we go? Does it make sense to go to Snap? It’s not just for people under 18; a good 15-20% of users are above the age of 25 and have disposable income. We’ve had clients sell products on there with an average order value of $100-150, so there’s money there. TikTok only launched shopping ads a few months ago, but it could work for brands that have a lot of video content.”
5. Track profit, not revenue
While it’s almost standard practice to track return on advertising spend (ROAS) as the defining financial metric, simply keeping score of revenue might not account for the actual goal of advertising: to make more money.
“Tracking profit over ROAS enables you to be more dynamic in the way you work with bidding,” Andrew observed.
“PPC marketers and businesses try to figure out what the optimal ROAS should be, and it all comes from analyzing margins on products; some work on a category basis and identify the ones that have higher margins than others. But this misses the point completely, because some brands have high margins and others have low ones. And if you’re running a sale, your margin is severely limited.
“During COVID, we worked with a client who had trouble getting inventory for a specific category — one we’d had problems with for a long time. We increased prices by 25% and all of a sudden, we started turning a profit. The profit margin earlier was so low that we couldn’t compete; with the new and improved conversions, we could own Shopping for that category.
“We’ve had other instances where we tracked profit over ROAS and the profit had doubled, or increased by 50-80%. When we looked at the analytics and measured ROAS, nothing had changed. It all comes from changing which products we’re actually pushing, because we can see which ones are selling well and turn a better profit instead of having empty revenue going through the stream.”
Conclusion
Nothing hurts an e-commerce program like a strategy in disarray. That’s why it’s critical to treat every step of the process with care.
If you’re an in-house marketer or a business owner, you might not have the time or resources to get it right every time. Tools like Optmyzr can make it easier to streamline and automate large parts of your PPC efforts, just as they help agencies achieve efficiency at scale.
You might also be completely new to e-commerce, in which case it’s not a bad idea to speak with an expert.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
Earlier this year, Google made an announcement that changed the way advertisers perceived Shopping campaigns. By making Google Shopping listings free, the world’s largest advertising network forced everyone selling tangible products to rethink their PPC strategies.
Suddenly, this component of the Google advertising network became much more attractive.
At first, brands and PPC marketers were captivated by the prospect of free ad space. Once the initial hype faded, it became clear that only a portion of Google Shopping listings would be made free and that certain conditions had to be met.
To take advantage of these free listings, advertisers need to have active Google Merchant Center accounts and enable their products to show on all surfaces including Google Images, the Google Shopping tab, Google Lens, and Google Search.
As of late May, our conversations with experts like Kirk Williams of Zato Marketing revealed that an average of 5-6% of Google Shopping listings were made complementary.
But that’s not the only reason it makes sense to give your products Google Shopping visibility.
If like many other brands, your business or client are just starting to get involved in building Google Shopping campaigns, this article will help you figure out how to sell on Google Shopping.
In this article, we’ll explore:
How to take advantage of Google Shopping listings
Why Google Shopping is a proven channel for product visibility
How to sell on Google Shopping the easy way
How to take advantage of Google Shopping listings
Google Shopping allows advertisers to promote physical, shippable products with a greater amount of visual appeal. Consumers searching for ‘blue shoes’ or ‘leather couch’ can view and explore a range of product listings that match closely with what they’re looking for.
Google Shopping campaigns come in two varieties: Standard and Smart.
Image sourced from versafeed.com
Standard campaigns are built manually to deliver on highly strategic goals. These require some understanding of product groups, campaign structures, and other campaign components in order to achieve a specific goal, such as a target ROAS.
Smart campaigns on Google Shopping reduce the entry barrier by using machine learning and automation to speed up the process. This makes them ideal for small businesses with limited budgets, or advertisers who don’t have the time to build out Standard campaigns.
While Standard campaigns afford greater control over location targeting, negative keywords, custom scheduling, and network placement; Smart campaigns require historical data but will determine placement and other parameters for you based on past performance of other campaigns.
Google Shopping: A proven channel for product visibility
Google Shopping campaigns have always been considered a core part of the PPC marketer’s toolbox. They carry a visual component, which has proven to be more attractive than plain text when products are involved.
Here are four more reasons why Google Shopping is a proven way to give your products the visibility they need, especially with the current economic landscape in mind.
The effects of COVID-19 have made e-commerce more viable and attractive than ever. Even if customers can’t visit your store, you can still sell and ship your products to people who might need (or simply want) them.
Google Shopping campaigns (and e-commerce in general) enable you to widen your catchment area. A brick and mortar store can only serve a specific geography; selling online lets you grow your audience, market, and business.
Including images of your products in Google Shopping campaigns lets consumers see what they’d be getting if they made a purchase. Just be sure to use accurate imagery to align expectations with reality.
Free Google Shopping listings are a valuable bonus. While a 5% boost won’t change your bottom line, many businesses need all the help they can get.
How to sell on Google Shopping the easy way
Google Shopping campaigns can be highly valuable if your business calls for them. But it can be confusing and tricky to build them out if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. Moreover, creating splits (e.g. by brand or category) takes a significant amount of time when done manually — and leaves you prone to human error.
Optmyzr’s tools for Google Shopping cover the full life cycle, allowing you to create campaigns and set structures from scratch. Use us to do the heavy lifting and help you create the campaign structures you want, quickly and without error.
With Optmytzr guiding you step by step, you can create both Standard and Smart Google Shopping campaigns and ad groups in just a few clicks.
Campaign Builder 2.0
Campaign Builder 2.0 is Optmyzr’s tool to build Standard and Smart Google Shopping campaigns from scratch. Anyone can link a spreadsheet or Google Merchant Center feed to get started in minutes.
Product Group Refresher 2.0
Product Group Refresher 2.0 optimizes existing Google Shopping campaigns by adding new products and product groups based on existing campaign structures. It looks at your current campaign structures and syncs with the feed to accurately reflect your inventory.
Machine learning provides suggestions, and you can even automate the entire process. For example, when new products are added to the inventory feed, Optmyzr can automatically create new product groups for them.
Manage Shopping Bids
This optimization identifies high-performing product groups, allowing you to raise bids for product groups that are driving results. It also shows which product groups are underperforming or failing, letting you lower bids for them.
By nature, this tool only supports Standard Google Shopping campaigns.
Shopping Analysis
One of our most popular Insight tools, Shopping Analysis helps Optmyzr users understand how their products are performing irrespective of structure. Use it to aggregate data and determine performance based on a number of different attributes.
Performance Metrics, such as ROAS or CPC
Standard Attributes enabled by Google, such as brand or product type
Feed Attributes based on your inventory, such as color or size
Aggregate data by price to see the performance and ROAS that products at different price points drive. Or if you’re selling shoes, easily see which sizes are more popular and sell more, or which ones aren’t in demand so you can fine-tune procurement.
Shopping Analysis works with both Standard and Smart Google Shopping campaigns. With the former, you can use this aggregate data to change bids using the Attribute Bidder. For Smart Shopping, you can see which products are selling better — an insight that’s not easy to obtain in Google Ads.
Conclusion
While it’s admirable that Google is thinking of advertisers and supporting them with some complementary Shopping listings, there’s greater value to be experienced than just a couple of freebies.
Unlike services, products have shape and form — and people love to see what they’re buying before they make a purchase. Google Shopping campaigns enable you to do this while expanding your reach, allowing small businesses to flourish and hobbyists to turn passion into profession.
To learn more about how we can help you build and optimize Google Shopping campaigns with minimal time sink, write to us at support@optymzr.com or sign up to try Optmyzr free of cost.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
Would you like to use additional business data like profit margins to structure your shopping campaigns and set bids? Is there any information missing in your merchant feed that you’d like to incorporate into your campaign structure?
If your answer to the above questions is yes, then supplemental feeds are the solution for you.
Supplemental feeds help you push additional information to your primary merchant feed without editing the primary feed. They can help you enhance the merchant feed by adding extra information that may be missing from the feed. For example, if you have profit margin data available for the products in the feed you can push that data to your feed as a custom label. Or, if you would like to structure your campaigns based on ROAS, you can do that as well using supplemental feeds.
How do supplemental feeds work?
When Google reads the data from your Merchant Center feed, it treats the parent feed and supplemental feed as one. You can create a supplemental feed with the additional information you’d like to add for each of the products and then associate it with the merchant center. The supplemental feed matches the product id in the primary feed and associates the extra information with the matching products. This process gives you the flexibility to add/update the required information in the merchant feed and use it to build campaigns.
Use cases for supplemental feeds
Let’s take an example to understand how supplemental feeds can help. Say, you have a feed with more than 10,000 products with different price points and you would like to structure your campaigns based on the price of different products. Google Ads only allows a specific list of attributes which can be used to create a campaign and that does not include attributes like price or ROAS. A supplemental feed can help you include the price field or ROAS as a custom label value in the feed and it can then be used to build a shopping campaign.
To start with, have a look at your feed and identify different price ranges in which your products fall (or you can use the Shopping Analysis tool from Optmyzr). The reason behind creating different price range buckets is to group together the products that have a similar price and have them under the same campaign or ad group. This will help you bid on similar priced products together. Once you have decided the price buckets, you can create a supplemental feed assigning these price buckets to a custom label for each of the products. Please refer to the example below:
Primary feed: Below is an example of a primary feed in its original state.
Supplemental feed: Looking at the price of the products in the primary feed, you can create different buckets and then assign the relevant price bucket as a custom label for each of the products.
Updated primary feed: The supplemental feed matches the product id with the primary feed and updates the custom label value accordingly. In the example below, we’re pushing the price data into the Custom Label 0 field which will enable us to use to structure campaigns.
Once the custom label is updated in the primary feed, you can then use it to create the campaign structure you want.
There are different use cases in which you can use a supplemental feed. I have mentioned a few below:
You can create a campaign for each different price bucket and then choose to set your bid targets based on the price range. To build out shopping campaigns, you can use the Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0 from Optmyzr. Read more about how it can help in the blog post here.
You can also use ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) to group products that have similar performance together. This strategy works for both standard and smart shopping campaigns. In fact it is one of the few ways you can optimize smart shopping campaigns. The Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0 from Optmyzr can help you with this as well.
Apart from the above cases, there are several other benefits of using supplemental feeds:
Supplemental feeds can be created and deployed by any one on the team and you don’t need an engineer to do it.
New information can be added to the primary feed through the supplemental feed and you don’t have to ask your client to make those changes.
Missing information like GTINs can be added to the feed easily. This helps make products more discoverable.
Smart shopping campaigns do not support inventory filters, so, if you want to advertise selective products, pushing custom label values using a supplemental feed can be useful.
Supplemental feeds can also help you categorize the products and create campaigns based on that. For example, finding out winners and losers based on the ROAS and creating campaigns for them.
Local inventory feeds can be easily updated with availability and price values regularly.
Supplemental feeds can help you manage your shopping campaigns more granularly by letting you add extra information to the primary feed as and when required. This makes it easy to make intelligent bidding decisions based on attributes like profit margins or ROAS to improve return on investment.
Holiday shopping season has seemingly become a “winner take all” proposition in the world of PPC. Think of it as the Fall playoff season leading up to the big championship game in December. Brands are scrapping for every click, every lead, every conversion.
Mistakes can be devastating to the end goal. And with each passing day in November and December, opportunities lost are gone. There’s little chance at re-earning the sale.
Shopping Campaigns have become heavily automated at the platform level, so on the surface it would seem that Google is making it easy for every brand and every merchant to launch effective shopping campaigns. So why worry?
Therein lies the latest challenge for PPC pros with all the pressure on them to execute flawless Shopping Campaigns. EVERYONE has access to the same heavily automated foundational toolkit. So if everyone plays from that same playbook, nobody can truly be out front.
Layered Automation: Deeper control for PPC rockstars
The core automations from the search engines essentially help marketers get efficient with the foundational elements of good PPC across the various ad types typically deployed. Optmyzr provides what we call layered automation to make it possible for strategically-inclined marketers to stand out from that “good” pack. Our team spends a lot of time tracking all of the advancements at Google and Microsoft to create tools that help marketers better utilize a search engine platform’s automation and transform PPC pros into strategic marketers as opposed to being tacticians.
The latest development from the Optmyzr team is a fully revised version of Optmyzr Shopping Campaign Builder. This week we formally introduced Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0, which taps the latest platform automations and make it much easier to build perfectly structured shopping ads faster and with more power behind them.
Version 2.0 culminates months of intense work by our team, connecting Google Merchant Feed data to new automation tools to build the perfect structures for shopping ads. Doing so meant ensuring the new version works across virtually any ad structure methodology. Thinking through the various ways PPC pros need to structure, we address a multitude of specific campaign needs, for example:
Creating one campaign per brand
Creating one ad group per SKU or product ID
Establishing separate campaigns for each range of profit margins which enables varying tROAS targets
Building and managing unique smart shopping campaigns for each product
Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0 makes it even easier to build perfectly structured shopping ads in record time. By maximizing the standard platform automations and layering in Optmyzr’s own automation protocols, it’s quite easy to build literally thousands of product groups in a matter of minutes as opposed to multiple days.
The essential linkage between the Google Merchant Feed and creation of product groups removes thousands of manual tasks. Within Campaign Builder, version 2.0 also includes enhanced capabilities within the Shopping Refresher module. Automations now extend to adding and removing campaigns as needed, acting on changes in data from the merchant feed. The earlier version had a simpler capability that was limited to working with a single campaign, requiring significant manual intervention (and time) to replicate across multiple campaigns.
Take, for example, the common approach of structuring campaigns based on similar products with similar profit margins. A good idea, which also allows for automated bidding to help maximize results. Such an approach, however, could box the marketer into a structure that isn’t nearly as dynamic as it could be. A marketer may decide it would be more beneficial to have one campaign for each product type. Shopping Refresher can now detect if a new product type suddenly appears in the feed and then automatically create a completely built out campaign with all product groups for that new product type.
The tool can also automatically detect the opposite – when a product is no longer available in the merchant feed. Campaign Refresher can automatically pause the campaign for that specific product and quickly cut off needless ad spend.
Move from tactical to strategic
Automations from Google, Bing and others can make things seem like doomsday for PPC pros in the long term. It’s understandable when considered purely at face value. However, the innovations that transformed other industries such as manufacturing over the last several decades have moved many smart professionals into much more strategic value-add roles.
Tightening bolts on the assembly line of yesteryear was an essential tactic/function many years ago. But repetitive action yielded the same core outcome while failing to tap the deeper thinking and intellect of the production line employee. In PPC, our value add as the human being running programs is not in managing repetitive actions. Our value add comes in the form of creativity and strategy – figuring out the intangibles and the if-this-then-that variables.
PPC pros who will lead the industry to greater relevance in the overall marketing mix will be the ones who layer powerful automation on top of the core automations from the search engines. The less time spent in the weeds of tactics will continue to elevate PPC pros from being “The Google Ads person” to being a strategic visionary with a much more essential role in the overall marketing hierarchy. Check out Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0. As always, contact us directly and we’ll gladly provide a 1:1 demo of how it can transform your PPC work day.
I had an illuminating conversation about Amazon Ads and PPC with an industry colleague recently, not long after we announced Optmyzr’s new Amazon Ads functionality. Our discussion shined a spotlight on a potential emerging threat for PPC pros – channel complacency.
Understandably, a lot of people in our space are deeply rooted in Google and Bing. It makes sense. Agencies have achieved greatness by making it possible for clients to dominate in the highly lucrative paid search engine results. Google and Bing are, without question, the primary search engines – and we are search marketers by trade. By a wide margin, standard Internet searches happen on these two platforms, with Google still the runaway leader – and its SERPs providing highly valuable paid (and organic) information.
Product Search – PPC’s hottest battleground
While Google maintains its overall Internet search dominance, actual product search has seen a quiet revolution in the background. Somewhere between 2015 and 2018, Amazon swiped the top spot for product searches, according to a study done by Jumpshot.
What? Did we hear that correctly? Amazon is the search king? But they’re eCommerce, not search!
Yes. For product-specific searches, Amazon seems to have hip-checked Google off the mountaintop. At the time of the Jumpshot study, Amazon held 54% of that type of search activity, compared to 46% for Google. Those figures were inverted just three years earlier. In the months since the study, Amazon has invested massively to deepen and further refine its search capabilities.
Google has fought back, of course, significantly enhancing its pay-for-play product search results, while deepening the experiences with Shopping Ads and Showcase Shopping Ads. Expect the battle to wage intensely for market dominance in product search.
Why? As we all know from years gauging searcher intent, product-specific search is a strong indicator that someone is stampeding down the funnel toward conversion. After all, a person typically doesn’t search [brand] [product] [size] [color] if they are trying to get general ideas for fashion trends for the upcoming season. Many of those searchers are seeking best price, convenience, and shipping options to purchase NOW.
So, PPC pros who dismiss Amazon search as not being “search marketing” are likely missing a huge opportunity not considering queries on Amazon as “search.”
Millions upon millions of searches are happening in the Amazon search box each day. Semantics and intent may be different than how many searches happen in the Google box, but make no mistake about it – Amazon is a search platform and there’s gold in them thar’ searches.
It’s been interesting observing reactions after we launched Amazon Ads functionality as part of the Optmyzr PPC Management Suite. PPC rockstars were all over it. They received the news with an almost “about time!” mindset, expanding their capabilities virtually overnight. Visionary PPC pros are looking beyond Google and Bing in their expanding definition of “search.”
Many other very talented pros in our space, however, are still connecting the dots of how search is morphing and seeing the broader landscape beyond the king (Google) and the queen (Bing) of search. The emergence of Amazon (and Facebook) as actual search platforms creates a big new opportunity for PPC pros looking to own a bigger piece of the overall digital marketing mix.
And since most agencies get paid based on how much spend they manage, any opportunity to significantly move the needle on spend under management should be seen as a tremendous opportunity, especially when the new platform isn’t all that difficult to manage with the right tools like Optmyzr.
Expanding the PPC universe – Simplified
Here’s the great news: It’s not difficult to expand PPC programs beyond Google and Bing. Again, the intent and behaviors in the various search boxes may be different, but the underlying mechanics are remarkably similar.
Think about it…Search > Algorithms > SERPs. Just as with Google and Bing, the Amazon machine churns out results against searches while allowing retailers and brands alike to buy their way to dominance for the keywords they want.
Optmyzr Rule Engine is the core of our Amazon offering. You can read more in our blog post announcing the Amazon capability, but here it is in a nutshell: Optmyzr makes it really easy for PPC pros to manage paid search across Google, Bing, and Amazon from a single interface. Manage critical aspects of paid search in Amazon, including the ability to set bids for a range or to meet a target ACOS goal. We allow the PPC pro to include negative keywords to reduce poor performing search terms and identify the positive keywords that convert in the Amazon universe.
Holiday shopping is ramping up as we speak. Hundreds of millions of searches for specific products will happen in the Amazon search box. You really don’t want to miss out on that lucrative search traffic. Your clients REALLY don’t want to miss out on it either!
Using inventory filters in Google Shopping campaigns becomes a necessity if you have different campaigns for different categories or brands of products. In this blog post, I’ll talk about what inventory filters are, when they should be used and how to set them up.
What are inventory filters?
When you set up a shopping campaign, the entire feed that is associated with the campaign and becomes the universe of that campaign. Inventory filters help you reduce the size of this universe for the campaign by restricting the products that are eligible to be advertised in it. When you set up an inventory filter for a campaign, it is your way of saying which products should be targeted in that campaign. For example, if you have a feed that has four different product types (shoes, t-shirts, pants, caps) and you want to create a separate campaign for each of them then you will set up four different campaigns and use inventory filters.
When to use inventory filters?
Inventory filters are set up at the campaign level so the most common use case to use them is when you want to create different campaigns for different groups of products like product lines or categories. Continuing from the example above, if you want a different campaign for each product type (shoes, t-shirts, pants, caps), inventory filters are the right way to do it. Having different campaigns helps manage budgets separately and have different targeting.
Why are inventory filters important?
As mentioned earlier, when you set up a shopping campaign in Google Ads, the entire feed becomes part of the campaign it is linked to. If you’re setting up multiple Google Ads shopping campaigns, then the only reliable way to prevent campaigns from competing with each other and duplication is to set up inventory filters. A common mistake is to create multiple campaigns and then manually exclude products that should not be advertised in a campaign. However, this is a very tedious task and prone to human error. Also, it is difficult to automatically refresh shopping campaigns to keep them in sync with the feed.
How to set them up?
Inventory filters can be set up in campaign settings in Google Ads. They can only be set up to include products with a certain attribute. For example, ‘Product Type’ is . It cannot be set up to be a partial match (contains) or to not match (does not contain).
Need help managing Google Shopping campaigns? Take a look at the tools Optmyzr has.
Black Friday. Cyber Monday. After-hours convenience. Price. Easy/free shipping. All are huge motivators driving people from brick-and-mortar stores to the ease and convenience of online retail. The trend lines are unmistakable. 2018 promises to be another transformational year for eCommerce at holiday time, with many experts predicting double digit increases in online holiday shopping.
Billions of dollars will be up for grabs.
PPC pros have an unprecedented opportunity to be real heroes this year by making sure their company wins more than its share of the shopping frenzy. Working in your favor, holiday shopping is always ripe with intent and immediacy.
Semantics Matter
First, let’s briefly recap the ongoing rapid evolution of the tools at our disposal. Google and Bing are both continually enhancing shopping tools to drive that high-intent searcher to conversion. They have added core automation to streamline the basics of PPC and more advanced tools such as Shopping Ads.
Focusing specifically on the Google platform (but still keeping in mind Bing is remarkably Google’esque with PPC), we all know the greater the specificity of a person’s search, the greater the intent. “Men’s black analog diving watches” tells the Google machine a lot about the searcher’s eagerness. Google can serve up engaging Shopping Ads featuring cool black diving watches to capture eagerness to purchase, serving product-specific ads with click-to-buy ease.
The holiday shopper doing more casual digital window shopping, however, will offer less specific searches such as “Men’s watches” or more vague “gift ideas for dads.” While vague, that shopper likely WANTS to get into a funnel and may need just a little prodding to convert.
In this less-specific search, Shopping Ads and Google’s Showcase Shopping Ads can create immersive and meaningful experiences for people browsing for that perfect gift.
If you haven’t dabbled yet with Showcase Shopping Ads, perhaps you should. They provide pre-click browsing of your products to generate purchase ideas based on more general searches. Previously, PPC pros didn’t have a lot of power to draw casual browsers into their funnel. Showcase Ads are an inexpensive option to meaningfully engage shoppers of modest intent – particularly those meandering for ideas on a mobile device.
Build – Optimize – Automate – Control
While Google and Bing do a good job automating core aspects of search ads for everyday PPC practitioners, the PPC rockstar needs tools like Optmyzr to take their game to new levels. The goal is beating competitors in the second-by-second, search-by-search battle for holiday sales.
The Optmyzr system gives you greater control and automation beyond what Google and Bing offer – and it’s all managed from a single interface. Everything from building campaigns, syncing with inventory, and managing bids to choosing your preferred mix of automation/manual intervention.
Campaign Builder greatly simplifies and automates creation of product group and other campaign structures. Tapping data in your merchant feed, this tool helps automatically align structures by category and craft groups by brand, product type, etc. Campaign Builder’s easy-to-use interface gives you greater control and flexibility to analyze structures to refine and improve them prior to launch. It will also flag gaps in structure that could negatively impact reporting and analysis downstream. In other words, you catch the clunky, annoying misses that would otherwise create headaches or hamper insight after the fact.
Next, let’s talk inventory. Retailers have greater opportunity to serve up ads based on actual inventory – you know…the stuff you have on hand and want/need to sell. Whether you sell cars or speciality holiday dresses or sporting goods, accurate inventory data fed into Optmyzr allows efficient set up and management of hundreds of potential rules and parameters to serve the right ad at the right time. Through rules and automation, you can streamline processes to serve ads based on highly specific product attributes – size, color, style, tech specs. Essentially, if you have data about the products, Optmyzr drives powerful tools to serve the ads aligned with that highly specific search.
Finally, let’s cover bid management. This is where a third-party tool like Optmyzr layers exceptional power on top of the standard automations from the search engines.
The day-to-day task of managing bids can be horribly time consuming, but it’s really at the heart of taking campaigns from basic to extraordinary. For those who need to manage basic modifications in bulk – such as blanket modifications across a product group, our Shopping Bidder tool allows a PPC pro to do that in minutes.
PPC pros, however, often want/need to make decisions at a much more granular level. Shopping Attribute Bidder taps data from Google Ads and specific attributes in your merchant feed. This combination deepens the ability for PPC pros to make different bids to accommodate variations based on any number of attributes. You’ll want to read up on GrIP structures to get the most bang for your buck with Shopping Attribute Bidder.
Finally, Optmyzr Rule Engine is an extremely powerful tool in the hands of a PPC rockstar. With this proprietary tool, it’s really quite easy to adjust bids based on deep data points, such as conversion, CPA, ROAS and others. Among the most versatile tools in the PPC toolbox, you can automate bidding structures across pre-set parameters. Big snowstorm about to hit the northeast? Bids can automatically adjust to push snow blowers or skis. July heatwave predicted in the midwest? Rule Engine can push window air conditioners in Milwaukee, Madison and Minneapolis. You can set those rules up well in advance to automate against countless eventualities.
Conclusion
Holiday shopping season always puts eCommerce topics to top-of-mind, so it’s always a great opportunity to talk about Shopping Ads and powerful bidding tools. Of course, we all want to capitalize on the November-December gift buying frenzy, but these tools are 12-month necessities to allow PPC pros to beat the competition.
People are out there searching for your products/services right now. Make sure they find you before they find your competitor.
Of course, if you want a free 14-day trial or demo, just let us know.
As longtime Search veterans ourselves, the Optmyzr team’s legacy generally comes from the Google universe. Yet we’ve always viewed Bing’s emergence as a true player in search as being a good thing for search marketers. More choice for users. A bigger pie overall. More opportunity for marketers to help brands reach the customers who are searching for what they sell.
Accurate market share stats are elusive, at best, but seem to range between 10-33% for Bing these days (in terms of search volume). While Google still rules the search universe, 10-33% of billions of searches conducted is massive – to say the very least.
Search is clearly the powerhouse way to reach customers because users tell the search engines specifically what they are seeking – “Men’s black dress shoes” or “trendy prom dresses” or “[brand name] camera lenses” or “family restaurants near me.” As Bing continues its steady growth in volume and its evolution to Google-like ad types, data and analytics, search marketers have found themselves working across platforms with greater frequency.
Trouble was, working in two platforms typically more than doubled the work for the PPC pro. Google automation and powerful tools like Optmyzr made it a snap to launch and manage Google Shopping Ads. Bing ads, though? Not so much. It’s been a much more manual and time-consuming prospect for PPC pros – until now.
The Optmyzr team is excited to introduce powerful new functionality that allows PPC pros to manage all critical aspects of Bing Shopping Ads from the same Optmyzr interface that manages Google Ads.
The new Bing-specific functionality greatly simplifies Bing Shopping Ads in much the same way it simplifies Google Shopping Ads. We set out to simplify core activities, including setting up advanced campaign structures, keeping campaigns synced with dynamic product inventory, and optimizing performance quickly and efficiently with AI-enabled decision support.
We’ve made it possible for PPC pros to tackle Bing Shopping Ads in minutes instead of hours. Many automated features speed things along, but Optmyzr also provides extensive manual intervention and optimization, so you can dig deep into your product data to improve performance.
A few of the most notable core features to highlight:
Optmyzr Campaign Builder: Set up your campaign structure for the most optimal deployment and management. Highly flexible in setup, much like what we’ve offered for Google Shopping Ads management.
Optmyzr Campaign Refresher: Keep your Bing ads in sync with a merchant feed.
Optmyzr Bid Management: Creates customizable reports that will help you identify commonalities affecting performance deep within campaigns. Commonalities might be brand, style, size, product type, price – any number of attributes essential to a successful campaign. You can act on the insight to drive better (more profitable!) bids.
As always, we focus much of our innovation on mid to advanced PPC pros, but the ease and flexibility of the system allows up-and-coming PPC managers to improve their abilities and execution.
One final important piece about the new Bing-specific functionality – you’ll still manage campaigns (setup to execution) individually for Bing and Google within Optmyzr. Each platform has its own unique structure and specific requirements. However, the time savings of deploying campaigns AND tracking metrics and reporting through the same system will undoubtedly help PPC pros work more efficiently and effectively. Optmyzr allows the PPC pro to access campaign metrics and reporting through the same interface, which allows more immediate comparison of performance in Google and Bing.
Best of all, you won’t be leaving millions – if not billions – of Bing searches to chance. As the overall search pie gets bigger and Bing continues to grow its share of search volume, it’s becoming more important than ever that search pros build their cross platform expertise and capability. If not, the competition might just run away with a huge percentage of previously untapped search traffic.
When it comes to Google Shopping Campaigns, there are different ways you can approach the bid management process.
At Optmyzr, we offer three tools that will help you manage shopping bids successfully. They have different focuses and vary by the granularity you’ll need. Whether you’re looking to manage more generic and standard changes in bids or to do so differently for that one specific product attribute, we’ve got you covered.
1. Shopping Bidder
One of these tools is the Shopping Bidder. With the Shopping Bidder, you can make rather standard and bulk modifications for bids based on performance. These bid changes can only be applied to product groups, and work by increasing or decreasing the current bid by a number or percentage.
You can also choose to set a new fixed bid. This tool is most useful for when you want to make changes like, for example, reduce the bids on all non-converting product groups by an X percentage, or set all new product groups at a specific initial bid.
2. Shopping Attribute Bidder
Based on how granular you want to go, at Optmyzr we also have the Shopping Bid by Attributes* tool, where you can combine performance data from your Google Ads account with the attributes in your merchant feed.
This means you can use a division such as Category 0 > Product Type 0 > Brand > Price to make different bid changes for every unique combination of the selected attributes. You can do this so long as you’re maintaining a GrIP structure, i.e. one product SKU per product group. (Try our Utility tool to Create a Grip structure)
3. Rule Engine
Another great tool to manage bids, and perhaps the most versatile one we have so far, is the Rule Engine*. The Rule Engine lets you change bids for product groups based on performance, and gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of comparing performance and setting bids.
The Rule Engine works with recipes that contain a set of rules you’ll define. These rules contain multiple conditions and associated actions, and all of the conditions must be met for the actions to be applied. For example, you can use our target ROAS, conversion rate, etc. to set bids for product groups.
The Rule Engine can even connect with your business data so you can start managing bids by margins or even by weather.
These three tools offer different, yet equally helpful ways of approaching shopping bid management, with different levels of complexity.
*The Bid by Attributes and Rule Engine tools are only available for Pro plan users, but as you can see both give a greater range of possibilities. If you’d like to try them, you can contact us at support@optmyzr.com.
Shopping campaigns work very differently from search campaigns. The biggest difference is that, unlike search campaigns, you can’t specify the keywords that you would like to show your ads for. However, you can decide which keywords you don’twant to show for, by adding negatives at the ad group and campaign level. Usually the purpose of adding negative keywords is to cut out irrelevant traffic which helps increase profitability. However, Google does a pretty good job of not matching irrelevant queries to shopping ads. The question then is – how can negative keywords help improve performance of AdWords shopping campaigns?
It can be done in two ways:
1. Direct traffic to more profitable ad groups
Negatives for shopping campaigns can be used to direct traffic to more profitable ad groups. When using a multi-campaign structure with different priorities, the same query can match to different ad groups. Comparing performance of the same search query across ad groups and adding it as an exact match negative to the ad group it is underperforming in will make sure that the query always matches to the more profitable ad group. By doing this you can sculpt the traffic to go to the ad group that you want.
2. Remove generic non-converting queries or queries with low ROAS
Google doesn’t match irrelevant search queries to shopping ads but it does match generic queries. For example, if you have an ad group selling ‘Adidas Running Shoes’, it can match to a query like ‘Black Shoes’ which is not irrelevant because it does refer to shoes but the search query is generic. Sometimes when campaigns have limited budget it is a good idea to concentrate on the queries that have the highest return on investment. Adding generic queries that don’t convert or have a very low ROAS as exact match negatives helps increase overall ROAS.
The new Shopping Negatives Tool from Optmyzr supports both the above strategies of adding negative keywords. It analyzes the search terms for shopping campaigns and recommends exact match negatives based on the these strategies.
Duplicate Queries (Across ad groups)
This strategy finds queries that match to more than one ad group and recommends adding the query as an exact match negative to the under performing ad group. It is like AB Testing the search query and keeping it in the best performing ad group.
Low Performing Queries (within ad groups)
This strategy finds queries that are not performing well within an ad group. They may have a lower ROAS than the ad group average or a much higher cost/conversion. If you’re on a limited budget, these queries can be added as exact match negatives to the ad group to reduce cost.
You have the option of clicking on the query and seeing exactly why the system is recommending adding it as a negative keyword. Also, the confidence level says how confident the system is when making the recommendation.
Watch this video to find out more. Try the Shopping Negatives Tool here.
Shopping campaigns are set up very differently from search campaigns in AdWords. The biggest difference is that technically your entire feed is part of each ad group in your shopping campaign. Unlike search campaigns where you choose the keywords that should be targeted, in shopping it is specifying what you don’t want to target and bid on separately. This is the reason that when you set up a shopping campaign in AdWords it starts off with one ad group and product group (All Products) which shows ads for all products in the feed. It also means that every product in the feed will have the same bid and it doesn’t matter if it costs $10 or $300.
Having the same bid for products that have a varying price point is not a good strategy and will result in low ROAS. This is because you will invest less in big ticket items which will most likely result in lower returns. To avoid this, it is recommended to create separate product groups for different products and set different bids. Deciding on the structure for your shopping campaign depends a lot on how you want to monitor and manage performance. The new Shopping Feed Analysis feature in the Shopping Campaign Builder gives you the additional layer of data you need to have the most accurate product group structure based on the data available in your feed. Before we get into the details of this feature, lets talk a bit more about campaign structure.
It is a good idea to follow the structure you have on your website. For example, if you’re selling accessories, you can choose to have different campaigns by the top level product category, ad groups by brand and product groups by product type. However, technically there are two things to consider – the attributes that AdWords lets you use to structure campaigns and the coverage of these attributes.
Attributes available to structure a shopping campaign
It is only possible to create product groups using specific attributes from the product feed as AdWords doesn’t allow the use of all attributes available in the feed to define product groups. The attributes you can use are:
Brand Condition Item Id Google Category Product Type Custom Labels/ Attributes
Coverage of attributes
If you use an attribute to define the structure but certain products don’t have a value for that attribute, those products will fall into everything else. This is what the Feed Analysis feature that I mentioned earlier helps fix. It’ll tell you in advance the attributes in the feed, the number of variations per attribute and the number of products that have that attribute defined. This can help you decide which attributes to select when setting up your shopping campaign. For example, if the feed has 80,000 products and the analysis shows that only 50,000 products have the brand attribute defined then avoid using brand to structure the campaign because 30,000 products will end up in everything else. It will also tell you how many different types of brands are there in the feed. For example, if the e-commerce store only carries one brand, it is not a good idea to split by brand. Therefore, choose attributes that are defined for most products in the feed and have some variation.
How to use the shopping feed analysis?
The feed analysis feature is available in the Shopping Campaign Builder tool in Optmyzr. When you are deciding on a campaign structure, select those attributes that have the highest coverage. This means they are defined for a majority of products in the feed. Also, after choosing the structure in the Shopping Campaign Builder, the tool will tell you the percentage of products that will fall into everything else. This way you can change the structure in the Shopping Campaign Builder before uploading the ad groups and product groups to AdWords.
In the screenshot below, the column ‘Products missing this attribute’ will tell you how many products in the feed don’t have a value for that attribute and if you were to use that to split your feed, those many products will end up in everything else. For example, the attribute Brand has 32 different variations and the number of products that don’t have brand defined is 0. This means it has good variation and full coverage so it is a good option to use. On the other hand, Custom Attribute 2 is not defined for 25,039 products so it is not recommended to use that to structure your campaign.
Understanding ‘everything else’
Products that don’t have a value for the attribute you selected to create product groups will go to everything else. This is essentially a group of products that are not split into their own product group. Each level of split in an ad group has an everything else node associated with it to accommodate the products that are not targeted at that level. The more products or SKUs that fall into everything else, the less control you have over their performance and bids. Think of it like a supermarket but instead of neatly stacked shelves by type of product, everything is mixed up together with a single price tag.
Why should products not fall into everything else?
AdWords only lets you set bids at the product group level. The everything else node is one product group and all the products inside it will get the same bid. You don’t have the flexibility to bid differently for products that have a different price. Also, performance metrics (for the purpose of setting bids) are reported at the product group level so the performance for all products will be consolidated. It doesn’t matter how many sales individual products in the everything else group drove.
If you’re just getting started with shopping and want to better understand why products should be split into different product groups, read the example below:
You are an e-commerce advertiser selling shoes. Each SKU or shoe in your feed has multiple attributes associated with it which provide information about it. Like brand (Reebok, Nike, Aldo etc.), product type (walking shoes, running shoes, heels…), price, color, gender, custom labels and the list goes on. Using some of these attributes, you can define product groups in AdWords which let you set a different bid for a pair of Nike shoes that cost $200 compared to another pair of Nike shoes that cost $90. If you don’t split your ad groups into specific product groups, all the products in your feed will be in a single product group and will have the same bid. To manage performance and bids, products need to be split into product groups because that is the lowest level at which AdWords allows changing bids for Shopping Campaigns.
Optmyzr has a new tool that will make it easy to restructure existing shopping campaigns to improve performance.
Create GRIP structure tool
In shopping campaigns, the product group is the level at which you can set bids. A product group can have any number of products. Having a granular shopping campaign structure lets you set a bid for each product individually. This is important because different products have different prices and having the same bid for all products may not result in high ROAS. For example, if you’re selling shoes and you choose to split campaigns by Category 0->Category 1->Product Type 0, you could end up with a structure where the last level has different types of shoes like running shoes, walking shoes. In this case you could end up bidding the same $2 for a pair of shoes that costs $100 and another that costs $250. To make sure you can bid relative to how each product performs, it is important to have a structure where there is one product or item in each product group. This is the GRIP (GRoup of Individual Products) structure.
How can you achieve the GRIP structure without spending hours in your AdWords account? The Shopping Campaign Builder lets you create the GRIP structure for new campaigns. You can specify the high level split, the tool will pull the data from your feed, put it into the defined structure and you can upload it to AdWords with a single click. For existing shopping campaigns that already have performance data, you can either spend hours creating this structure in AdWords or use the new Create GRIP structure tool from Optmyzr. This lets you restructure existing shopping campaigns to have the GRIP (groups of individual products) structure.
How does it work?
The tool detects the last level at which an ad group is split and splits it one level further at the item id level. This enables you to have one product group per item id while preserving the historical data associated with the ad group. Once you have this structure you can use the Shopping Attribute Bidder to aggregate data by any attribute in the feed.
Benefits of using the tool
No restructuring required: It works with existing campaign structures
Preserves historical data: It splits out existing ad groups so historical data is not lost
Higher ROI: It enables you to manage bids for each product which results in better performance and higher ROI
Saves time: You can create thousands of products groups within minutes
This tool is currently in beta and is available in the Pro subscription plan on Optmyzr.
I’m the engineer behind our recently announced Shopping Attribute Bidder and I would like to show you some of the benefits you can achieve by deploying a more granular structure for your product groups in shopping campaigns.
How bids work for Shopping Ads
In shopping campaigns, you set bids for product groups. However, not all product groups can get a bid. Why is that? It’s because product groups can be subdivided and the bid can only be set at the final level of subdivision.
Here’s an example where products have been segmented (subdivided) along a few dimensions: first by the category (‘electronics’ or ‘toys’). Electronics are subdivided further by ‘brand’, and toys are not subdivided further. The right column in green represents all other product categories and is called “Everything else” in AdWords. This is further subdivided by ‘used status’.
This segmentation can be shown as a tree:
What’s important here is that in the AdWords interface, each division is called a ‘product group’ but only the ones at the lowest level (the colored ones in the image above) can have a bid. We’ll call these ‘biddable product groups’.
Why AdWords has non-biddable product groups
So why does AdWords even have non-biddable product groups? It’s because the way they let advertisers do the subdivisions in the interface requires one subdivision at a time. In creating the tree, each level has to be subdivided individually.
Doing this is actually really really painful if you just want to build a logical division, for example, splitting all products by category 0, and then splitting all those by brand. AdWords supports 7 levels of subdivision but in the interface anything more than 2 levels is extremely manual.
If you need help with that, check out our super fast Shopping Campaign Builder tool. We’ve had advertisers create hundreds of ad groups and thousands of granular product groups in just minutes with it.
How to set unique bids per product (SKU) in Shopping Ads
How granularly you can set bids depends on how granular your biddable product groups are. So if you want very granular, SKU level bids, you must place each SKU in its own product group.
It’s a similar concept to SKAGs in search campaigns. SKAG stands for Single Keyword Ad Group. The name I came up with for the equivalent of a SKAG in shopping campaigns is the GRIP structure. GRIP stands for GRoup of Individual Products.
Let me show you two ways to split four SKUs (item IDs) into biddable product groups.
Here’s what your biddable product groups contain in a GRIP structure:
In the GRIP structure above, each individual shoe is placed in a product group. The same four products in a non-GRIP structure below are all grouped together based on a subdivision of something they have in common, in this case the fact they’re all sneakers.
In the GRIP structure, I can set a unique bid for each item I sell. In a non-GRIP structure, the bid for all four sneakers has to be the same.
Why the GRIP structure is good for bidding
With the Shopping Attribute Bidder tool I created, we can analyze AdWords performance for any attribute we have included in our Google Merchant Feed. For example, we could analyze how shoes of different sizes perform. Here’s what we might see in Optmyzr:
As you can see, size 11.5 shoes have an ROAS of 1361%. Size 10 shoes on the other hand haven’t sold anything so their ROAS is 0%.
In a non-GRIP structure, this useful insight cannot be acted on because shoes of different sizes exist in the same biddable product group.
In a GRIP structure, on the other hand, we can act on this insight:
What’s really cool is that your structure no longer limits your ability to act on insights. If you want to analyze performance by brand or color, that would work just as easily. Here we use the GRIP structure to change bids for things that are red:
And here we change bids for products from a certain brand:
Not only can you now analyze data using attributes not available in AdWords (we do this by merging your merchant feed with the AdWords reports in our systems), you can even combine attributes to find more granular insights.
Changing bids for GRIP ads
It was important for us to give you the ability to act on insights right from the page where you got the insight. Here’s what the Shopping Attribute Bidder tool looks like when you’ve found an insight that you want to use for a bid change:
The analysis here looks at price ranges of products, something the advertiser has entered using a custom attribute. We can see performance data for each attribute. When products with the same attribute have different bids, we show each bid so that you can raise or lower them all by a percentage or a fixed amount.
Conclusion
I see a lot of e-commerce advertisers with sub-optimal product groups. That’s why I’m excited about the fact that with Optmyzr you can now more easily create a great shopping structure and use that to improve bid management. Try it out and let me and the team know what you think…
Today you will see some new tools for managing Shopping Ads in Optmyzr’s One-Click Optimizations™ menu. These new and updated tools help e-commerce advertisers manage every aspect of advertising an e-commerce business on Google AdWords. Both the setup and management of shopping ads are made more efficient so that you can get better results with less effort.
The following tools are part of our updated Shopping Ads management suite:
You specify how you want your products to be segmented in AdWords. Our tool automatically builds out the associated structure, handling the creation of thousands of very granular ad groups and product groups.
This tool speeds up the creation of well-structured shopping campaigns, making it possible to conduct A/B tests and experiment with different structures. Without the Campaign Builder tool, a merchant selling ten brands, and products in ten categories and ten subcategories would have to load 1,000 pages in AdWords to create the same structure that can be set up with Optmyzr in just six clicks.
To achieve the best return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), you have to set the right bids for all products you advertise with Google Shopping ads. This level of bid control requires that product groups in AdWords correctly reflect the range of goods you sell. Because ad groups in AdWords don’t automatically get updated based on changes in the merchant feed, Optmyzr has created this tool to make it easier for you to sync a store’s inventory with AdWords.
In AdWords, product groups are created based on a snapshot of the data in a product feed. Because this data changes dynamically based on inventory, the AdWords structure can quickly become out of sync. Catching mismatches between what is sold and what is managed in AdWords is time-consuming, manual, and often overlooked by advertisers. Accounts whose bids are poorly managed due to the complexity of maintaining a correct structure can suffer from decreases in ROAS.
Optmyzr’s Shopping Campaign Refresher analyzes the AdWords Shopping campaign to determine its structure and compares this with the data in the Merchant Center feed to provide an automated optimization proposal that corrects any mismatches.
Optmyzr now provides three ways to manage CPC bids for product groups.
Bid by Rules (Rule Engine)
Complex bidding logic can be automated with our Rule Engine. The Rule Engine can combine data from different entities, and date ranges with data maintained in Google Sheets. The data can be used to create a series of if-then-else statements, giving you the complete flexibility to create advanced bidding logic.
We have provided default rules for managing bids based on ROAS and CPA, and you can enhance these rules with your own insights about your company and industry.
Quickly identify product groups that meet basic profitability criteria and apply bid changes in bulk with this tool. When there isn’t enough data to make bid management decisions, the tool can help reach the required data levels by aggregating metrics based on commonalities between products. For example, advertisers who have structured product groups by brand could use brand-level metrics to make bid changes for items where data sparsity is an issue.
The most powerful way to bid for Shopping Ads is with the new Shopping Attribute Bidder. Regardless of the structure in AdWords, you can view shopping performance by any attribute of your merchant center feed (even by color or size). If product groups are divided by item id, you can act on insights by updating bids from the same page where you got the insight.
For example, a shoe retailer can get instant insights into what size shoe has the best ROI. They could further refine their analysis by analyzing a combination of multiple attributes, like shoe size and color.
What makes Optmyzr’s tool unique is that insights can be turned into intelligent optimizations unlike in AdWords where the analysis and bid changes happen in separate places, and where they are limited by the way an account is structured.
Optmyzr’s tools for optimizing bid adjustments for dayparting, device, and geography are all compatible with Shopping Campaigns.
Budget Pacing
Our Enhanced Scripts™ for reaching a target budget without exceeding it are compatible with Shopping campaigns as well as many other campaign types.
The lifecycle of a Shopping Ad
We covered the three stages of managing Shopping ads in a recent blog post. Whether you need to build, update, or optimize shopping ads, Optmyzr now makes that easier than ever.
If you’re relatively new to managing shopping ads, you might enjoy our 3-part series on SearchEngineLand. Part 1, part 2, part 3. Many of the concepts have evolved but this series of articles lays out many of the basics you should understand before you can become proficient in managing shopping ads.
We hope you’ll try out our new and updated tools and let us know how we can help make your shopping ads even more successful.
How much time do you spend managing shopping campaigns in AdWords? In this blog post, we talk about how you can save time by automating shopping campaign optimization and management.
1. Creating Campaigns
The first step is to create a well structured shopping campaign with properly defined product groups. Unlike AdWords search campaigns where keywords are the biddable elements in shopping campaigns it is product groups. The ideal structure is to have an individual product group for each item in the feed. This enables you to control and manage bids at the most granular level based on performance. In AdWords, it is difficult to create one product group per item id because you need to split them manually. Due to this, depending on the size of the feed it could take hours or days to just set up a shopping campaign.
The Shopping Campaign Builder from Optmyzr lets you create shopping campaigns within a few minutes. You can define the structure you would like to split your product feed by and upload product groups to AdWords with a single click. Watch this short video of how the Shopping Campaign Builder works.
2. Managing Bids
When you’re managing bids for product groups, it is important to take into account the revenue they generate and the return on investment (ROAS). Having one product group per item id gives a lot of flexibility when managing bids as you can measure the return on investment at a very granular level. However, if you have thousands of product groups, AdWords doesn’t make it easy. I’ve mentioned three tools from Optmyzr that can help you manage bids at scale for product groups.
Shopping Bidder
This is a One-Click Optimization™ that lets you change bids for product groups based on performance. You can choose to change bids for product groups that have ROAS>100% and ROAS<100%. It is also possible to automate your optimization strategy by creating custom filters. These can then be used to change bids for product groups based on performance. This version of the Shopping Bidder lets you view data for product groups at the product group level.
Shopping Attribute Bidder
This new optimization for shopping campaigns lets you aggregate and combine data across product groups based on attributes and use that to change bids. You can choose from attributes available in the feed like color, size, gender, group id and more. What makes this powerful is that it enables you to aggregate data across the campaign irrespective of the structure and change bids at scale. Watch a video of how the Shopping Attribute Bidder works.
Rule Engine
The new Rule Engine from Optmyzr gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of analyzing performance for product groups and also how bids are changed. It lets you automate your own bidding strategy for shopping campaigns. For example, you can use a formula to compare the performance of the product group to that of the ad group and campaign. Similarly, you can choose to change the bid using a formula that takes into account the conversion rate when calculating the new bid.
The Shopping Bidder and Rule Engine let you change bids by absolute numbers or percentages.
3. Refreshing Campaigns
Once you create shopping campaigns in AdWords, the number of product groups will not automatically change based on your feed. For example, you are selling shoes and create one product group for each model or item id in the feed. Now when new types of shoes get added to the feed, AdWords doesn’t automatically create product groups for them. As a result, the new products end up in Everything Else. This may lead them to get very little traffic as ‘Everything Else’ usually has a low bid.
To avoid this, you can go to your AdWords account and create new product groups for products that end up in ‘Everything Else’. Or, you can use the Shopping Refresher from Optmyzr.
Shopping Refresher
This One-Click Optimization™ automatically finds new products that are added to the feed, identifies the structure of the Shopping Campaign and creates new product groups. We have two versions of the Shopping Refresher. In the regular version, you can run the refresher ad group by ad group. In the Pro version, you can run it for all ad groups in the campaign together. The Pro version also creates new ad groups if the campaign structure requires it. See how the Shopping Refresher works. To try the Shopping Refresher Pro (currently in Beta), contact our support team.
When shopping campaigns are split at a very granular level like product id, each product group may not have enough data to make a bid decision. This makes it difficult to optimize these product groups creating a chicken and egg problem. You can’t optimize without data and you won’t get traffic if bids are set too low. In such cases, it helps if you can group product groups to create a critical mass and use aggregated data to set bids for product groups. We recently launched the roll up feature in the Shopping Bidder One-Click Optimization™ that is designed to do this. It makes it easier to set bids at scale by aggregating data for product groups.
How does the roll up feature in Shopping Bidder work?
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The first step is to select the metric by which you want to roll up data and the second step is to set the threshold for that metric.
Step 1: Select the metric by which you want to group or aggregate data
Step 2: Set the threshold for that metric
Step 3: Click update
Understanding the results
The tool will roll up product groups to the lowest level that meets the data threshold selected. For example, if you select clicks as the metric and the threshold is set to 500, the tool will show all product groups that have at least 500 clicks. Product groups that don’t have 100 clicks will be rolled up to the lowest level at which the threshold is met.
Product groups are rolled up and grouped together at the lowest level. The number of product groups in the group show in brackets (n) next to the name.
Sometimes there are a lot of product groups in a single group but the range for max cpc is broad. In this case, the tool further breaks it down into sub groups that have a smaller max CPC range. This helps set bids at a more granular level. You can click on the rolled up product group to see sub groups.
The max CPC in this case shows the range (min – max) for all product groups under the roll up. If the new CPC requires the bid to be increased by a percentage, this is applied on the max number in the range.
We’ve been pretty excited about the launch of Google Shopping ads since they’re a great way for retailers to highlight their products’ photos and prices. Unfortunately when running Shopping ads for thousands of products, bid management using the AdWords interface is a full time job: not because it’s difficult, but simply because the interface is excruciatingly slow when managing many products that are split across many campaigns and ad groups.
After confirming that this was a real problem with some other PPC folks at the HeroConf conference last month, we started building a bid management tool for Shopping Ads and today we’re excited to reveal it to the world.
[][1]Optmyzr’s Shopping Bidder Tool for AdWords makes setting the correct CPC for your shopping ads a quick and easy process that can easily be done for thousands of product groups in a matter of mere minutes.
Here’s how our Shopping Bidder works:
You get all the biddable items for your entire account on a single page.
You can filter the view to see just ROI positive, ROI negative, or items with no impressions or you can apply a custom filter using your own criteria like clicks, cost, impressions, etc.
You can change bids in bulk for all the items that meet your filter criteria, for example, lower all bids 10% for ROI negative items with at least 10 clicks in the past 30 days.
With one click, you can send the new bids to AdWords where they go live instantly.
This is much, much faster than doing the same in AdWords which has a few shortcomings:
You cannot see all biddable items from your entire account on one page. You have to open up every ad group one by one.
There are no filters for product groups so you have to manually find items that meet your criteria for needing a bid change.
To change a bid it takes several clicks to expand the product groups until you get to the level where bids can be set.
Initially this tool will � make bid management for Shopping ads a lot faster but when it becomes this easy, you’ll also find yourself splitting up your product groups ever more granularly, and that should further improve results.
We’re really excited to have this ready for our users today and we hope you’ll send us feedback about how we can make this even more useful for you.
Shopping campaigns have to be managed differently from Search and Display campaigns in order to improve their performance. We spoke to some of our customers and learned that leveraging shopping campaign priorities is one of the best strategies to do that.
Here we’ll share those best practices with you. But first, a bit about campaign priorities.
What are campaign priorities?
Campaign priorities in Google Ads are used to select the bid when a product is advertised through multiple campaigns. Though every new shopping campaign is automatically created on “low priority” as a default setting, you can modify this and set your campaigns to either high, medium, or low priority.
Keep in mind that campaign priorities are not the same as using negatives, as you aren’t driving or excluding traffic, but rather giving first or second priority for participation in auctions.
Priority levels outweigh the bid amount at auction time, so if a campaign on high priority has a lower bid than a campaign on medium priority, the high priority campaign’s bid will be used. In another case, if multiple campaigns have the same priority, then the campaign with the highest bid is the one that will be used in the auction.
Note that budget issues can cause the priorities to be ignored. For example, if the highest priority campaign runs out of budget, then the bid from the runner-up in terms of priority levels will be used.
When are campaign priorities useful?
Campaign priorities are mostly useful when you’re advertising the same product, for the same country, in multiple Shopping campaigns.
How to use Campaign priorities
1. Prioritize best sellers for generic searches
Campaign priorities can be used to give first participation in the auction for a campaign with your best sellers, or a campaign with the products you want to prioritize or highlight in appearing.
To avoid your shopping ads showing up for unqualified searches you can make your campaigns “compete smarter”, as detailed in this CPC Strategy article.
Example:
Let’s say your inventory contains a variety of wireless speakers. You have different brands and models, but the Bose Minilink II and the JBL Flip speakers are your best-selling items. And as bestsellers, you want to make sure that they have first participation in auction upon a generic “wireless speakers” search.
The way to do this would be to create a campaign for best-sellers and include the Bose Minilink II and the JBL Flip speakers, and then set the priority of this campaign to “High Priority”.
This doesn’t exclude any campaigns from participating, it just helps you define where you first want to place the bid from.
2. Prioritize flighted budgets
Another case would be to use campaign priorities to spend flighted or seasonal budgets before spending evergreen budgets.
Example:
Say you are creating a winter campaign that runs on a specific budget and focuses on winter clothing items only. One of the products in this campaign is a jacket, which is also included in the outdoor apparel campaign that runs year-round.
Considering the winter campaign has its own specific budget, you can make sure that budget is used first, before that of the outdoor apparel campaign.
To do this, you’d set the winter campaign on a high priority, and the outdoor apparel campaign with a medium or low priority.
3. Bid less for generic searches and more for product searches
Somewhat counterintuitively, CPCs for generic queries tend to run higher than those for specific product searches.
Here’s an illustration of that effect from Andreas Reiffen and Crealytics:
The higher the bid, the more one-word (generic) queries the ad is shown for.
This is generally bad because generic searches tend to happen long before the conversion. The more specific, multi-word queries tend to immediately precede the sale. So ROAS-focused advertisers will want to bid more for specific queries and less for generic queries but that’s the opposite of what happens when you have just one campaign for your products.
A strategy that lets you bid more for specific product searches involves a mix of campaign priorities, different bids, and different negative keywords. Kirk Williams wrote a detailed step-by-step article on the benefits of setting up an SKU-level shopping strategy.
This strategy was pioneered by Martin Roettgerding. Here’s how it works:
So for the Generic Campaign, the one that is supposed to attract clicks for the most generic queries related to what you sell, you set high priority, low bids, and add negative keywords for the brands and product names.
Now if a branded search happens, the high priority campaign is skipped because it has a negative brand keyword so the medium campaign will pick up the traffic with a reasonable bid.
Closing thoughts
If you’ve tried some of these techniques or explored others that leverage shopping campaign priorities, let us know. We’d love to feature your story in an upcoming blog post.
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Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
2020 was anything but a normal year. The pandemic slowed day-to-day life as we know it, but it sped up years of e-commerce growth in just a few weeks. This acceleration is so huge that we can expect it to continue this year and beyond. Consumers are now looking for solutions online due to lockdowns, travel restrictions, and the unavailability of products in physical stores. While most retailers and businesses welcomed this shift to online shopping, many weren’t ready to cater to a virtual store experience.
To get a better look at the past year and discuss what to expect in 2021, we invited over some of our friends from Google and asked for their insights. We also heard from Andrew Lolk, an industry veteran and leading e-commerce expert, on his agency’s findings of what really works when the rubber meets the road.
Emi Wayner, Platform Partner Lead, Google
Peter Oliveira, Partner Development Analyst, Google
Andrew Lolk, Founder, SavvyRevenue
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights on tackling shopping ads and e-commerce in 2021.
1. Shopping & e-commerce predictions for 2021
Emi: As we all know, we have already shifted a lot since COVID happened. Digital is going to be a critical touchpoint for many shoppers. Searching locally and then confirming in-store availability. Consumers will also be looking to try new and safer services this year. We are also expecting a 600% increase in searches for ‘click + collect’ services.
Marketers can help raise awareness of differentiated omni-channel offerings and provide a great end-to-end experience for users who are increasingly selecting store pickup as their preferred fulfillment option. ‘Curbside Pickup’ and ‘Pickup Later’ are also useful to meet the needs of consumers. We have noticed that when you have ‘Pickup Today’ extension, the CVR increases 13% in ads while the CTR spikes 2%.
Andrew: It’s been interesting to see how lockdowns have affected the different markets around the world. As we have multiple office locations, we operate with e-commerce brands across the US, Europe, and Scandinavia. While we keep seeing different numbers and charts, we have seen e-commerce growth across all categories in different countries.
The interesting part is how in all the countries we’ve seen, the e-commerce levels almost stay at the same level even post-lockdowns. So the new e-commerce levels appear to be here to stay!
2. Thoughts on e-commerce in 2020
Emi: I think overall all categories went up in terms of purchase online. But we have particularly seen good growth in electronics, clothes and home furniture. Other categories like health and personal care also saw an increase in sales. On the search terms side, we noticed that people were more comfortable with purchasing non-brand items as they were more focused on inventory, looking for available items.
A lot of this can be based on ‘social e-commerce’. When you’re watching YouTube, you’d find a lot more advertising and useful information present that influences consumers to shop. Moreover, we have also observed a trend of personal services like fitness training, consulting, etc being offered online.
3. Smart vs Regular Shopping Campaigns
Peter: The key difference between the two is that Smart Shopping dynamically allocates your budget using machine learning across different channels and formats. So whereas in a traditional shopping campaign, you’d have a separate display campaign or a dynamic remarketing campaign, Smart Shopping is gonna do all that automatically for you. The good thing is that it still keeps your goal in mind while tapping into those additional formats and services to bring you more leads or sales.
The core levers that we have for scaling Smart Shopping Campaigns, in general, are ROAS, the budget, and also how many products are in the feed. The more products you have, the more inventory you get, which is similar to adding more keywords to your search campaign in order to generate more reach.
4. Smart Shopping outperforms Standard Shopping setups 9/10 times
Andrew: For in-house teams, or full-service agencies, Smart Shopping wins almost every time. Where we see Smart Shopping work really well is when we don’t have anything better to come up with. So let’s say a DTC advertiser that sells socks. We have little search term data, no price comparison data, no significant brands, etc. The complexity overall is almost non-existing. Smart Shopping does really well in those cases.
If you use external data like price comparison data, proactive seasonal bidding, weather data, inventory levels, promotions, etc, or have been running another more complex setup for a longer time, then making the switch will make Smart Shopping relearn some (maybe all) of those things again.
For Google Shopping campaigns to beat Smart Shopping, it’s paramount to use the priority levels to help it prioritize products is really the key to success:
The old school / easiest example to understand is using bestsellers in a high priority campaign, and others in a medium priority
But the sky’s the limit really, and we’ve tried a lot of different setups that all work well depending on the scenario.
5. Making Smart Bidding and Smart Shopping work for you
Peter: The core levers that we have for scaling Smart Shopping campaigns, in general, are ROAS, the budget, and also how many products are in the feed. The more products you have, the more inventory you get, which is similar to adding more keywords to your search campaign in order to generate more reach.
Andrew: For Smart Bidding to work optimally you have to keep optimizing your overall campaigns, but more importantly, you need to keep updating the ROAS/CPA targets. Not daily, not weekly, but only when you notice performance changes. This can be after a really good sales period where you’ve been hitting targets and then go into a slump. The algorithm will lower your bids to hit your target ROAS - but that might push you out of the auctions, which will start a negative spiral of you getting less and less data, which makes the algorithm work poorly.
Conclusion
The shift to an online shopping experience is a long pending one. We might see many businesses and buyers preferring the old-school brick-and-mortar stores. But due to health concerns, the necessity of having a fluid online shopping experience is now more prevalent than ever. PPC professionals and business owners need to re-assess, analyze and streamline their approaches to e-commerce in the upcoming months.
Using Google’s new setups and extensions, like Pickup Today, can only leverage us in the long run. Relying on automation, machine learning, and good data are sure to help us navigate new e-commerce and shopping trends in 2021. Now, you can get the slides from episode 32 of PPC Town Hall on optimizing shopping ads right here.
The holiday season is the busiest time for e-commerce and with just days until Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, everyone in the search marketing community is knee-deep in last-minute preparations for the sale of the year. Considering what 2020 has been like so far, what else should we expect to be different? We can’t predict the unexpected, but we can point out some new trends that you should be prepared for.
More even than in previous years, we have seen a bigger rise in the number of online shoppers. Owing to health restrictions and lockdowns, people have turned online to look for products and services. We need to look at audience behavior, pay close attention to logistics, and keep a close eye on our messaging. And because we are living in such an ‘unprecedented’ year, we are bound to see some ‘unexpected’ things in the upcoming weeks.
Here’s my take on 7 such things that we need to be prepared for this Holiday season.
1. Holiday shopping will start sooner
Holiday shopping started early this year and that’s backed up by Microsoft research showing that over 40% of shoppers intend to start earlier this year. Due to the pandemic, a lot of retailers have been very aggressive with deals throughout this year and that may have reset some expectations with consumers. We may now see deals lasting longer and pop up more frequently than before.
While Black Friday is usually the unofficial start to the Holiday shopping season, this year shoppers won’t be waiting that long. Counting the fact that there are around 50 days between Amazon’s Prime Day (Oct 13) and Cyber Week, shoppers will have begun planning and purchasing for the Holiday season from early October. Moreover, considering the current health regulations, social distancing, and movement restrictions, shoppers might be looking towards a safer way to continue their shopping. This will prompt them to be less spontaneous and instead better plan their in-store visits, and even space them out over a few months to lessen the stress related to the circumstances of this unusual year.
2. Most shopping will be done online
E-commerce is going to be huge in the upcoming months. Even in Q1 & Q2, we saw an unprecedented push towards digital shopping and e-commerce. So the same wave is expected to follow through till the end of the year. According to a report published by Statista Research Department (Aug 10, 2020), titled United States: retail e-commerce sales 2017-2024, US online retail sales are projected to reach 476.5 billion US dollars by 2024.
E-commerce has accelerated ahead of where everyone expected it to be. For example, the Snacks Daily podcast reported that the Disney+ streaming service has reached its 5-year goal for subscriptions just 7 months after launch, more than 4 years ahead of schedule!
Another thing we are expecting to see is a constant rise in the number of online shoppers post-pandemic, relying on e-commerce stores for their purchases. Data from IBM’s US Retail Index supports this and shows that the pandemic has quickened the transfer from physical to digital stores by 5 years!
3. BOPIS will be popular with customers
BOPIS (Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store) is going to be a huge hit. People who never dreamed of buying online may now use this hybrid approach. But for retailers, this brings a shift in the competitive landscape. Earlier, brick-and-mortar stores were just competing against pure-play e-commerce shops where consumers liked their convenience and low prices. Now they also have to compete against hybrid players with a strong BOPIS model, like Target and Walmart instead of just Amazon.
While it’s true that physical stores were already competing with brands like Target and Walmart, that was based more on local convenience and low prices. But with consumers relying on the added convenience of shopping in apps and opting for BOPIS, things may get even tougher for old-school brick-and-mortar stores with no digital capabilities.
4. Holiday 2020 will be celebrated differently
Microsoft’s research data indicates that people will be celebrating differently than before.
More people will celebrate at home (40% will change usual holiday plans according to Microsoft’s data), with smaller groups. Which means less travel but more first-time chefs cooking their first-holiday meal. This in turn is a big boon for food delivery services like DoorDash which, driven by the pandemic, turned a profit for the first time and will have its IPO soon.
Moreover, with people deciding to stay home, they might be more inclined to invest in self-pampering products like fitness equipment, beauty products, or even streaming subscriptions. So those industries will continue to see an increase in sales as the holidays roll around.
5. Figuring out shipping & delivery
Free shipping, which has long been a staple of e-commerce deals, is likely to take on a new meaning. With higher e-commerce sales, shipping logistics are more strained than ever and that’s on top of pandemic-driven supply-chain issues that have created empty shelves and shortages of a variety of products over the past months. According to a Salesforce report — traditional delivery providers (like FedEx, UPS, DHL) might face issues with capacity (by 5%) between the week before Cyber Week and Boxing Day. Consumers may be surprised when they have to order much earlier than before to get their gifts on time for their celebrations.
And in turn, retailers and service providers will have to keep a lookout for unanticipated delivery delays of inbound and outbound goods, shipping surcharges imposed by carriers, and potentially higher than usual returns from consumers who are panic buying.
6. Sale events will be game-changers
Contrary to previous years, Black Friday 2020 might not be able to get much in-store action, courtesy of the pandemic. And while Black Friday has been associated with big-item sales which require a lot of planning and intent, Cyber Monday has always been about online-shopping.
In-person Black Friday shopping used to appeal to consumers for 3 primary reasons:
• Great deals and discounts • Multiple gifts can be bought in one shopping trip • Chance to discover new gift ideas
But things are different this year and despite the usual appeal of Black Friday, according to Microsoft, Cyber Monday is the sales event to be on the lookout for this year. If your Black Friday follows the trend and is lower than expected, it’s not too late to shift that budget to Cyber Monday over the weekend.
And for international marketers, the following data might be much insightful. In the US, these sale events might bring in consumers, UK & AU report lower numbers of shoppers attending them.
7. Rise of the gift cards
Microsoft says gift cards are growing faster than other categories this year. They are an ingenious solution to a big Holiday problem for consumers – choosing a gift and delivering it on time, even for procrastinators who waited too long! They can even help small businesses market their products and gain stability in the Holiday season by bringing in steady revenue with minimal investment. Consumers have been buying gift cards to support their local businesses in the pandemic.
As gift cards are traditionally excluded from sales events like Black Friday, that may explain why some people don’t intend to participate in the event this year (as explained in the point above).
The other items that are on shoppers’ lists are apparel, toys, electronics, and self-care products.
Conclusion
2020 has been a year with many ups and downs. Unlike earlier years, this year consumers won’t be crowding aisles for Black Friday sales, but rely on purchasing from the comforts of their homes. Since we only have a week to Black Friday, most marketers would have already put their plans and strategies in place.
While you might not be up for making major changes directly to your ads right now, you can still create last-minute monitors and alerts so that you get some help staying on top of things during your busiest time of the year. If you don’t have these set up, do so now! Also, check out the tips we shared from speaking to 14 PPC experts about their advice on navigating Holiday 2020 and winning e-commerce sales.
As a PPC professional, you’d have often wondered which campaign type would best suit your goals and business objectives. While it can’t be denied that Performance Max for retail is less time-consuming it doesn’t provide the control you need.
Standard Shopping campaigns can also be quite beneficial if used efficiently. Not only will you be able to have full control over your campaigns, but direct the adjustments more effectively without compromising on the target.
This means that you can run efficient and profitable campaigns with Standard Shopping if you want to! Here are some tips to structure Standard Shopping campaigns to make them profitable with insights from Optmyzr products.
1. Campaign Structure
If you have a feed with varying products, it’s a good idea to have a multi-campaign structure. For example, you can choose to have different campaigns by different categories of products or brands. This enables you to allocate budgets by product type or brand. You can also build campaigns by attributes like ROAS or profit margins if you are passing this data to the feed using custom label attributes. Optmyzr can help build campaigns based on ROAS.
Ad groups: Inside the campaigns, you should further segment products at the ad group level. There are two advantages to doing that:
Having different ad groups gives you the option to sculpt traffic by adding negatives. For example, if you are selling shoes and have different campaigns for different brands, segment your ad groups by shoe types like running shoes, walking shoes, etc.
With different ad groups, you get the opportunity to optimize campaigns running on the target ROAS automated bidding strategy, as you can set a different target ROAS for different ad groups based on performance.
Product groups: We recommend having a GRIP (group of individual products) structure where you have one product group for each item in your feed. This structure gives you the flexibility to set bids for each product group. You can analyze data aggregated by different attributes like price, color, size, and item group id in the feed using the Shopping Attribute Bidder, and set bids based on that. If you are running on an automated bidding strategy, it gives you the option to exclude unprofitable products.
Pro Tip: If you have an existing shopping campaign, use the Shopping Analysis Tool to see performance aggregated by different product attributes. This can help you decide on the best structure for your campaigns and ad groups. We recommend choosing attributes that have 100% coverage in the feed because it prevents products from falling into everything else in the product group. The feed analysis feature from Optmyzr can give you an overview of attribute coverage.
Using inventory filters for campaign settings can help you make sure that you’re not advertising the same products in multiple campaigns. You can define inventory filters in the Google Ads interface in the campaign settings. Also, when you create shopping campaigns using Optmyzr’s Shopping Builder 2.0, these inventory filters are set up automatically based on the structure you choose.
2. Search Query Management
Shopping campaigns do not have keywords so it is not possible to tell Google which queries you want your ads to show for. However, you can tell Google which queries you don’t want to show your ads for by using negative keywords. Negative keywords can also help sculpt traffic to direct traffic to more profitable ad groups. This makes sure that queries are more accurately matched to products that help maximize ROAS.
Pro Tip: Use the Shopping Negatives tool from Optmyzr to send traffic to more profitable ad groups or to add unprofitable queries as negatives to save cost. You can also use the Rule Engine to automate this process.
3. Bidding
Standard Shopping campaigns give you a lot of flexibility with bidding strategy and that is one of the reasons we prefer them over Performance Max campaigns for retail. You can either choose to use a manual bidding strategy or put the campaigns on an automated bidding strategy like target ROAS (tROAS).
Automated Bidding (tROAS)
You can set your shopping campaigns to run on a tROAS automated bidding strategy. We recommend using standard automated bidding instead of portfolio automated bidding. This way you will have the opportunity to tweak the target ROAS at the ad group level when you use standard automated bidding. In fact, this is one of the ways to use automation layering to get better performance and benefit from Google’s automated bidding.
You can use the Optimize Target ROAS optimization that helps increase conversions and increase ROAS. This optimization was built using the Rule Engine so you can build your own version of it as well and automate it.
Manual Bidding
You can also use manual bidding which will give you more granular control over bids. Apart from making bid changes at the product group level, you can also set bid adjustments by time, geography, audiences, and devices. While it requires a higher level of monitoring than automated bidding, it can be quite rewarding.
Optmyzr has a whole suite of tools to help you manage hours of the week, geo, audience, gender, and device bid adjustments. You can also use the Rule Engine to automate your strategy which reduces the day-to-day overhead. When you are running on manual bidding, analyze the benchmark CTR and benchmark CPC metrics to see how your products are performing against your competitors. This information can come in handy when you’re setting bids.
4. Budgets
When you have a multi-campaign structure, make sure to allocate budgets in a way that maximizes performance. For example, if your most profitable campaigns are losing impression share due to budget, reallocate the budget from other campaigns. The Optimize Budget tool from Optmyzr can help you do this very easily.
Points to remember
Make sure to note the following points to maximize the profits and efficiency of your Standard Shopping campaign:
Create a multi-campaign and multi-ad group structure
Create product groups at the item id level
Choose the right bidding strategy – automated or manual, based on the amount of time you have to manage the campaigns
Manage search queries closely and add negative keywords
Make sure your most profitable campaigns have enough budget
When you choose to go with Standard Shopping campaigns, you’d have full control over your campaigns, making every decision based on your own business choices. You can structure campaigns to have separate ad groups and product groups which will give you the flexibility to manage their bids, ROAS targets, and negative keywords. Performance Max campaigns for retail don’t give the user control to manage any of these things.
If you are an experienced professional, working with Standard Shopping campaigns can help you analyze and experiment with your accounts. Using predictive tools like Optmyzr can help you hone your campaign objectives and give meaningful suggestions to better optimize your PPC accounts.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
The holiday season is no longer upon us — it’s here. With Amazon kicking off Prime Day last week, the US market has entered the busiest time of Q4. And if you’re a search marketer, you’re probably still looking for ways to adapt to the new game that is e-commerce in 2020.
We spoke to 14 PPC experts to find out what advice they have for fellow search marketers to crush holiday sales and win big at e-commerce in Q4 2020. Here are their tips (in no particular order)!
Focus on profits rather than Google metrics like target ROAS. Remember that a higher ROAS does not automatically mean a higher profit so it’s important to find the sweet spot for your accounts.
Better yet, split up your shopping campaigns so that products are grouped by profit margin and then set a different tROAS for every campaign so that it achieves profitability. This works with standard and Smart Shopping campaigns, and it’s a great way to take back some control while still using Google’s amazing capabilities in automated bidding.
2. Optimize your data feed
Ed Goss, Managing Director, Ten Thousand Foot View
We’ll all be running Smart Shopping campaigns sooner or later. Focus on data feed optimization as this evergreen strategy will become your primary differentiator. With Google ramping up product disapproval thresholds, a high-quality feed can also save you from constant troubleshooting.
At my agency, we’ve found many advertisers haven’t spent any time optimizing Merchant Center. Activating features like feed rules, promotions, product ratings, and even automatic improvements can substantially boost click share and ROAS performance.
3. Don’t break or lose trust
Navah Hopkins, Director of Paid Media, Hennessey Digital
If online retailers do just one thing to bolster their performance, it’s to ensure they’re not losing the sale because of lack of trust.
Customers expect trust symbols:
• SSL certification • Detailed product descriptions/specs on technical products • Photos of the product • Reviews
The unspoken expectation is an online store will have more than one product unless the brand is clearly direct-to-consumer (DTC). If there aren’t a lot of products on offer (or if there isn’t a cohesive theme behind products being offered), it can deter prospects from going ahead with the purchase.
Q4 is the quarter of the year for most e-commerce. It’s Black Friday, the Christmas season, and sales. You have high expectations. Your product promotions are ready. Discount codes and campaigns are ready. Marketing budget is increased. But so is your competition as well.
Q4 is an e-commerce dogfight and the complexity of handling promotions, discount codes, free shipping, increased CPA, etc leaves you open to decreased profits even if turnover goes up. My advice is to track your profitability every day, on every order and every online ad, and get going with profit-bidding. No more guessing about profitability.
If you want to learn the difference between ROAS and POAS, click here.
My tips come in the form of three simple yet highly effective areas:
• Smart Bidding adoption • Merchant Center promotions • A budget to match your ambition
If you’re not using proactive Smart Bidding (rather than reactive manual bidding), you’re missing out on thousands of signals that Google can be responsive to in a split second.
Secondly, utilize promotions in the Merchant Center. If you or your client are running a Black Friday or Christmas sale, the world needs to know!
Finally, make sure that you’re not missing out on traffic (and therefore sales) because of something as simple as being limited by budget.
Check your creatives and keep your messaging seasonal! In the new automated landscape of PPC it’s sometimes easy to forget the basics. In Q4 refresh your smart shopping ad images, remarketing, and even your product descriptions to make sure you are shouting about your USPs and standing out from the crowd with seasonal content. In the Northern Hemisphere, think roaring fires and festive scenes, no ice creams or sunbathers. No group shots either resonate by reflecting current COVID guidelines.
Top Tip: If you are looking for volume and reach try adding generic phrases to product descriptions “a perfect stocking filler”.
We are about to enter a period of time in e-commerce that digital marketers have never before faced. I believe the most practical thing we can do as marketers is to seek “stability” in our efforts. In Google Ads, I believe this stability can take 2 routes: algorithm stability and bandwidth stability.
By seeking algorithm stability, we need to give the machines the best shot at helping us in this time of potential upset. This means, we should minimize the amount of unnecessary changes we are doing too close to BFCM. My recommendation is to have your feed data locked down by October 31 so you are making no changes (other than normal pricing or stock changes, of course) in November as you approach the core season.
By seeking bandwidth stability, you are addressing the human side of PPC in ensuring you and your team have the ability to account for the unknown. If you are continuing to do normal sets of optimizations through the BFCM period, then not only are you potentially throwing off machine learning, but you are putting the pressure of normal changes on your team in a time that is sure to have additional pressures added at the last minute.
Since 2020 has already been an off-the-charts year in craziness, it is best to go into Q4 expecting at least more of the same! Get your strategies and ads in order as early as possible – both to ensure delivery delays don’t derail everything and in case ads start taking a lot longer to get through approvals. Talk with clients about expectations too and make sure they understand that things could get disrupted from any direction this year so there should be contingency plans in place for as many aspects as possible.
In my opinion, the key for success in Q4 campaigns for shopping & e-commerce in this strange year is in the general marketing strategy we all should set up to ride the long wave of incremental online purchases created by 2020.
We all know very well how important it is to set new ads (and extensions) and to push budgets on the right promotions when people are more willing to buy online, but the real challenge here is to turn a cash-flash into a structural and steady sales growth.
The key to all this is to deseasonalize the demand. And you can do it only partially by acting on campaigns; you have to change the structure of your promotions. From Black Friday to a week or even a month, let people know that they have not to wait till November 27th to have their discounted El Dorado and that they will find good bargains long after it.
Learn more about PPC in Europe by reading this blog post.
10. Look beyond just ads
Elizabeth Marsten, Senior Director of Marketplace Strategic Services, Tinuiti
The array of options for e-commerce right now are pretty dizzying and even more so at a time when traffic is high and add in a marathon of shopping dates into Q4. So to get to it — if you are in-store and haven’t checked out Instacart, you definitely should.
Shoppers are going beyond groceries and the self-serve platform makes it easy. If you are in retailers like Walmart or Target, there are sponsored product options that may be a fit with low or no minimum budgets to give it a go. If you’re DTC, definitely check out some of the lesser crowded options like eBay or Etsy to promote items often at a lower cost than you would on more popular channels. And of course, Google Shopping, Shopping Actions, Buy with Google. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a no commission platform right now.
11. Go beyond on the customer experience
Duane Brown, Founder & Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk
If you are in e-commerce, DTC, or even in B2B and sell a physical product, making sure you can deliver that product and make the last mile work for your brand is something all marketers should care about. If we can not get our brands to deliver a product in people’s hands, we won’t have anything to sell. We won’t have a reason to run PPC ads.
The battleground for Q4 2020 will be in the streets and in the warehouses across this country and around the world. This may not be the job we signed up for but if there is a roadblock stopping customers from having the best experience possible after clicking on our ads, we need to help brands remove that roadblock.
2020 has been a whirlwind experience. It can be hard to think about let alone predict the future. However, I truly believe that making sure we can get our products into the hands of customers is going to be a challenge this year and all brands need to plan for it. We can not run ads, spend tons of money, and then not deliver on our brand promise to get that item someone bought.
To ensure Q4 success, we review performance trends and predict where the best opportunities will be relative to auction competition. This includes factoring in prediction forecast ranges where shoppers start earlier than last year. We build out promotional calendars and prepare in good time. Simple, basic tasks that might seem obvious still need to be triple checked to avoid missing out. This includes ensuring customer match lists are up to date, and that product feeds are in good health.
The competition will be fierce this year. Many omnichannel e-commerce companies will be chasing revenue online. Q4 accounts for 20-50% of most e-commerce revenue and with Covid-19 not being over by a long shot many will have to shoot for the stars.
Here it’s important to distinguish between DTC and “retail e-commerce” companies. DTC will experience more competition, but overall do great. They have seen a much bigger appetite for e-commerce and are living high off this. Retail e-commerce is trying to play catch-up, which is close to impossible.
I’m therefore predicting a mad dash for revenue in Q4 across the US and Europe. Be ready to change course, lower ROAS targets, and come up with better strategies during Q4. Only the best survive.
I feel like a bit of a broken record, but Q4 2020 is going to be different than any Q4 we’ve had before. The keys to winning this year are expectation setting, transparency, and patience.
The fast rise in e-commerce and reticence to visit stores in person means shipping delays and curbside pickup. Companies will win with an omnichannel strategy (leveraging in-store pickup options in Merchant Center) and transparent shipping timelines to ensure consumers will get their gifts on time.
The other challenge to be cognizant of is slowed approval timelines within Google or Microsoft. Both have had resource issues (along with the rest of the world), meaning your ads for a 1-day sale may not get approved as fast as they would before. Get your sales planned well ahead of time, and leverage extensions to ensure ads show rather than fully swapping ads for every promotion.
Conclusion
In the coming months, we’ll all need to put more thought into everything that’s important to meet business goals. Whether it’s logistics, automation or bidding strategy, keep your audience as your focus.
Share the right messages to the right people. Regularly monitor and update your accounts. And above all, be prepared yet flexible. Resources like Ignite Visibility’s e-commerce study can keep you on the right path.
More importantly, make note of what experts and your peers have to say about the upcoming season. Gain multiple perspectives and apply those which help you fulfill both yours as well as your clients’ goals.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
While many marketers and agencies might prefer Smart Shopping campaigns for its ease of use, some still prefer Standard campaigns because they feel more in control. One question that we hear from e-commerce advertisers time and again is what works better: Smart or Standard Shopping campaigns?
You’re in for a surprise if you think we advocate for one over the other.
To be honest, there’s no universal ‘right answer’ to which campaign type is better. It all depends on your vertical, business goals, and the strategy for your PPC campaigns.
In some cases, Standard Shopping campaigns outperform Smart ones in terms of ROAS; other times, a purely Smart campaign strategy can deliver better performance; or you can deploy a hybrid strategy, like using Standard campaigns with automated bidding.
In this article, we’ll take you through some use cases to help you better understand which Google Shopping campaign type will work better for your needs.
1. Feed size and variety of products
If you have a small feed with products that are very similar to one another, then combining all of them in the same campaign will probably work well. For example, if you’re only selling custom shoes that are all priced between $100-150, running a single Smart Shopping campaign may be a good idea. This is because the expected return on ad spend (ROAS) for all products in the campaign is pretty much at the same level.
Optmyzr Tip:OurShopping Analysistool can help you see if products in your Smart Shopping campaigns have varying performance.
However, if you have a large product feed with varying products, a single Smart Shopping campaign will not yield the best performance.
Consider the example of a large clothing retailer who sells a variety of apparel like t-shirts, shoes, ties, shirts, and socks. A single Smart Shopping campaign is not the best strategy since different products will have varying manufacturing costs and price points, and you may wish to allocate different budgets to different categories of products based on what you want to advertise more.
If everything is in one Smart Shopping campaign, the performance will average out and won’t be optimized for profitability. In cases like these, we recommend either multiple Smart Shopping campaigns or multiple Standard campaigns.
Optmyzr Tip:OurShopping Builder 2.0tool can help you create multiple campaign structures for your feed very easily.
The proof is in the pudding. Shopping Builder 2.0 is a great way to create Shopping campaigns faster and get straight to selling.
2. Niche products or seasonal products
If you are selling niche or very seasonal products, like highly specialized tools or Christmas ornaments, it would be wiser to avoid Smart Shopping campaigns. This is largely because there may not be enough data for Google’s machine learning algorithms to make smart decisions.
In this case, a Standard Shopping campaign with manual bidding or target ROAS/target CPA bidding strategy will work better.
3. Scarcity of time
When you don’t have much time to manage your Shopping campaigns and the choice boils down to either running a campaign or none at all, pick a Smart Shopping campaign. However, if you do have some time to manage your campaigns and your feed has different kinds of products, choose a multiple campaign structure.
4. Control & Visibility
Let’s face it: Smart campaigns don’t give you much control. If you want more granular command over different attributes — bids, target ROAS, search queries, networks, and devices to name some — then consider switching to Standard Shopping campaigns.
With Standard campaigns, you have the flexibility to choose which parts of the campaign management process you want to automate.
For example, you can use automated bidding strategies like target ROAS that automate the bidding process, but you can still retain control over other things like search queries and negative keywords.
When you need more visibility into your campaign’s performance, Smart Shopping may not be the best option. If you want to see which search queries drive the most sales — or even which ones are not profitable and should be added as negatives — Smart Shopping won’t give you that data while Standard ones will.
What can you do in each type of campaign?
To wrap things up, here is an overview of the levers you can pull to optimize both smart and standard shopping campaigns.
For Smart Shopping campaigns:
Manage budgets for each campaign
Manage target ROAS at the campaign level
Manage seasonality adjustments
Exclude products you don’t want to advertise
For Standard Shopping campaigns:
Manage budgets at the campaign or shared budget level
Set bids based on performance at product group, ad group and/or campaign level
Use automated bidding and set ROAS targets at the campaign/ad group level
Manage bid adjustments for device, location, time, and more
Use inventory filters to target a particular set of products
Access search query data and add negatives keywords to sculpt traffic and increase profitability
Manage placements and ad schedules
Set campaign priorities: low, mid, high
Exclude products you don’t want to advertise on
Both Smart and Standard campaigns have their pros and cons, so choose what suits the campaign you’re running, your line of business, your marketing strategy, and how much time you have.
At the same time, stay mindful of your clients and their business goals while choosing a strategy. If your clients are focused on profitability and not ROAS (as we all should be), then adapt accordingly.
One recommendation we make often is to run Standard Shopping campaigns with an automated bidding strategy like target ROAS, as it brings together the best of both worlds — the power of automation without sacrificing insight and control.
There’s no doubt that 2020 has been an unusual year for all of us. Even though we’re just in the middle of October, people have already started shopping for the upcoming holidays.
Supply chains, delivery, and in-store experiences aren’t what they normally are, yet consumers are buying and spending more — which has forced marketers and agencies to run offers and deals a bit earlier than usual.
But even with so much uncertainty and change, e-commerce has been ahead of what we expected at the start of the year.
So this week on Episode 25 of PPC Town Hall, we wanted to gain a perspective on how we all could navigate the coming Holiday season and make the most of it. We talked to two amazing PPC experts from OMG Commerce, an Optmyzr user, who shared their insights on all things e-commerce and shopping.
Our panelists for the week:
Brett Curry, CEO, OMG Commerce
Greg Maycock, Sr. Google Strategist, OMG Commerce
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are the top 5 insights from this week’s PPC Town Hall with OMG Commerce to help you make the most of Holiday e-commerce this year.
1. Changes in the last few years
Brett: One of the things that we did early on was manual bidding. In fact, as an agency, we were really good at it. So, we had some non-automated options where we were doing things with spreadsheets. We used formulas to sort our products and create bidding recommendations.
When Google launched Target ROAS, we were hesitant to try it out. But as it got better and better, we decided to test it out with a few of our campaigns. It took a little bit of convincing, but we slowly started to transition. I think that if there is some new tool that is better than our current approach, we need to embrace that!
One thing that we have to look at is how shifting our segmentation, breaking out campaigns, or even changing our targets can impact the full product-line visibility and sales. While we have come a long way from spreadsheets, we still have to think strategically and dig into the data regularly.
Greg: The smart bidding strategies have created opportunities to scale in terms of having multiple campaigns with multiple strategies. It has definitely changed how we look at campaign structures. In fact, I don’t think we have any accounts which don’t have three or more shopping campaigns. Earlier, with manual bidding, we ran a lot of campaigns with single product ad groups to focus our optimizations manually at the sku level. Now, it’s more about creating campaign structures that feed the smart-bidder the data and focus on what you want to optimize for.
2. Aligning PPC outcomes with business goals
Brett: As we do a lot of Youtube ads, we have all sorts of in-depth discussions with our clients. Usually, we have to ask them questions, about three or four times, in different ways with projected illustrations of results. We talk a lot about portfolios and how different campaigns work together. We also have to ask probing questions to really understand the client’s goals. In my opinion, we have to over-communicate.
Our role, as an agency, is to think strategically, ask questions, and revisit all of our findings. Ask a lot of questions so you get as much clarity as possible and keep evaluating what you’re doing. Eventually, this will help you align with your client.
3. Understanding YouTube campaign structure and formats
Brett: We primarily focus on Trueview for Action campaign where we can bid on a Target CPA basis. We found that if you give Google the goal of conversions, the smart-bidder becomes pretty good at finding people who convert. If you use Cost Per View as your bid strategy, Google’s pretty good at finding people who watch YouTube videos. So with CPV, your views will go up but your conversions will go way down. If you transition to Trueview for Action, you’ll get more clicks and certainly more conversions.
While we are looking for direct conversions through YouTube Trueview ads, we are also looking at the brand lift and Google trends to see the impact of our campaigns.
Greg: When we are retargeting viewed video audiences, who are still in the acquisition funnel, we turn to Trueview for action campaigns to re-engage people who saw the initial video. But we are also running YouTube for shopping campaigns, remarketing to people who did engage with the website but didn’t convert.
4. How to leverage audiences
Brett: Now’s the time to get your brand’s (or business’) message out there to drive not only conversions but build other kinds of audiences as well. We have a four-pronged marketing approach that can guide you better.
I think that this year, customers will be more interested in on-time delivery and getting the product they want than deals alone. It’s safe to say that most people also want deals or discounts. Done right, you can offer a deal that doesn’t negatively impact your brand. You can also look at free gifts, which is kind of like discounting but while making use of some unsold inventory.
5. Free PLAs and Deep Feed Analysis
Brett: In order to fill the gaps in your Search and Shopping, all you’ve to do is enable a setting inside Google merchant center to get free listings on surfaces across Google.
Most people search for a product on Google and then click on the Shopping ads on the main SERP. But some shoppers click through to the shopping or image tabs. Your free listings can appear on these tabs. If you’re paying for Google shopping ads, then surfaces across Google can deliver a 3-5% increase in conversions and clicks.
We do a deep feed analysis when we start with a client. This is compared with our keyword research and evaluated. After this, our feed specialist would craft the updated titles, descriptions, product categories, and even product types.
Conclusion
The way ahead for the world might be uncertain but it’s also exciting, and that’s true for PPC and e-commerce as well. As we get used to these regular changes, we also need to keep a strategic eye on everything we’ve done in the past.
Make informed decisions and align your PPC goals with what your clients want to achieve for their businesses. Re-check data, run tests, and communicate with your client to start the right way and keep the relationships strong.
Focus on the right messages to the right audience at the right time — the essence of Google Ads and PPC in general — and stay in touch with trends and updates to how search engines work for advertisers and users alike.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
In the past couple of months, more and more retailers have gone online to reach wider audiences. To get (or keep) an edge over newfound e-commerce competitors, businesses need to make the most of their proprietary data to optimize their Google Shopping campaigns.
One way to do that is by using a supplemental feed to complement the primary feed.
Supplemental feeds are an excellent way of managing your product listings with added information. Essentially, it’s secondary data that can be used to update a Google Merchant Feed without tampering with the primary feed.
One example is using a supplemental feed to temporarily adjust sale pricing, without having to undo the standard price categorization that’s built up in a primary feed. So while you can’t use supplemental feeds instead of a primary one, they can provide helpful layers of data that can optimize your shopping campaigns.
Why search marketers should consider using supplemental feeds
While the primary feed contains basic product details, supplemental feeds can be used to enrich that with more detail or alternative ones. They’re the perfect way to update listings without messing with your primary feed. And you can also avoid any extra client-developer work, as practically anyone can deploy them.
You can layer additional information in the form of custom labels, promotions, or even altered descriptions and titles. All you need to do is provide the additional information with the product IDs in Google Merchant Center, and it enriches the product data in the primary feed.
A supplemental feed can only be used with primary feed and cannot be added to the Google Merchant Center as the main data for products.
Let’s take a look at how to use supplemental feeds during the rush of holiday e-commerce that’s headed our way.
Use cases for Q4 Shopping campaigns
1. Announce promotional items.
During the Holiday season, you would want to advertise some items exclusively as on ‘sale’ or ‘New Arrivals’. As smart shopping campaigns don’t allow inventory filters, you can use a supplemental feed to add additional details about the product like promotional messages using custom label field.
Once you identify the items you need to highlight, use a custom label field to mark them. Now, use the supplemental feed with the product IDs with the custom label field you created to set up a new campaign!
2. Modify titles to match seasonal search trends.
Let’s say you sell different types of sweaters and other winter clothing. During the holidays, you notice that customers are using search terms like “Christmas sweaters” or “Christmas pullovers”.
If your product titles don’t contain these keywords, your ads may not be getting the traffic they should. To maximize exposure without increasing bids, you can alter your product titles to include the word “Christmas”.
Use the supplemental feed to create a new custom label and upload a list of product IDs with the updated titles, replacing earlier keywords and creating a new campaign. Once your promotion ends, you can simply remove this field, revert to earlier product titles, and your feed goes back to the previous setting.
3. Fix errors in Google Merchant Center.
Google Merchant Center often flags your products and disapproves them due to missing GTINs or Google Product Category. Imagine if this were to happen in the weeks before the BIGGEST sale of the year. Your developer will need loads of time to fix these issues and may not get it done in time.
However, if you have the details required by Google Merchant Center, you need not wait that long. Use a supplemental feed to add the necessary information and not only will you have your whole inventory live, but also avoid account suspensions during the holiday rush.
Using supplemental feeds with Optmyzr
We all know how Smart Shopping campaigns provide almost no control over product ads. You can try optimizing them by clubbing together products in different campaigns based on profit margins, high-selling products, or even ROAS goals.
The additional details for customizations can be fed to the merchant feed as a custom label. From there, you can use Optmyzr’s Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0 for each separate custom label value and create different smart shopping campaigns.
Also, check out this article where we busted some common Smart Shopping myths to show you the path to better optimization.
Conclusion
As businesses start gearing up for Q4 and the holiday season, marketers need to be mindful of changing shopping behaviors and be ready to pivot quickly. Considering the scope of e-commerce in the next few months, optimizing your product listings using supplemental feeds feels almost like a must-do.
While seasoned PPC experts might turn to feed management tools, taking a look at supplemental feeds for quick and easy fixes is still a good idea. Start with these, improve the feed with new data for seamless campaigns, and maximize reach.
If you want to try Optmyzr and experience our Shopping capabilities for yourself (get a new campaign live in as little as 5 minutes), sign up for our 14-day free trial. No credit card required, and full access to all our features!
As a leader in search advertising, Google is constantly innovating and developing new ways for advertisers to showcase their products and services. One long-standing feature, Showcase Shopping Ads are core to retail advertising and have helped businesses target top-of-funnel audiences.
Similar to product ads, Showcase ads appear at the top of a search engine results page (SERP) above any search ads. Clicking them shows products matching the broad search query, with an expanded catalog of products that matches search terms. Active since 2017, Showcase ads are almost like a virtual storefront for retailers.
Let’s take a look at a few recent changes to Showcase ads to see what they mean for the search marketing community.
1. Redesigned Showcase format
In order to provide more engagement from users and drive better performance, Showcase Ads are getting a total redesign. The new format has been expected to fully roll out by August.
With this restructuring, brand names have become clickable, which means that users can easily switch between retailers to view their group. Google has also added a description input space for the advertiser in the ad creation process.
The new update will also help users see a carousel of retailer offers that are most relevant to the query. Marketers can also input the Category Page URL during the ad creation process.
Image courtesy Google.com
2. Dynamic Showcase Ads: Ad variation reporting no longer available
In July, Google stopped providing the monthly reports on ad text variation metrics. To report on the performance of Dynamic Showcase ads, advertisers can measure pre/post-pilot activation. You can also reference the Google Ads landing page report to measure traffic to dynamically populated URLs in the whitelisted ad group.
3. Showcase Ads fully launched in Sweden & Netherlands
Showcase ads have been fully available to advertisers in Sweden & Netherlands since this past summer. Existing advertisers in these markets should expect a 2-3x increase in volume with this introduction.
Optmyzr’s take on the updates
Source: Merkle’s Digital Marketing Report Q1 2020
Shopping ads are one of the main sources of search clicks for e-commerce. And while they’re great to connect consumers with merchants when they’re looking for a specific product, they’ve been less useful for consumers who are at the beginning of their buying journey. Showcase ads help with this by letting advertisers display a variety of their products when the user’s query is still fairly generic.
Source: AdHawk
On the topic of ad variation reports going away, we can say this is another example of a move towards hands-off automation where Google wants to automate the whole process and avoid interference from humans. You could say that this reminds us of Smart Shopping Ads where there is very little to manage.
At Optmyzr, however, we see better results when advertisers create multiple Smart Shopping campaigns with different ROAS goals that are based on profitability targets and margins. We also see that with our Shopping Analysis tool, we can still help advertisers get insights on things like which product mix is most effective.
This insight can then be turned into an optimization where underperforming products are excluded from the Smart Shopping campaign. So even when it seems like there is little left to manage, the best advertisers will still find ways to use tools like Optmyzr to eke another bit of efficiency out of their campaigns, thereby allowing them to stay ahead of the competition.
As the holiday season approaches, search marketers are busy preparing for a rush of shopping and e-commerce activity in Q4. You need to be ready to navigate the next few months with expert planning and monitoring to deploy successful PPC campaigns.
This year more than ever, it’s important to arm yourself with tips and tricks to crush holiday sales. So for episode 21 of PPC Town Hall, we brought in a couple of experts in the space to talk about best practices in all things shopping and e-commerce:
Purna Virji, Senior Manager of Global Engagement, Microsoft
Anders Hjorth, Digital Marketing Strategist, Innovell
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 6 insights that can help you top the e-commerce charts during Q4, Black Friday, and the holiday season.
1. Search is going to be a big place to be
Purna: In 2020, we have been seeing three proverbial ‘elephants in the room’ – the economy, the COVID-19 crisis, and the upcoming elections in the US.
1. Recession: During the last financial crisis in 2008, consumers reported that they would pull back their holiday spending by 29%. However, these claims proved overly conservative as sales dipped by only 4.7% YoY. Even during the .com bubble, Retail sales continued to grow.
Search will be this big place where everyone will come to look for gifts. While retailers continue to cut back on budgets for other channels, Search seems to be least affected.
2. COVID-19: With 75% of U.S. consumers avoiding in-store shopping malls and 53% avoiding shops in general because of COVID-19₂, in-store holiday traffic will likely decline this year.
Online sales, however, are projected to astronomically increase this holiday season as COVID-19 continues to boost eCommerce activity. Anticipate holiday shopping to begin earlier as both retailers and customers offset the unprecedented shipping delays unearthed by COVID-19.
Even as the economy re-opens, and physical stores allow for customers to return, we expect BOPIS (buy online, pick up in-store) interest to remain exponentially higher than it would have without the health concerns related to physical distance.
3. Election: The election in 2016 did not impact search, yet we expect 2020 to perform very differently based on a multitude of factors
Moreover, with physical locations being restricted, more and more people have been coming online to find things. Due to this, we are expecting a double-digit growth to online sales for the Holiday season.
2. Shifts in Search Advertising don’t give a solid outlook
Anders: While analyzing Google’s quarterly reports, I saw that Google had negative growth in Q2 2020 compared with the year before, something which we have never seen before. Combining this information with the rumors of reducing search term reports or negative keywords, I believe that they might be panicking a bit.
3. Seeing the pandemic as an opportunity
Anders: I think people are very uncertain about the current situation. While certain brands closed up and waited for the changes to still, others took this up as an opportunity to talk and communicate with their audience. We have seen brands emerging, others pulling out of auctions, or bidding higher to get all the attention. So if you are a brand that hasn’t interacted at all, take this chance to tell the community that you are still around.
4. Impact on data analytics and audiences
Anders: One of the things that we noticed while talking to some of the big names of the industry, is that bidding strategies were radically changed in about 25% of all projects they managed. But even with the data, you simply can’t predict in the same manner as you did before. Depending on the circumstances, you may have to reset the data, or even set a ‘before’ and ‘after’ lockdown, to learn user behaviors.
I remember what Fred says in his book (Digital Marketing in an AI World), that we need to take a step back to look at the data. I think this is the time that we need to step back and look at things. Earlier on, we could trust the machines for the data they had and their ability to predict, but it might not be so reliable right now, as the data is changing. You need to be extra careful before fully trusting the algorithms.
5. Rely on Machine learning and add your insights
Purna: It’s true that the old models and strategies have somehow seen huge changes from predictable patterns. But I think there’s still a strong case for things like automated bidding. eCPC bidding can work well for Product Ads, and Microsoft recently launched Target ROAS bidding for shopping as well, and we have been seeing some really good performance there.
So with so much unpredictability, leave some of the signals to the machine. But wherever you can put in your own inputs, give the system the best information possible such as through Custom Labels to manage campaign/product group optimization.
You can download Microsoft’s holiday shopping checklist as seen during Purna’s segment by clickinghere.
6. Microsoft recommendations for feed management
Purna: Remember to check the following things:
Be sure to add an email address in the Microsoft Merchant Center – even if you work with a third party feed management system- to keep track of feed rejections and notifications such as alerts if your feed is going to expire or if there’s a sudden increase in rejected offers.
Audit duplicate titles. (Considered duplicate titles only if the entry has both the same title and the same price.)
Pay attention to your descriptions as they show up on shopping tabs.
Optimize for the shopping tab for it can help boost CTRs and Conversion rates.
Don’t ignore optional columns like Product Variants and Product Categories, as adding these can give the search engines more information to help show your SKUs for higher relevancy searches.
Conclusion
As we near the end of September, last-minute preparations for the coming quarter are in full swing. Search marketing has changed, and we need to be watchful of these changes as they affect data analytics and audience behaviors.
At Optmyzr, we’ve seen a massive shift across industries as businesses took recent months as an opportunity to go online. More and more marketers and agencies are starting to trust machine learning, automation, and data-driven optimizations.
One thing is clear: In order to thrive in Q4, PPC professionals need to look for powerful search systems and highly effective management tools. Being careful of the minutiae like descriptions or optional columns could prove to be game-changers.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
While many locations are exiting lockdown restrictions and business has been allowed to resume, the realities of the pandemic mean that many people are still unable or unwilling to shop in person. But that doesn’t necessarily mean demand is lower.
Enter e-commerce: the reigning champion of helping businesses make money through the internet.
This week on PPC Town Hall, Optmyzr CEO Frederick Vallaeys spoke to a couple of the world’s sharpest minds on the subject:
Duane Brown, Founder and Head of Strategy, Take Some Risk
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 tips from this week’s panelists on how e-commerce done right can make more money for your clients and your business.
1. Build a robust product feed
Every digital marketer knows that e-commerce success begins and ends with the product feed, so it’s paramount to get this in order before even trying to get creative with placements or extensions.
“We’ve seen big e-commerce stores come in and do really well with a feed where the titles are optimized for organic traffic. At the same time, we’ve seen time and time again that if you take the time to really build out the rest of the feed values so that your feed is as good as it can be, it can drastically improve Google Shopping results over time,” Andrew shared.
“The problem is this improvement doesn’t happen from one day to the next. With some of the stores we’ve worked with, where the product feed was very weak and where we optimized the feed (added keywords to the titles, etc.), it took months for it to actually show overall great results.
“My takeaway from this is that the feed really has a quality factor to it; we can’t see it, it’s not listed like Quality Score, but there is a component that determines how many searches you get shown for. It won’t necessarily boost your rank for a single keyword, but how far and wide Google can and will spread your product exposure.”
2. Give your products visibility
On the other hand, building a good feed means nothing unless you utilize it the right way.
“The vast majority of our clients are on Shopify, but we also work with businesses that are on WooCommerce and Magento as well. One of our clients on WooCommerce uses their app, and we used a supplemental feed to augment/change the product titles. It was easy to do because they only have 74 SKUs, so I was able to build out what I wanted in 5-6 hours. We push clients until they make the changes we want,” Duane shared.
“We’re not going to do subpar work, so if you’re not going to let us use Feedonomics, we don’t want you as a client. We don’t have time to waste building out feeds when we can think more strategically about how to use that feed to make our clients more money.”
3. Know when to use Smart and Standard campaigns
If you’re listing your products via Google Shopping campaigns, you have a choice to make: control the parameters yourself via a Standard campaign, or let Google use its machine-driven Smart campaign to optimize things for you.
“My recommendation depends on who you are. If you’re an in-house marketing coordinator and need to run your Google campaigns because you’ve had a bad experience with several agencies, Smart Shopping usually outperforms anything average PPC managers can do by themselves,” Andrew said.
“If you’re on the agency side or have a lot of experience, then you can usually utilize more of the complex structures to generate better results than Smart Shopping can. That said, I think it’s one of the best things to come out of Google in a long time.”
Duane had a word of advice for anyone leaning toward a Smart campaign.
“You can only use Smart Shopping if you have enough data in your Standard campaigns, so you can’t just launch a Smart Shopping campaign on day one even if you wanted to. I would recommend hitting a consistent 75-100 conversions per month before moving to Smart Shopping.”
4. Look beyond Google
While Google offers many effective ways to advertise, over-reliance on one platform can be limiting.
“I love Google, but sometimes people get so focused on Google and forget that there’s so much other opportunity in the world,” Duane said. “This article from Modern Retail talks about Levi’s doing a test with TikTok — an app that’s very big with influencers, celebrities and content creators. They have shopping ads now and around 200-250 million users in the US; so does Snapchat with its 229 million users.”
Duane knows other opportunities exist — and he’s already taking advantage of them.
“We’re making shopping work on Google; where else can we go? Does it make sense to go to Snap? It’s not just for people under 18; a good 15-20% of users are above the age of 25 and have disposable income. We’ve had clients sell products on there with an average order value of $100-150, so there’s money there. TikTok only launched shopping ads a few months ago, but it could work for brands that have a lot of video content.”
5. Track profit, not revenue
While it’s almost standard practice to track return on advertising spend (ROAS) as the defining financial metric, simply keeping score of revenue might not account for the actual goal of advertising: to make more money.
“Tracking profit over ROAS enables you to be more dynamic in the way you work with bidding,” Andrew observed.
“PPC marketers and businesses try to figure out what the optimal ROAS should be, and it all comes from analyzing margins on products; some work on a category basis and identify the ones that have higher margins than others. But this misses the point completely, because some brands have high margins and others have low ones. And if you’re running a sale, your margin is severely limited.
“During COVID, we worked with a client who had trouble getting inventory for a specific category — one we’d had problems with for a long time. We increased prices by 25% and all of a sudden, we started turning a profit. The profit margin earlier was so low that we couldn’t compete; with the new and improved conversions, we could own Shopping for that category.
“We’ve had other instances where we tracked profit over ROAS and the profit had doubled, or increased by 50-80%. When we looked at the analytics and measured ROAS, nothing had changed. It all comes from changing which products we’re actually pushing, because we can see which ones are selling well and turn a better profit instead of having empty revenue going through the stream.”
Conclusion
Nothing hurts an e-commerce program like a strategy in disarray. That’s why it’s critical to treat every step of the process with care.
If you’re an in-house marketer or a business owner, you might not have the time or resources to get it right every time. Tools like Optmyzr can make it easier to streamline and automate large parts of your PPC efforts, just as they help agencies achieve efficiency at scale.
You might also be completely new to e-commerce, in which case it’s not a bad idea to speak with an expert.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
Earlier this year, Google made an announcement that changed the way advertisers perceived Shopping campaigns. By making Google Shopping listings free, the world’s largest advertising network forced everyone selling tangible products to rethink their PPC strategies.
Suddenly, this component of the Google advertising network became much more attractive.
At first, brands and PPC marketers were captivated by the prospect of free ad space. Once the initial hype faded, it became clear that only a portion of Google Shopping listings would be made free and that certain conditions had to be met.
To take advantage of these free listings, advertisers need to have active Google Merchant Center accounts and enable their products to show on all surfaces including Google Images, the Google Shopping tab, Google Lens, and Google Search.
As of late May, our conversations with experts like Kirk Williams of Zato Marketing revealed that an average of 5-6% of Google Shopping listings were made complementary.
But that’s not the only reason it makes sense to give your products Google Shopping visibility.
If like many other brands, your business or client are just starting to get involved in building Google Shopping campaigns, this article will help you figure out how to sell on Google Shopping.
In this article, we’ll explore:
How to take advantage of Google Shopping listings
Why Google Shopping is a proven channel for product visibility
How to sell on Google Shopping the easy way
How to take advantage of Google Shopping listings
Google Shopping allows advertisers to promote physical, shippable products with a greater amount of visual appeal. Consumers searching for ‘blue shoes’ or ‘leather couch’ can view and explore a range of product listings that match closely with what they’re looking for.
Google Shopping campaigns come in two varieties: Standard and Smart.
Image sourced from versafeed.com
Standard campaigns are built manually to deliver on highly strategic goals. These require some understanding of product groups, campaign structures, and other campaign components in order to achieve a specific goal, such as a target ROAS.
Smart campaigns on Google Shopping reduce the entry barrier by using machine learning and automation to speed up the process. This makes them ideal for small businesses with limited budgets, or advertisers who don’t have the time to build out Standard campaigns.
While Standard campaigns afford greater control over location targeting, negative keywords, custom scheduling, and network placement; Smart campaigns require historical data but will determine placement and other parameters for you based on past performance of other campaigns.
Google Shopping: A proven channel for product visibility
Google Shopping campaigns have always been considered a core part of the PPC marketer’s toolbox. They carry a visual component, which has proven to be more attractive than plain text when products are involved.
Here are four more reasons why Google Shopping is a proven way to give your products the visibility they need, especially with the current economic landscape in mind.
The effects of COVID-19 have made e-commerce more viable and attractive than ever. Even if customers can’t visit your store, you can still sell and ship your products to people who might need (or simply want) them.
Google Shopping campaigns (and e-commerce in general) enable you to widen your catchment area. A brick and mortar store can only serve a specific geography; selling online lets you grow your audience, market, and business.
Including images of your products in Google Shopping campaigns lets consumers see what they’d be getting if they made a purchase. Just be sure to use accurate imagery to align expectations with reality.
Free Google Shopping listings are a valuable bonus. While a 5% boost won’t change your bottom line, many businesses need all the help they can get.
How to sell on Google Shopping the easy way
Google Shopping campaigns can be highly valuable if your business calls for them. But it can be confusing and tricky to build them out if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. Moreover, creating splits (e.g. by brand or category) takes a significant amount of time when done manually — and leaves you prone to human error.
Optmyzr’s tools for Google Shopping cover the full life cycle, allowing you to create campaigns and set structures from scratch. Use us to do the heavy lifting and help you create the campaign structures you want, quickly and without error.
With Optmytzr guiding you step by step, you can create both Standard and Smart Google Shopping campaigns and ad groups in just a few clicks.
Campaign Builder 2.0
Campaign Builder 2.0 is Optmyzr’s tool to build Standard and Smart Google Shopping campaigns from scratch. Anyone can link a spreadsheet or Google Merchant Center feed to get started in minutes.
Product Group Refresher 2.0
Product Group Refresher 2.0 optimizes existing Google Shopping campaigns by adding new products and product groups based on existing campaign structures. It looks at your current campaign structures and syncs with the feed to accurately reflect your inventory.
Machine learning provides suggestions, and you can even automate the entire process. For example, when new products are added to the inventory feed, Optmyzr can automatically create new product groups for them.
Manage Shopping Bids
This optimization identifies high-performing product groups, allowing you to raise bids for product groups that are driving results. It also shows which product groups are underperforming or failing, letting you lower bids for them.
By nature, this tool only supports Standard Google Shopping campaigns.
Shopping Analysis
One of our most popular Insight tools, Shopping Analysis helps Optmyzr users understand how their products are performing irrespective of structure. Use it to aggregate data and determine performance based on a number of different attributes.
Performance Metrics, such as ROAS or CPC
Standard Attributes enabled by Google, such as brand or product type
Feed Attributes based on your inventory, such as color or size
Aggregate data by price to see the performance and ROAS that products at different price points drive. Or if you’re selling shoes, easily see which sizes are more popular and sell more, or which ones aren’t in demand so you can fine-tune procurement.
Shopping Analysis works with both Standard and Smart Google Shopping campaigns. With the former, you can use this aggregate data to change bids using the Attribute Bidder. For Smart Shopping, you can see which products are selling better — an insight that’s not easy to obtain in Google Ads.
Conclusion
While it’s admirable that Google is thinking of advertisers and supporting them with some complementary Shopping listings, there’s greater value to be experienced than just a couple of freebies.
Unlike services, products have shape and form — and people love to see what they’re buying before they make a purchase. Google Shopping campaigns enable you to do this while expanding your reach, allowing small businesses to flourish and hobbyists to turn passion into profession.
To learn more about how we can help you build and optimize Google Shopping campaigns with minimal time sink, write to us at support@optymzr.com or sign up to try Optmyzr free of cost.
Note: Smart Shopping campaigns have been upgraded to Performance Max in September 2022. We suggest you refer to these links below to know more about Performance Max.
Would you like to use additional business data like profit margins to structure your shopping campaigns and set bids? Is there any information missing in your merchant feed that you’d like to incorporate into your campaign structure?
If your answer to the above questions is yes, then supplemental feeds are the solution for you.
Supplemental feeds help you push additional information to your primary merchant feed without editing the primary feed. They can help you enhance the merchant feed by adding extra information that may be missing from the feed. For example, if you have profit margin data available for the products in the feed you can push that data to your feed as a custom label. Or, if you would like to structure your campaigns based on ROAS, you can do that as well using supplemental feeds.
How do supplemental feeds work?
When Google reads the data from your Merchant Center feed, it treats the parent feed and supplemental feed as one. You can create a supplemental feed with the additional information you’d like to add for each of the products and then associate it with the merchant center. The supplemental feed matches the product id in the primary feed and associates the extra information with the matching products. This process gives you the flexibility to add/update the required information in the merchant feed and use it to build campaigns.
Use cases for supplemental feeds
Let’s take an example to understand how supplemental feeds can help. Say, you have a feed with more than 10,000 products with different price points and you would like to structure your campaigns based on the price of different products. Google Ads only allows a specific list of attributes which can be used to create a campaign and that does not include attributes like price or ROAS. A supplemental feed can help you include the price field or ROAS as a custom label value in the feed and it can then be used to build a shopping campaign.
To start with, have a look at your feed and identify different price ranges in which your products fall (or you can use the Shopping Analysis tool from Optmyzr). The reason behind creating different price range buckets is to group together the products that have a similar price and have them under the same campaign or ad group. This will help you bid on similar priced products together. Once you have decided the price buckets, you can create a supplemental feed assigning these price buckets to a custom label for each of the products. Please refer to the example below:
Primary feed: Below is an example of a primary feed in its original state.
Supplemental feed: Looking at the price of the products in the primary feed, you can create different buckets and then assign the relevant price bucket as a custom label for each of the products.
Updated primary feed: The supplemental feed matches the product id with the primary feed and updates the custom label value accordingly. In the example below, we’re pushing the price data into the Custom Label 0 field which will enable us to use to structure campaigns.
Once the custom label is updated in the primary feed, you can then use it to create the campaign structure you want.
There are different use cases in which you can use a supplemental feed. I have mentioned a few below:
You can create a campaign for each different price bucket and then choose to set your bid targets based on the price range. To build out shopping campaigns, you can use the Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0 from Optmyzr. Read more about how it can help in the blog post here.
You can also use ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) to group products that have similar performance together. This strategy works for both standard and smart shopping campaigns. In fact it is one of the few ways you can optimize smart shopping campaigns. The Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0 from Optmyzr can help you with this as well.
Apart from the above cases, there are several other benefits of using supplemental feeds:
Supplemental feeds can be created and deployed by any one on the team and you don’t need an engineer to do it.
New information can be added to the primary feed through the supplemental feed and you don’t have to ask your client to make those changes.
Missing information like GTINs can be added to the feed easily. This helps make products more discoverable.
Smart shopping campaigns do not support inventory filters, so, if you want to advertise selective products, pushing custom label values using a supplemental feed can be useful.
Supplemental feeds can also help you categorize the products and create campaigns based on that. For example, finding out winners and losers based on the ROAS and creating campaigns for them.
Local inventory feeds can be easily updated with availability and price values regularly.
Supplemental feeds can help you manage your shopping campaigns more granularly by letting you add extra information to the primary feed as and when required. This makes it easy to make intelligent bidding decisions based on attributes like profit margins or ROAS to improve return on investment.
Holiday shopping season has seemingly become a “winner take all” proposition in the world of PPC. Think of it as the Fall playoff season leading up to the big championship game in December. Brands are scrapping for every click, every lead, every conversion.
Mistakes can be devastating to the end goal. And with each passing day in November and December, opportunities lost are gone. There’s little chance at re-earning the sale.
Shopping Campaigns have become heavily automated at the platform level, so on the surface it would seem that Google is making it easy for every brand and every merchant to launch effective shopping campaigns. So why worry?
Therein lies the latest challenge for PPC pros with all the pressure on them to execute flawless Shopping Campaigns. EVERYONE has access to the same heavily automated foundational toolkit. So if everyone plays from that same playbook, nobody can truly be out front.
Layered Automation: Deeper control for PPC rockstars
The core automations from the search engines essentially help marketers get efficient with the foundational elements of good PPC across the various ad types typically deployed. Optmyzr provides what we call layered automation to make it possible for strategically-inclined marketers to stand out from that “good” pack. Our team spends a lot of time tracking all of the advancements at Google and Microsoft to create tools that help marketers better utilize a search engine platform’s automation and transform PPC pros into strategic marketers as opposed to being tacticians.
The latest development from the Optmyzr team is a fully revised version of Optmyzr Shopping Campaign Builder. This week we formally introduced Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0, which taps the latest platform automations and make it much easier to build perfectly structured shopping ads faster and with more power behind them.
Version 2.0 culminates months of intense work by our team, connecting Google Merchant Feed data to new automation tools to build the perfect structures for shopping ads. Doing so meant ensuring the new version works across virtually any ad structure methodology. Thinking through the various ways PPC pros need to structure, we address a multitude of specific campaign needs, for example:
Creating one campaign per brand
Creating one ad group per SKU or product ID
Establishing separate campaigns for each range of profit margins which enables varying tROAS targets
Building and managing unique smart shopping campaigns for each product
Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0 makes it even easier to build perfectly structured shopping ads in record time. By maximizing the standard platform automations and layering in Optmyzr’s own automation protocols, it’s quite easy to build literally thousands of product groups in a matter of minutes as opposed to multiple days.
The essential linkage between the Google Merchant Feed and creation of product groups removes thousands of manual tasks. Within Campaign Builder, version 2.0 also includes enhanced capabilities within the Shopping Refresher module. Automations now extend to adding and removing campaigns as needed, acting on changes in data from the merchant feed. The earlier version had a simpler capability that was limited to working with a single campaign, requiring significant manual intervention (and time) to replicate across multiple campaigns.
Take, for example, the common approach of structuring campaigns based on similar products with similar profit margins. A good idea, which also allows for automated bidding to help maximize results. Such an approach, however, could box the marketer into a structure that isn’t nearly as dynamic as it could be. A marketer may decide it would be more beneficial to have one campaign for each product type. Shopping Refresher can now detect if a new product type suddenly appears in the feed and then automatically create a completely built out campaign with all product groups for that new product type.
The tool can also automatically detect the opposite – when a product is no longer available in the merchant feed. Campaign Refresher can automatically pause the campaign for that specific product and quickly cut off needless ad spend.
Move from tactical to strategic
Automations from Google, Bing and others can make things seem like doomsday for PPC pros in the long term. It’s understandable when considered purely at face value. However, the innovations that transformed other industries such as manufacturing over the last several decades have moved many smart professionals into much more strategic value-add roles.
Tightening bolts on the assembly line of yesteryear was an essential tactic/function many years ago. But repetitive action yielded the same core outcome while failing to tap the deeper thinking and intellect of the production line employee. In PPC, our value add as the human being running programs is not in managing repetitive actions. Our value add comes in the form of creativity and strategy – figuring out the intangibles and the if-this-then-that variables.
PPC pros who will lead the industry to greater relevance in the overall marketing mix will be the ones who layer powerful automation on top of the core automations from the search engines. The less time spent in the weeds of tactics will continue to elevate PPC pros from being “The Google Ads person” to being a strategic visionary with a much more essential role in the overall marketing hierarchy. Check out Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0. As always, contact us directly and we’ll gladly provide a 1:1 demo of how it can transform your PPC work day.
I had an illuminating conversation about Amazon Ads and PPC with an industry colleague recently, not long after we announced Optmyzr’s new Amazon Ads functionality. Our discussion shined a spotlight on a potential emerging threat for PPC pros – channel complacency.
Understandably, a lot of people in our space are deeply rooted in Google and Bing. It makes sense. Agencies have achieved greatness by making it possible for clients to dominate in the highly lucrative paid search engine results. Google and Bing are, without question, the primary search engines – and we are search marketers by trade. By a wide margin, standard Internet searches happen on these two platforms, with Google still the runaway leader – and its SERPs providing highly valuable paid (and organic) information.
Product Search – PPC’s hottest battleground
While Google maintains its overall Internet search dominance, actual product search has seen a quiet revolution in the background. Somewhere between 2015 and 2018, Amazon swiped the top spot for product searches, according to a study done by Jumpshot.
What? Did we hear that correctly? Amazon is the search king? But they’re eCommerce, not search!
Yes. For product-specific searches, Amazon seems to have hip-checked Google off the mountaintop. At the time of the Jumpshot study, Amazon held 54% of that type of search activity, compared to 46% for Google. Those figures were inverted just three years earlier. In the months since the study, Amazon has invested massively to deepen and further refine its search capabilities.
Google has fought back, of course, significantly enhancing its pay-for-play product search results, while deepening the experiences with Shopping Ads and Showcase Shopping Ads. Expect the battle to wage intensely for market dominance in product search.
Why? As we all know from years gauging searcher intent, product-specific search is a strong indicator that someone is stampeding down the funnel toward conversion. After all, a person typically doesn’t search [brand] [product] [size] [color] if they are trying to get general ideas for fashion trends for the upcoming season. Many of those searchers are seeking best price, convenience, and shipping options to purchase NOW.
So, PPC pros who dismiss Amazon search as not being “search marketing” are likely missing a huge opportunity not considering queries on Amazon as “search.”
Millions upon millions of searches are happening in the Amazon search box each day. Semantics and intent may be different than how many searches happen in the Google box, but make no mistake about it – Amazon is a search platform and there’s gold in them thar’ searches.
It’s been interesting observing reactions after we launched Amazon Ads functionality as part of the Optmyzr PPC Management Suite. PPC rockstars were all over it. They received the news with an almost “about time!” mindset, expanding their capabilities virtually overnight. Visionary PPC pros are looking beyond Google and Bing in their expanding definition of “search.”
Many other very talented pros in our space, however, are still connecting the dots of how search is morphing and seeing the broader landscape beyond the king (Google) and the queen (Bing) of search. The emergence of Amazon (and Facebook) as actual search platforms creates a big new opportunity for PPC pros looking to own a bigger piece of the overall digital marketing mix.
And since most agencies get paid based on how much spend they manage, any opportunity to significantly move the needle on spend under management should be seen as a tremendous opportunity, especially when the new platform isn’t all that difficult to manage with the right tools like Optmyzr.
Expanding the PPC universe – Simplified
Here’s the great news: It’s not difficult to expand PPC programs beyond Google and Bing. Again, the intent and behaviors in the various search boxes may be different, but the underlying mechanics are remarkably similar.
Think about it…Search > Algorithms > SERPs. Just as with Google and Bing, the Amazon machine churns out results against searches while allowing retailers and brands alike to buy their way to dominance for the keywords they want.
Optmyzr Rule Engine is the core of our Amazon offering. You can read more in our blog post announcing the Amazon capability, but here it is in a nutshell: Optmyzr makes it really easy for PPC pros to manage paid search across Google, Bing, and Amazon from a single interface. Manage critical aspects of paid search in Amazon, including the ability to set bids for a range or to meet a target ACOS goal. We allow the PPC pro to include negative keywords to reduce poor performing search terms and identify the positive keywords that convert in the Amazon universe.
Holiday shopping is ramping up as we speak. Hundreds of millions of searches for specific products will happen in the Amazon search box. You really don’t want to miss out on that lucrative search traffic. Your clients REALLY don’t want to miss out on it either!
Using inventory filters in Google Shopping campaigns becomes a necessity if you have different campaigns for different categories or brands of products. In this blog post, I’ll talk about what inventory filters are, when they should be used and how to set them up.
What are inventory filters?
When you set up a shopping campaign, the entire feed that is associated with the campaign and becomes the universe of that campaign. Inventory filters help you reduce the size of this universe for the campaign by restricting the products that are eligible to be advertised in it. When you set up an inventory filter for a campaign, it is your way of saying which products should be targeted in that campaign. For example, if you have a feed that has four different product types (shoes, t-shirts, pants, caps) and you want to create a separate campaign for each of them then you will set up four different campaigns and use inventory filters.
When to use inventory filters?
Inventory filters are set up at the campaign level so the most common use case to use them is when you want to create different campaigns for different groups of products like product lines or categories. Continuing from the example above, if you want a different campaign for each product type (shoes, t-shirts, pants, caps), inventory filters are the right way to do it. Having different campaigns helps manage budgets separately and have different targeting.
Why are inventory filters important?
As mentioned earlier, when you set up a shopping campaign in Google Ads, the entire feed becomes part of the campaign it is linked to. If you’re setting up multiple Google Ads shopping campaigns, then the only reliable way to prevent campaigns from competing with each other and duplication is to set up inventory filters. A common mistake is to create multiple campaigns and then manually exclude products that should not be advertised in a campaign. However, this is a very tedious task and prone to human error. Also, it is difficult to automatically refresh shopping campaigns to keep them in sync with the feed.
How to set them up?
Inventory filters can be set up in campaign settings in Google Ads. They can only be set up to include products with a certain attribute. For example, ‘Product Type’ is . It cannot be set up to be a partial match (contains) or to not match (does not contain).
Need help managing Google Shopping campaigns? Take a look at the tools Optmyzr has.
Black Friday. Cyber Monday. After-hours convenience. Price. Easy/free shipping. All are huge motivators driving people from brick-and-mortar stores to the ease and convenience of online retail. The trend lines are unmistakable. 2018 promises to be another transformational year for eCommerce at holiday time, with many experts predicting double digit increases in online holiday shopping.
Billions of dollars will be up for grabs.
PPC pros have an unprecedented opportunity to be real heroes this year by making sure their company wins more than its share of the shopping frenzy. Working in your favor, holiday shopping is always ripe with intent and immediacy.
Semantics Matter
First, let’s briefly recap the ongoing rapid evolution of the tools at our disposal. Google and Bing are both continually enhancing shopping tools to drive that high-intent searcher to conversion. They have added core automation to streamline the basics of PPC and more advanced tools such as Shopping Ads.
Focusing specifically on the Google platform (but still keeping in mind Bing is remarkably Google’esque with PPC), we all know the greater the specificity of a person’s search, the greater the intent. “Men’s black analog diving watches” tells the Google machine a lot about the searcher’s eagerness. Google can serve up engaging Shopping Ads featuring cool black diving watches to capture eagerness to purchase, serving product-specific ads with click-to-buy ease.
The holiday shopper doing more casual digital window shopping, however, will offer less specific searches such as “Men’s watches” or more vague “gift ideas for dads.” While vague, that shopper likely WANTS to get into a funnel and may need just a little prodding to convert.
In this less-specific search, Shopping Ads and Google’s Showcase Shopping Ads can create immersive and meaningful experiences for people browsing for that perfect gift.
If you haven’t dabbled yet with Showcase Shopping Ads, perhaps you should. They provide pre-click browsing of your products to generate purchase ideas based on more general searches. Previously, PPC pros didn’t have a lot of power to draw casual browsers into their funnel. Showcase Ads are an inexpensive option to meaningfully engage shoppers of modest intent – particularly those meandering for ideas on a mobile device.
Build – Optimize – Automate – Control
While Google and Bing do a good job automating core aspects of search ads for everyday PPC practitioners, the PPC rockstar needs tools like Optmyzr to take their game to new levels. The goal is beating competitors in the second-by-second, search-by-search battle for holiday sales.
The Optmyzr system gives you greater control and automation beyond what Google and Bing offer – and it’s all managed from a single interface. Everything from building campaigns, syncing with inventory, and managing bids to choosing your preferred mix of automation/manual intervention.
Campaign Builder greatly simplifies and automates creation of product group and other campaign structures. Tapping data in your merchant feed, this tool helps automatically align structures by category and craft groups by brand, product type, etc. Campaign Builder’s easy-to-use interface gives you greater control and flexibility to analyze structures to refine and improve them prior to launch. It will also flag gaps in structure that could negatively impact reporting and analysis downstream. In other words, you catch the clunky, annoying misses that would otherwise create headaches or hamper insight after the fact.
Next, let’s talk inventory. Retailers have greater opportunity to serve up ads based on actual inventory – you know…the stuff you have on hand and want/need to sell. Whether you sell cars or speciality holiday dresses or sporting goods, accurate inventory data fed into Optmyzr allows efficient set up and management of hundreds of potential rules and parameters to serve the right ad at the right time. Through rules and automation, you can streamline processes to serve ads based on highly specific product attributes – size, color, style, tech specs. Essentially, if you have data about the products, Optmyzr drives powerful tools to serve the ads aligned with that highly specific search.
Finally, let’s cover bid management. This is where a third-party tool like Optmyzr layers exceptional power on top of the standard automations from the search engines.
The day-to-day task of managing bids can be horribly time consuming, but it’s really at the heart of taking campaigns from basic to extraordinary. For those who need to manage basic modifications in bulk – such as blanket modifications across a product group, our Shopping Bidder tool allows a PPC pro to do that in minutes.
PPC pros, however, often want/need to make decisions at a much more granular level. Shopping Attribute Bidder taps data from Google Ads and specific attributes in your merchant feed. This combination deepens the ability for PPC pros to make different bids to accommodate variations based on any number of attributes. You’ll want to read up on GrIP structures to get the most bang for your buck with Shopping Attribute Bidder.
Finally, Optmyzr Rule Engine is an extremely powerful tool in the hands of a PPC rockstar. With this proprietary tool, it’s really quite easy to adjust bids based on deep data points, such as conversion, CPA, ROAS and others. Among the most versatile tools in the PPC toolbox, you can automate bidding structures across pre-set parameters. Big snowstorm about to hit the northeast? Bids can automatically adjust to push snow blowers or skis. July heatwave predicted in the midwest? Rule Engine can push window air conditioners in Milwaukee, Madison and Minneapolis. You can set those rules up well in advance to automate against countless eventualities.
Conclusion
Holiday shopping season always puts eCommerce topics to top-of-mind, so it’s always a great opportunity to talk about Shopping Ads and powerful bidding tools. Of course, we all want to capitalize on the November-December gift buying frenzy, but these tools are 12-month necessities to allow PPC pros to beat the competition.
People are out there searching for your products/services right now. Make sure they find you before they find your competitor.
Of course, if you want a free 14-day trial or demo, just let us know.
As longtime Search veterans ourselves, the Optmyzr team’s legacy generally comes from the Google universe. Yet we’ve always viewed Bing’s emergence as a true player in search as being a good thing for search marketers. More choice for users. A bigger pie overall. More opportunity for marketers to help brands reach the customers who are searching for what they sell.
Accurate market share stats are elusive, at best, but seem to range between 10-33% for Bing these days (in terms of search volume). While Google still rules the search universe, 10-33% of billions of searches conducted is massive – to say the very least.
Search is clearly the powerhouse way to reach customers because users tell the search engines specifically what they are seeking – “Men’s black dress shoes” or “trendy prom dresses” or “[brand name] camera lenses” or “family restaurants near me.” As Bing continues its steady growth in volume and its evolution to Google-like ad types, data and analytics, search marketers have found themselves working across platforms with greater frequency.
Trouble was, working in two platforms typically more than doubled the work for the PPC pro. Google automation and powerful tools like Optmyzr made it a snap to launch and manage Google Shopping Ads. Bing ads, though? Not so much. It’s been a much more manual and time-consuming prospect for PPC pros – until now.
The Optmyzr team is excited to introduce powerful new functionality that allows PPC pros to manage all critical aspects of Bing Shopping Ads from the same Optmyzr interface that manages Google Ads.
The new Bing-specific functionality greatly simplifies Bing Shopping Ads in much the same way it simplifies Google Shopping Ads. We set out to simplify core activities, including setting up advanced campaign structures, keeping campaigns synced with dynamic product inventory, and optimizing performance quickly and efficiently with AI-enabled decision support.
We’ve made it possible for PPC pros to tackle Bing Shopping Ads in minutes instead of hours. Many automated features speed things along, but Optmyzr also provides extensive manual intervention and optimization, so you can dig deep into your product data to improve performance.
A few of the most notable core features to highlight:
Optmyzr Campaign Builder: Set up your campaign structure for the most optimal deployment and management. Highly flexible in setup, much like what we’ve offered for Google Shopping Ads management.
Optmyzr Campaign Refresher: Keep your Bing ads in sync with a merchant feed.
Optmyzr Bid Management: Creates customizable reports that will help you identify commonalities affecting performance deep within campaigns. Commonalities might be brand, style, size, product type, price – any number of attributes essential to a successful campaign. You can act on the insight to drive better (more profitable!) bids.
As always, we focus much of our innovation on mid to advanced PPC pros, but the ease and flexibility of the system allows up-and-coming PPC managers to improve their abilities and execution.
One final important piece about the new Bing-specific functionality – you’ll still manage campaigns (setup to execution) individually for Bing and Google within Optmyzr. Each platform has its own unique structure and specific requirements. However, the time savings of deploying campaigns AND tracking metrics and reporting through the same system will undoubtedly help PPC pros work more efficiently and effectively. Optmyzr allows the PPC pro to access campaign metrics and reporting through the same interface, which allows more immediate comparison of performance in Google and Bing.
Best of all, you won’t be leaving millions – if not billions – of Bing searches to chance. As the overall search pie gets bigger and Bing continues to grow its share of search volume, it’s becoming more important than ever that search pros build their cross platform expertise and capability. If not, the competition might just run away with a huge percentage of previously untapped search traffic.
When it comes to Google Shopping Campaigns, there are different ways you can approach the bid management process.
At Optmyzr, we offer three tools that will help you manage shopping bids successfully. They have different focuses and vary by the granularity you’ll need. Whether you’re looking to manage more generic and standard changes in bids or to do so differently for that one specific product attribute, we’ve got you covered.
1. Shopping Bidder
One of these tools is the Shopping Bidder. With the Shopping Bidder, you can make rather standard and bulk modifications for bids based on performance. These bid changes can only be applied to product groups, and work by increasing or decreasing the current bid by a number or percentage.
You can also choose to set a new fixed bid. This tool is most useful for when you want to make changes like, for example, reduce the bids on all non-converting product groups by an X percentage, or set all new product groups at a specific initial bid.
2. Shopping Attribute Bidder
Based on how granular you want to go, at Optmyzr we also have the Shopping Bid by Attributes* tool, where you can combine performance data from your Google Ads account with the attributes in your merchant feed.
This means you can use a division such as Category 0 > Product Type 0 > Brand > Price to make different bid changes for every unique combination of the selected attributes. You can do this so long as you’re maintaining a GrIP structure, i.e. one product SKU per product group. (Try our Utility tool to Create a Grip structure)
3. Rule Engine
Another great tool to manage bids, and perhaps the most versatile one we have so far, is the Rule Engine*. The Rule Engine lets you change bids for product groups based on performance, and gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of comparing performance and setting bids.
The Rule Engine works with recipes that contain a set of rules you’ll define. These rules contain multiple conditions and associated actions, and all of the conditions must be met for the actions to be applied. For example, you can use our target ROAS, conversion rate, etc. to set bids for product groups.
The Rule Engine can even connect with your business data so you can start managing bids by margins or even by weather.
These three tools offer different, yet equally helpful ways of approaching shopping bid management, with different levels of complexity.
*The Bid by Attributes and Rule Engine tools are only available for Pro plan users, but as you can see both give a greater range of possibilities. If you’d like to try them, you can contact us at support@optmyzr.com.
Shopping campaigns work very differently from search campaigns. The biggest difference is that, unlike search campaigns, you can’t specify the keywords that you would like to show your ads for. However, you can decide which keywords you don’twant to show for, by adding negatives at the ad group and campaign level. Usually the purpose of adding negative keywords is to cut out irrelevant traffic which helps increase profitability. However, Google does a pretty good job of not matching irrelevant queries to shopping ads. The question then is – how can negative keywords help improve performance of AdWords shopping campaigns?
It can be done in two ways:
1. Direct traffic to more profitable ad groups
Negatives for shopping campaigns can be used to direct traffic to more profitable ad groups. When using a multi-campaign structure with different priorities, the same query can match to different ad groups. Comparing performance of the same search query across ad groups and adding it as an exact match negative to the ad group it is underperforming in will make sure that the query always matches to the more profitable ad group. By doing this you can sculpt the traffic to go to the ad group that you want.
2. Remove generic non-converting queries or queries with low ROAS
Google doesn’t match irrelevant search queries to shopping ads but it does match generic queries. For example, if you have an ad group selling ‘Adidas Running Shoes’, it can match to a query like ‘Black Shoes’ which is not irrelevant because it does refer to shoes but the search query is generic. Sometimes when campaigns have limited budget it is a good idea to concentrate on the queries that have the highest return on investment. Adding generic queries that don’t convert or have a very low ROAS as exact match negatives helps increase overall ROAS.
The new Shopping Negatives Tool from Optmyzr supports both the above strategies of adding negative keywords. It analyzes the search terms for shopping campaigns and recommends exact match negatives based on the these strategies.
Duplicate Queries (Across ad groups)
This strategy finds queries that match to more than one ad group and recommends adding the query as an exact match negative to the under performing ad group. It is like AB Testing the search query and keeping it in the best performing ad group.
Low Performing Queries (within ad groups)
This strategy finds queries that are not performing well within an ad group. They may have a lower ROAS than the ad group average or a much higher cost/conversion. If you’re on a limited budget, these queries can be added as exact match negatives to the ad group to reduce cost.
You have the option of clicking on the query and seeing exactly why the system is recommending adding it as a negative keyword. Also, the confidence level says how confident the system is when making the recommendation.
Watch this video to find out more. Try the Shopping Negatives Tool here.
Shopping campaigns are set up very differently from search campaigns in AdWords. The biggest difference is that technically your entire feed is part of each ad group in your shopping campaign. Unlike search campaigns where you choose the keywords that should be targeted, in shopping it is specifying what you don’t want to target and bid on separately. This is the reason that when you set up a shopping campaign in AdWords it starts off with one ad group and product group (All Products) which shows ads for all products in the feed. It also means that every product in the feed will have the same bid and it doesn’t matter if it costs $10 or $300.
Having the same bid for products that have a varying price point is not a good strategy and will result in low ROAS. This is because you will invest less in big ticket items which will most likely result in lower returns. To avoid this, it is recommended to create separate product groups for different products and set different bids. Deciding on the structure for your shopping campaign depends a lot on how you want to monitor and manage performance. The new Shopping Feed Analysis feature in the Shopping Campaign Builder gives you the additional layer of data you need to have the most accurate product group structure based on the data available in your feed. Before we get into the details of this feature, lets talk a bit more about campaign structure.
It is a good idea to follow the structure you have on your website. For example, if you’re selling accessories, you can choose to have different campaigns by the top level product category, ad groups by brand and product groups by product type. However, technically there are two things to consider – the attributes that AdWords lets you use to structure campaigns and the coverage of these attributes.
Attributes available to structure a shopping campaign
It is only possible to create product groups using specific attributes from the product feed as AdWords doesn’t allow the use of all attributes available in the feed to define product groups. The attributes you can use are:
Brand Condition Item Id Google Category Product Type Custom Labels/ Attributes
Coverage of attributes
If you use an attribute to define the structure but certain products don’t have a value for that attribute, those products will fall into everything else. This is what the Feed Analysis feature that I mentioned earlier helps fix. It’ll tell you in advance the attributes in the feed, the number of variations per attribute and the number of products that have that attribute defined. This can help you decide which attributes to select when setting up your shopping campaign. For example, if the feed has 80,000 products and the analysis shows that only 50,000 products have the brand attribute defined then avoid using brand to structure the campaign because 30,000 products will end up in everything else. It will also tell you how many different types of brands are there in the feed. For example, if the e-commerce store only carries one brand, it is not a good idea to split by brand. Therefore, choose attributes that are defined for most products in the feed and have some variation.
How to use the shopping feed analysis?
The feed analysis feature is available in the Shopping Campaign Builder tool in Optmyzr. When you are deciding on a campaign structure, select those attributes that have the highest coverage. This means they are defined for a majority of products in the feed. Also, after choosing the structure in the Shopping Campaign Builder, the tool will tell you the percentage of products that will fall into everything else. This way you can change the structure in the Shopping Campaign Builder before uploading the ad groups and product groups to AdWords.
In the screenshot below, the column ‘Products missing this attribute’ will tell you how many products in the feed don’t have a value for that attribute and if you were to use that to split your feed, those many products will end up in everything else. For example, the attribute Brand has 32 different variations and the number of products that don’t have brand defined is 0. This means it has good variation and full coverage so it is a good option to use. On the other hand, Custom Attribute 2 is not defined for 25,039 products so it is not recommended to use that to structure your campaign.
Understanding ‘everything else’
Products that don’t have a value for the attribute you selected to create product groups will go to everything else. This is essentially a group of products that are not split into their own product group. Each level of split in an ad group has an everything else node associated with it to accommodate the products that are not targeted at that level. The more products or SKUs that fall into everything else, the less control you have over their performance and bids. Think of it like a supermarket but instead of neatly stacked shelves by type of product, everything is mixed up together with a single price tag.
Why should products not fall into everything else?
AdWords only lets you set bids at the product group level. The everything else node is one product group and all the products inside it will get the same bid. You don’t have the flexibility to bid differently for products that have a different price. Also, performance metrics (for the purpose of setting bids) are reported at the product group level so the performance for all products will be consolidated. It doesn’t matter how many sales individual products in the everything else group drove.
If you’re just getting started with shopping and want to better understand why products should be split into different product groups, read the example below:
You are an e-commerce advertiser selling shoes. Each SKU or shoe in your feed has multiple attributes associated with it which provide information about it. Like brand (Reebok, Nike, Aldo etc.), product type (walking shoes, running shoes, heels…), price, color, gender, custom labels and the list goes on. Using some of these attributes, you can define product groups in AdWords which let you set a different bid for a pair of Nike shoes that cost $200 compared to another pair of Nike shoes that cost $90. If you don’t split your ad groups into specific product groups, all the products in your feed will be in a single product group and will have the same bid. To manage performance and bids, products need to be split into product groups because that is the lowest level at which AdWords allows changing bids for Shopping Campaigns.
Optmyzr has a new tool that will make it easy to restructure existing shopping campaigns to improve performance.
Create GRIP structure tool
In shopping campaigns, the product group is the level at which you can set bids. A product group can have any number of products. Having a granular shopping campaign structure lets you set a bid for each product individually. This is important because different products have different prices and having the same bid for all products may not result in high ROAS. For example, if you’re selling shoes and you choose to split campaigns by Category 0->Category 1->Product Type 0, you could end up with a structure where the last level has different types of shoes like running shoes, walking shoes. In this case you could end up bidding the same $2 for a pair of shoes that costs $100 and another that costs $250. To make sure you can bid relative to how each product performs, it is important to have a structure where there is one product or item in each product group. This is the GRIP (GRoup of Individual Products) structure.
How can you achieve the GRIP structure without spending hours in your AdWords account? The Shopping Campaign Builder lets you create the GRIP structure for new campaigns. You can specify the high level split, the tool will pull the data from your feed, put it into the defined structure and you can upload it to AdWords with a single click. For existing shopping campaigns that already have performance data, you can either spend hours creating this structure in AdWords or use the new Create GRIP structure tool from Optmyzr. This lets you restructure existing shopping campaigns to have the GRIP (groups of individual products) structure.
How does it work?
The tool detects the last level at which an ad group is split and splits it one level further at the item id level. This enables you to have one product group per item id while preserving the historical data associated with the ad group. Once you have this structure you can use the Shopping Attribute Bidder to aggregate data by any attribute in the feed.
Benefits of using the tool
No restructuring required: It works with existing campaign structures
Preserves historical data: It splits out existing ad groups so historical data is not lost
Higher ROI: It enables you to manage bids for each product which results in better performance and higher ROI
Saves time: You can create thousands of products groups within minutes
This tool is currently in beta and is available in the Pro subscription plan on Optmyzr.
I’m the engineer behind our recently announced Shopping Attribute Bidder and I would like to show you some of the benefits you can achieve by deploying a more granular structure for your product groups in shopping campaigns.
How bids work for Shopping Ads
In shopping campaigns, you set bids for product groups. However, not all product groups can get a bid. Why is that? It’s because product groups can be subdivided and the bid can only be set at the final level of subdivision.
Here’s an example where products have been segmented (subdivided) along a few dimensions: first by the category (‘electronics’ or ‘toys’). Electronics are subdivided further by ‘brand’, and toys are not subdivided further. The right column in green represents all other product categories and is called “Everything else” in AdWords. This is further subdivided by ‘used status’.
This segmentation can be shown as a tree:
What’s important here is that in the AdWords interface, each division is called a ‘product group’ but only the ones at the lowest level (the colored ones in the image above) can have a bid. We’ll call these ‘biddable product groups’.
Why AdWords has non-biddable product groups
So why does AdWords even have non-biddable product groups? It’s because the way they let advertisers do the subdivisions in the interface requires one subdivision at a time. In creating the tree, each level has to be subdivided individually.
Doing this is actually really really painful if you just want to build a logical division, for example, splitting all products by category 0, and then splitting all those by brand. AdWords supports 7 levels of subdivision but in the interface anything more than 2 levels is extremely manual.
If you need help with that, check out our super fast Shopping Campaign Builder tool. We’ve had advertisers create hundreds of ad groups and thousands of granular product groups in just minutes with it.
How to set unique bids per product (SKU) in Shopping Ads
How granularly you can set bids depends on how granular your biddable product groups are. So if you want very granular, SKU level bids, you must place each SKU in its own product group.
It’s a similar concept to SKAGs in search campaigns. SKAG stands for Single Keyword Ad Group. The name I came up with for the equivalent of a SKAG in shopping campaigns is the GRIP structure. GRIP stands for GRoup of Individual Products.
Let me show you two ways to split four SKUs (item IDs) into biddable product groups.
Here’s what your biddable product groups contain in a GRIP structure:
In the GRIP structure above, each individual shoe is placed in a product group. The same four products in a non-GRIP structure below are all grouped together based on a subdivision of something they have in common, in this case the fact they’re all sneakers.
In the GRIP structure, I can set a unique bid for each item I sell. In a non-GRIP structure, the bid for all four sneakers has to be the same.
Why the GRIP structure is good for bidding
With the Shopping Attribute Bidder tool I created, we can analyze AdWords performance for any attribute we have included in our Google Merchant Feed. For example, we could analyze how shoes of different sizes perform. Here’s what we might see in Optmyzr:
As you can see, size 11.5 shoes have an ROAS of 1361%. Size 10 shoes on the other hand haven’t sold anything so their ROAS is 0%.
In a non-GRIP structure, this useful insight cannot be acted on because shoes of different sizes exist in the same biddable product group.
In a GRIP structure, on the other hand, we can act on this insight:
What’s really cool is that your structure no longer limits your ability to act on insights. If you want to analyze performance by brand or color, that would work just as easily. Here we use the GRIP structure to change bids for things that are red:
And here we change bids for products from a certain brand:
Not only can you now analyze data using attributes not available in AdWords (we do this by merging your merchant feed with the AdWords reports in our systems), you can even combine attributes to find more granular insights.
Changing bids for GRIP ads
It was important for us to give you the ability to act on insights right from the page where you got the insight. Here’s what the Shopping Attribute Bidder tool looks like when you’ve found an insight that you want to use for a bid change:
The analysis here looks at price ranges of products, something the advertiser has entered using a custom attribute. We can see performance data for each attribute. When products with the same attribute have different bids, we show each bid so that you can raise or lower them all by a percentage or a fixed amount.
Conclusion
I see a lot of e-commerce advertisers with sub-optimal product groups. That’s why I’m excited about the fact that with Optmyzr you can now more easily create a great shopping structure and use that to improve bid management. Try it out and let me and the team know what you think…
Today you will see some new tools for managing Shopping Ads in Optmyzr’s One-Click Optimizations™ menu. These new and updated tools help e-commerce advertisers manage every aspect of advertising an e-commerce business on Google AdWords. Both the setup and management of shopping ads are made more efficient so that you can get better results with less effort.
The following tools are part of our updated Shopping Ads management suite:
You specify how you want your products to be segmented in AdWords. Our tool automatically builds out the associated structure, handling the creation of thousands of very granular ad groups and product groups.
This tool speeds up the creation of well-structured shopping campaigns, making it possible to conduct A/B tests and experiment with different structures. Without the Campaign Builder tool, a merchant selling ten brands, and products in ten categories and ten subcategories would have to load 1,000 pages in AdWords to create the same structure that can be set up with Optmyzr in just six clicks.
To achieve the best return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), you have to set the right bids for all products you advertise with Google Shopping ads. This level of bid control requires that product groups in AdWords correctly reflect the range of goods you sell. Because ad groups in AdWords don’t automatically get updated based on changes in the merchant feed, Optmyzr has created this tool to make it easier for you to sync a store’s inventory with AdWords.
In AdWords, product groups are created based on a snapshot of the data in a product feed. Because this data changes dynamically based on inventory, the AdWords structure can quickly become out of sync. Catching mismatches between what is sold and what is managed in AdWords is time-consuming, manual, and often overlooked by advertisers. Accounts whose bids are poorly managed due to the complexity of maintaining a correct structure can suffer from decreases in ROAS.
Optmyzr’s Shopping Campaign Refresher analyzes the AdWords Shopping campaign to determine its structure and compares this with the data in the Merchant Center feed to provide an automated optimization proposal that corrects any mismatches.
Optmyzr now provides three ways to manage CPC bids for product groups.
Bid by Rules (Rule Engine)
Complex bidding logic can be automated with our Rule Engine. The Rule Engine can combine data from different entities, and date ranges with data maintained in Google Sheets. The data can be used to create a series of if-then-else statements, giving you the complete flexibility to create advanced bidding logic.
We have provided default rules for managing bids based on ROAS and CPA, and you can enhance these rules with your own insights about your company and industry.
Quickly identify product groups that meet basic profitability criteria and apply bid changes in bulk with this tool. When there isn’t enough data to make bid management decisions, the tool can help reach the required data levels by aggregating metrics based on commonalities between products. For example, advertisers who have structured product groups by brand could use brand-level metrics to make bid changes for items where data sparsity is an issue.
The most powerful way to bid for Shopping Ads is with the new Shopping Attribute Bidder. Regardless of the structure in AdWords, you can view shopping performance by any attribute of your merchant center feed (even by color or size). If product groups are divided by item id, you can act on insights by updating bids from the same page where you got the insight.
For example, a shoe retailer can get instant insights into what size shoe has the best ROI. They could further refine their analysis by analyzing a combination of multiple attributes, like shoe size and color.
What makes Optmyzr’s tool unique is that insights can be turned into intelligent optimizations unlike in AdWords where the analysis and bid changes happen in separate places, and where they are limited by the way an account is structured.
Optmyzr’s tools for optimizing bid adjustments for dayparting, device, and geography are all compatible with Shopping Campaigns.
Budget Pacing
Our Enhanced Scripts™ for reaching a target budget without exceeding it are compatible with Shopping campaigns as well as many other campaign types.
The lifecycle of a Shopping Ad
We covered the three stages of managing Shopping ads in a recent blog post. Whether you need to build, update, or optimize shopping ads, Optmyzr now makes that easier than ever.
If you’re relatively new to managing shopping ads, you might enjoy our 3-part series on SearchEngineLand. Part 1, part 2, part 3. Many of the concepts have evolved but this series of articles lays out many of the basics you should understand before you can become proficient in managing shopping ads.
We hope you’ll try out our new and updated tools and let us know how we can help make your shopping ads even more successful.
How much time do you spend managing shopping campaigns in AdWords? In this blog post, we talk about how you can save time by automating shopping campaign optimization and management.
1. Creating Campaigns
The first step is to create a well structured shopping campaign with properly defined product groups. Unlike AdWords search campaigns where keywords are the biddable elements in shopping campaigns it is product groups. The ideal structure is to have an individual product group for each item in the feed. This enables you to control and manage bids at the most granular level based on performance. In AdWords, it is difficult to create one product group per item id because you need to split them manually. Due to this, depending on the size of the feed it could take hours or days to just set up a shopping campaign.
The Shopping Campaign Builder from Optmyzr lets you create shopping campaigns within a few minutes. You can define the structure you would like to split your product feed by and upload product groups to AdWords with a single click. Watch this short video of how the Shopping Campaign Builder works.
2. Managing Bids
When you’re managing bids for product groups, it is important to take into account the revenue they generate and the return on investment (ROAS). Having one product group per item id gives a lot of flexibility when managing bids as you can measure the return on investment at a very granular level. However, if you have thousands of product groups, AdWords doesn’t make it easy. I’ve mentioned three tools from Optmyzr that can help you manage bids at scale for product groups.
Shopping Bidder
This is a One-Click Optimization™ that lets you change bids for product groups based on performance. You can choose to change bids for product groups that have ROAS>100% and ROAS<100%. It is also possible to automate your optimization strategy by creating custom filters. These can then be used to change bids for product groups based on performance. This version of the Shopping Bidder lets you view data for product groups at the product group level.
Shopping Attribute Bidder
This new optimization for shopping campaigns lets you aggregate and combine data across product groups based on attributes and use that to change bids. You can choose from attributes available in the feed like color, size, gender, group id and more. What makes this powerful is that it enables you to aggregate data across the campaign irrespective of the structure and change bids at scale. Watch a video of how the Shopping Attribute Bidder works.
Rule Engine
The new Rule Engine from Optmyzr gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of analyzing performance for product groups and also how bids are changed. It lets you automate your own bidding strategy for shopping campaigns. For example, you can use a formula to compare the performance of the product group to that of the ad group and campaign. Similarly, you can choose to change the bid using a formula that takes into account the conversion rate when calculating the new bid.
The Shopping Bidder and Rule Engine let you change bids by absolute numbers or percentages.
3. Refreshing Campaigns
Once you create shopping campaigns in AdWords, the number of product groups will not automatically change based on your feed. For example, you are selling shoes and create one product group for each model or item id in the feed. Now when new types of shoes get added to the feed, AdWords doesn’t automatically create product groups for them. As a result, the new products end up in Everything Else. This may lead them to get very little traffic as ‘Everything Else’ usually has a low bid.
To avoid this, you can go to your AdWords account and create new product groups for products that end up in ‘Everything Else’. Or, you can use the Shopping Refresher from Optmyzr.
Shopping Refresher
This One-Click Optimization™ automatically finds new products that are added to the feed, identifies the structure of the Shopping Campaign and creates new product groups. We have two versions of the Shopping Refresher. In the regular version, you can run the refresher ad group by ad group. In the Pro version, you can run it for all ad groups in the campaign together. The Pro version also creates new ad groups if the campaign structure requires it. See how the Shopping Refresher works. To try the Shopping Refresher Pro (currently in Beta), contact our support team.
When shopping campaigns are split at a very granular level like product id, each product group may not have enough data to make a bid decision. This makes it difficult to optimize these product groups creating a chicken and egg problem. You can’t optimize without data and you won’t get traffic if bids are set too low. In such cases, it helps if you can group product groups to create a critical mass and use aggregated data to set bids for product groups. We recently launched the roll up feature in the Shopping Bidder One-Click Optimization™ that is designed to do this. It makes it easier to set bids at scale by aggregating data for product groups.
How does the roll up feature in Shopping Bidder work?
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The first step is to select the metric by which you want to roll up data and the second step is to set the threshold for that metric.
Step 1: Select the metric by which you want to group or aggregate data
Step 2: Set the threshold for that metric
Step 3: Click update
Understanding the results
The tool will roll up product groups to the lowest level that meets the data threshold selected. For example, if you select clicks as the metric and the threshold is set to 500, the tool will show all product groups that have at least 500 clicks. Product groups that don’t have 100 clicks will be rolled up to the lowest level at which the threshold is met.
Product groups are rolled up and grouped together at the lowest level. The number of product groups in the group show in brackets (n) next to the name.
Sometimes there are a lot of product groups in a single group but the range for max cpc is broad. In this case, the tool further breaks it down into sub groups that have a smaller max CPC range. This helps set bids at a more granular level. You can click on the rolled up product group to see sub groups.
The max CPC in this case shows the range (min – max) for all product groups under the roll up. If the new CPC requires the bid to be increased by a percentage, this is applied on the max number in the range.
We’ve been pretty excited about the launch of Google Shopping ads since they’re a great way for retailers to highlight their products’ photos and prices. Unfortunately when running Shopping ads for thousands of products, bid management using the AdWords interface is a full time job: not because it’s difficult, but simply because the interface is excruciatingly slow when managing many products that are split across many campaigns and ad groups.
After confirming that this was a real problem with some other PPC folks at the HeroConf conference last month, we started building a bid management tool for Shopping Ads and today we’re excited to reveal it to the world.
[][1]Optmyzr’s Shopping Bidder Tool for AdWords makes setting the correct CPC for your shopping ads a quick and easy process that can easily be done for thousands of product groups in a matter of mere minutes.
Here’s how our Shopping Bidder works:
You get all the biddable items for your entire account on a single page.
You can filter the view to see just ROI positive, ROI negative, or items with no impressions or you can apply a custom filter using your own criteria like clicks, cost, impressions, etc.
You can change bids in bulk for all the items that meet your filter criteria, for example, lower all bids 10% for ROI negative items with at least 10 clicks in the past 30 days.
With one click, you can send the new bids to AdWords where they go live instantly.
This is much, much faster than doing the same in AdWords which has a few shortcomings:
You cannot see all biddable items from your entire account on one page. You have to open up every ad group one by one.
There are no filters for product groups so you have to manually find items that meet your criteria for needing a bid change.
To change a bid it takes several clicks to expand the product groups until you get to the level where bids can be set.
Initially this tool will � make bid management for Shopping ads a lot faster but when it becomes this easy, you’ll also find yourself splitting up your product groups ever more granularly, and that should further improve results.
We’re really excited to have this ready for our users today and we hope you’ll send us feedback about how we can make this even more useful for you.
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