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Google Shopping Campaign Management

Google Shopping Ads (also known as Product Listing Ads) have been a huge success since they were launched in 2012 . In the Uk, Shopping Ads now account for 82% of retail ad spend and using the platform has become a must for e-commerce retailers. The down side of this success is that costs are slowly on the up so it’s especially vital that businesses use the most advanced optimisation techniques to reduce cost per conversion and achieve maximum return on investment.

jackets

At Clarity PPC we have been using Google Shopping since the beginning and have many years of experience in running very successful and profitable campaigns. Below are four key areas where advanced techniques are necessary for effective campaigns.

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Optimize product feed

Structure campaigns by intent

Advanced bid managment

Audience targeting

Optimize Product Feed

feed optimisationGoogle Shopping campaigns do not use keywords like regular search ads. Instead, they are triggered from the information within our Shopping Feed. As well as making sure we meet Google’s specifications, we also need to consider our keywords in product titles and descriptions, are they search friendly? Merchant Promotions and Product Extensions can also be harnessed to increase performance.

There is also the option to use Custom Labels within the Shopping Feed. This can be a very powerful tool as any information entered in these fields can then be used to segment product groups within campaigns allowing different bids to be applied. Possibilities here include: Price Range, Sales Margin, Stock Quantity, Best Sellers, Season, Sale Items and many more.

Structure Campaigns by Intent

To achieve the best performance from Google Shopping campaigns it is important to segment campaigns by search intent. As an example, through the course of buying a new jacket a customer may use the following three search terms at different stages within the process.

“Waterproof Jackets” = High volume / low intent to buy
“North Face Waterproof Jackets” = Medium volume / Medium intent to buy
“North Face Point Five Waterproof Jacket” = Low volume / High intent to buy

As they move further down the sales “funnel” the volume of searches goes down but the intent to buy goes up. At Clarity PPC we use a combination of campaign priority settings and negative keywords to ensure the most aggressive bidding is used only on the highest intent keywords.

Advanced Bid Management

colleagues desk aboveOnce we are happy with product feeds and campaign structure we can start to optimise using bid modifiers. These effectively allow you to adjust bids up or down for certain “situations” without affecting your core bid for that product group. We can use bid modifiers with Shopping Campaigns in four areas:

Device: Desktop/Mobile/Tablet
Ad schedule: Day of the week/Time of the day
Location: Country/City etc
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads: Audience groups/ Customer match

As conversion rates can fluctuate wildly within these various scenarios it’s crucial that bid modifiers are used correctly. At Clarity PPC we constantly monitor these bids and use formulas to correctly calculate how much they should be adjusted, no guesswork!

Audience Targeting

RLSA or Remarketing Lists for search ads is another crucial part of a properly optimised Google Shopping Campaign. Lists can created in a number of ways, including using a rule based system. For example: customers who visited the basket page but not the checkout page are saved into a Remarketing List called  “Basket Abandoners”. This can then be applied to our Shopping Campaigns allowing us to modify the bid. We can now increase bids knowing the customer has interacted with our brand. This considerably improves conversion rates and ROI.

Customer Match takes this a step further and allows us to upload a customer email list. We can now adjust our bid knowing that ad clicks will be from some of our most engaged customers. At Clarity PPC we have seen very encouraging results from using a number of different RLSA lists in combination with Shopping Campaigns.

Clarity PPC provides all of the above as standard in our Shopping Campaign Service.

Set up and Monthly Management

  • Merchant Center Set Up & Link
  • Product feed review
  • Custom label set up
  • Campaign restructure
  • Bidding by customer intent
  • Device bidding
  • Ad schedule set up and intelligent bidding
  • Location bidding
  • Remarketing lists and bid by audience
  • Customer Match set up
  • Merchant promotions
  • Working to customer KPI’s and budget