@AnnStanley

Guide to Google

Shopping Ads

Presented on 7th May 2015

By Ann Stanley

Managing Director of Anicca Digital

@AnnStanley

Anicca Group

Digital & Search Marketing

(Paid advertising, SEO, PPC,

Analytics, ecommerce)

Marketing training (and

qualifications) for business

professionals

Owned & Earned media

(SEO, Content, PR, Social,

Email, MAS)

More leads and sales Educating your team Building your brand

@AnnStanley

Some of our clients

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Contents

1. Importance of using Shopping ads for

eCommerce sites

2. Product feeds from your website

3. Best practice on setting up your campaigns, ad

groups and product groups

4. How to avoid possible pitfalls and account

disapproval

5. Top tips and methods to improve your results

6. What’s new and what’s coming soon!

@AnnStanley

Part 1:

Importance of using Shopping

ads for eCommerce sites

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Google results for ‘hotpoint fridge’*

Pay per click text ads (via

AdWords)

Pay per click text ads (via

AdWords)

Organic or natural

search results

Shopping Ads (paid ads via AdWords)

Google My Business listings

*keyphrase chosen to illustrate different types of results

Google My Business

listings

Organic or natural

search results

Below

the fold

@AnnStanley

Why Use Shopping Ads?

• Only for ecommerce websites (other inventory ads

coming soon?)

• Higher click through rate (CTR) = more website traffic

• Usually converts better than text ads

• You can display a Shopping and text ad at the same

time (is this cost effective?)

• Huge growth in Google Shopping ads – with many

advertisers getting the majority of their revenue from

these ads rather than text ads

• Bing Shopping ads available in USA and in beta in the UK

• Facebook and Amazon have developed their own

versions of product ads

@AnnStanley

Digital advertising in the UK –

(2014 full year results)

• UK digital ad spend in 2014

reached record high of

£7.194 billion with 14% year-

on-year growth

• Mobile reached £1.62 billion

of this, representing 23% of

total. Mobile had 63% year-

on-year growth, driven by

social, video and in-app ads

• Social ads grew 65% year-

on-year to £922m with 56%

on mobile (£517m)

Source: www.iabuk.net/blog/digital-adspend-goes-stellar-in-2014

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Marin 2013 – data from their users

(global)

Product Listing

Ads (PLA) Spend

PLA Share

of Spend

PLA CPC

Note: Shopping ads replaced

PLA’s in August 2014

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Kenshoo – USA vs. UK data

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Adobe – USA Data

According to data from Adobe Digital Index:

• Google shopping ad spending in the US retail sector grew 47% year over

year and 53% quarter over quarter in Q4 2014.

• Meanwhile, spending on Google text ads was down 6% year over year.

• PLAs accounted for one-fifth of US retail search ad clicks in Q4 2014

(mainly because many sites using AdWords are not ecommerce)

@AnnStanley

Merkle RKG - USA Data

RKG found that:

• US retail paid search

clicks for PLAs and Bing

Product Ads combined

rose 50.8% year over year

in Q4 2014, vs. 6.4% for

text ads.

• Spending on the two

product ad types

combined rose 45.4% in

the retail sector between

Q4 2013 and Q4 2014,

while growth for text ads

was 10.4%.

• CPC’s were down for

product ads - this was

mainly attributed to

cheaper Bing Product ads

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AdGooroo – top USA spenders by

ad format

• 9 out of the 20 advertisers had over 70% of

their ad spend allocated to Shopping ads

• Amazon (who does not use Google

Shopping ads in the US as a point of

principle) and 4 other advertisers had less

than 50% of their ad spend allocated to

Shopping ads

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Part 2:

Product feeds

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How To Setup Shopping ads

LINK

Create & Export

Product Feed

from your website

Set up Shopping Campaigns

and Ad Groups

Set Max CPC Bids

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Creating a Merchant Centre

account

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Merchant Centre – Data Feed

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Merchant Centre – Uploading a Feed

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Merchant Centre – Uploading a Feed

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Feed Requirements

• ID

• Title

• Description

• Google Product Category – e.g. Clothing & Accessories >

Clothing > Dresses

• Product Type - This can be made up by you – use website

categories

• Link - Landing page – must have price and click to buy

option

• Image Link - Image URL• Condition

• Price

• Brand

• Availability• GTIN - Unique product identifier

@AnnStanley

Google Policies• Correct information

• Price, Stock, URL (Landing Page)

• Membership sites must allow non-member purchasing

• Prices should be fixed, not for auction use

• Prices should include tax

• International e.g. language and currency of country

Product feed Policies

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494

Shopping Policies

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188484

@AnnStanley

Ecommerce plug-ins for creating

products feeds

http://www.woothemes.com/products/google-product-feed/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/purple-xmls-google-product-feed-

for-woocommerce/

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/simple-google-shopping.html

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Linking Merchant Centre to

AdWords

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Part 3:

Best practice for setting up your

campaigns, ad groups and

product groups

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Setting up a new Shopping

Campaign

• New Shopping campaigns

were introduced to allow

more granularity and provide

competitive metrics for

marketers

• Old PLA campaigns were

upgraded to Shopping ads in

August 2014.

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Shopping Campaigns settings

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Planning your campaign and

product group hierarchy

• Typically create campaigns for:

– Product types (from your feed)

– Brands (from your feed)

– Brand in combination with Product type

˃ Plan out your hierarchy in advance:

Product Type > Brand > Item IDBrand > Custom Label 0 (Margin) > Product Type > Item IDBrand > Product type > Custom Label 1 (Price band) > Item ID

Targeting Options

@AnnStanley

Using campaign filters

Campaign Brand A

First Hierarchy Category

Second Hierarchy Custom Labels

Third Hierarchy Item ID

Using campaign or

inventory filter:Without using inventory filter:

Campaign Shopping

First Hierarchy Brand

Second Hierarchy Category

Third Hierarchy Custom Labels

Fourth Hierarchy Item ID • Campaign is Brand specific –

so it can be allocated its own budget.

• Ideally you want each variation of the first hierarchy in a new ad group.

• Campaign can include all brand variations in one campaign (just use Ad Groups to separate brands) –so it can be allocated an overall Shopping budget.

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Creating a campaign priority and

Inventory filter

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Creating a campaign filter

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Other campaign settings and

creating an ad

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Example product group hierarchy

Brand (Campaign)

Product Type

Item ID

Product Type

Item ID

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Creating the product group

hierarchy

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Part 4:

How to avoid possible pitfalls and

account disapproval

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Feed quality and disapproval

• Some information

about your feed is

imported into

AdWords dashboard

• You need to access

Merchant Centre for

full view

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Merchant centre – feed status

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Site-wide disapprovals

• Terms and conditions (absent or unclear)

• Policy violations e.g. Lack of address details, prices

excluding Tax

• Duplicate serving (more than one site with same

products from same company)

• Image quality or violations

• Can take 2-3 weeks to get reinstated!

@AnnStanleyManaging price and availability

changes• Use XML with daily feed (or preferably the API), to keep data in

Merchant Centre synchronised with your website

• Disapprovals are often for competitive sectors that employ price-

matching with many price changes per day

• Use automatic item updates via Schema Microdata.

• Google says:

– Enabling automatic item updates in your account allows us to

update your items on Google Shopping based on the schema.org

microdata we find on your website.

– Issues such as latency between updates on your website and

updates to your data submissions to Google Shopping can result in

inaccurate or stale product data.

– For example, if your most recent data feed contains an item that

costs $4 but your product landing page lists it as $3, we will update

the item to $3 on Google Shopping.

– Automatic item updates are currently offered for price and

availability information only.

@AnnStanley

Multi-price issues

This ad could be disapproved due to policy violation on prices!

@AnnStanley

B2B sites with prices excluding VAT

This ad could also be disapproved due to policy violation on including Tax!

@AnnStanley

“Approved” way of displaying VAT

and multi-packs for B2B sites

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Feed management software

Feed out

• Feed Optimise

• One Feed

• Single feed

• Feed Manager

• Go Data feed

• Summit Feed

• Fuse Pump

Feed out – Orders in

• ChannelAdvisor

• Intelligent Reach

• Sell Brite

• Linn Works

• Seller Express

• Software packages from £50 - £2k+ per month

• Some charge additional costs for each channel• Some charge percentage of sales

@AnnStanley

Advantages of using Feed

management software

• Easy set-up with one feed in and multiple feeds out (each

bespoke for specific platform)

• Some offer creation of dynamic text ad with parameters e.g.

price inserted from feed for a specific SKU

• Easy expansion into other platforms:

– CSE

– Affiliate

– Marketplaces

– Social ads

• Manual adjustment of feed content i.e. allows you to modify

content outside of website for specific platforms

• Bid management – including rules based

• Reporting by product, category, brand etc.

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Example of dashboard (Feed

Optimise)

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Item level reporting and bidding

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Using feed management software

to create Merchant Promotions

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Feed content management/

overwrite

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Other tools

• Competitive intelligence e.g. SEM Rush

• Bid management e.g. Marin, Kenshoo, Acquisio

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Part 5:

Top tips and methods to improve

your results

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Search Terms For Shopping

Campaigns

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Use of negatives

• Add negatives at the campaign or ad group level

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Bidding too low

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Bidding too high

• Being shown for multiple models or variants

• Reduce bids across all of these items, as you will cannibalise your own sales

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Use of promotions

Ad text created in

AdWords – this only

shows occasionallySpecial offer created in

Merchant Centre

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Creating promotions in Merchant

centre

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Creating a promotion in Merchant

Centre (cont.)

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Searching for generic phrases

• Generic search terms trigger

different models with different

prices

• Look at search term reports to

determine performance for

generic phrases

• Consider use of negatives if

conversion rate is low?

• Reduce bid if you have many

products appear for the same

term

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Effect of competitors with lower

prices

Competitors

dropped

price

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How to avoid loosing sales when

you are out of stock

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Which ads are shown? –

Limited budget and time of day?6am

12pm

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Frequency and average position

6am 12pm Stats

Ad 1 Ad 2 Ad 3 Ad 4 Ad 5 Ad 6 Shown Frequency Av. First

showing

AO1 1 1/2/3 1 1 1 6 8 1.0

Sonic

Direct 2 3 2 2 0 2/5 5 7 1.8

Currys4 4 0 4 5 4 5 5 3.5

Argos3 0 5 3 0 3 3 3 2.3

Very5 5 0 5 0 0 3 3 2.5

Tesco0 0 0 0 2/3/4 0 1 3 0.3

Euronics0 2 0 0 0 0 1 1 0.3

• Positions and presence changed each time the search was made

and at different times of day

• AO and Sonic Direct are bidding the highest and or have the most

budget

• Some advertisers like Tesco only showed at night when other

advertisers were turned off

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Mobile ads for PLA’s

• Most users think there are only 3 ads on

mobile as they do not realise they can scroll

horizontally

• Additional ones do not get clicked on (with

negative effect on Quality Score)

• Conversion rate is typically less than half

desktop (so bid modifiers should be used)

• Cross device conversions are still difficult to

measure, so users may research on mobile

and buy on other devices

• Recommend that you bid lower and then use

remarketing

@AnnStanley

Local Inventory ads

Loughborough

Rugby

Note: These locations are within 15 miles of my

search location (Leicester)

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Part 6:

What’s new and what coming

soon!

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Ratings (stars) in Text ads

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Product reviews in shopping ads

• Aggregated product

review of many ratings

• No minimum stars

(unlikely text ads)

• 5% CTR uplift in USA

• <1% click through to

Google Product page

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Google Certified Shops

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Remarketing with Shopping ads

• Set bid adjustments for Shopping campaigns for

users who have been to the website before

• Increasing bids for known customers and continuing

their shopping experience

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Bing Shopping ads

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Thank you

Ann Stanley

ann@anicca.co.uk

anicca.co.uk

+44 (0)7930 384443