smx london 2015 google shopping ads - tips and whats new

20th May 2015

Practical Tips to Improve your Google

Shopping AdsAnn Stanley

Founder and Managing Director,

Anicca Digital@annstanley

searchmarketingexpo.com@AnnStanley

#SMXLondon

• Co-founded Anicca in 2007 • My role is consultant,

trainer and Managing Director

• Current team of 18 • Main focus is search

(SEO/PPC) and ecommerce marketing

• New Conversations agency offering PR and social (integrated with SEO)

About Ann Stanley and Anicca


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• Top tips and strategies to improve the performance of your Shopping Ads

• How to avoid account disapprovals and other pitfalls

• What’s new and what’s coming soon!

Contents


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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

Mainly ads shown above

the fold


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Growth in Shopping Ads Q4 2014 vs. Q4 2013 (USA)

Merkle RKG (USA Data)• Clicks from Google and Bing

Shopping Ads combined rose 50.8% year over year vs. 6.4% for text ads.

• Spending on Shopping Ads increased 45.4%, while text ads was 10.4%.

• CPC’s were down for Shopping Ads - this was mainly attributed to cheaper Bing Product ads


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Part 1:Top tips and strategies to improve the performance of your Shopping Ads


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Tip 1 – Enhance your ads with promotions, product reviews and Certified Shopping


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Use of ad text and Merchant Promotions

• Create promotional text for all your ads in AdWords – even though they only show occasionally

• Merchant Promotions created in Merchant Centre for specific products

• We recommend having month-long promotions due to Google’s long manual approval process


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Creating promotions in Merchant Centre


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Using feed management software to create Merchant Promotions


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Product reviews in Shopping Ads

• Aggregated product review of many ratings on the Google Product page

• No minimum stars (unlike text ads)

• 5% CTR uplift in USA• <1% click through to

Google Product page

Google product Page


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Google Certified Shops

• Google Certified Shops symbol rarely shown in the UK Shopping Ads at the moment

• USA research shows uplift in CTR and conversion rates


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Tip 2 -Bid management and other strategies to ensure your ads get seen (but without cannibalisation)


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Variation in ad frequency and position6am 12pm Stats

Ad 1 Ad 2 Ad 3 Ad 4 Ad 5 Ad 6 Times Shown

TotalFrequency

Av. First showing

AO.com 1 1 1/2/3 1 1 1 6 8 1.0

Sonic Direct 2 3 2 2 0 2/5 5 7 2.2

Argos 3 0 5 3 0 3 3 3 3.5

Currys 4 4 0 4 5 4 5 5 4.2

Very 5 5 0 5 0 0 3 3 5

Tesco 0 0 0 0 2/3/4 0 1 3 2

Euronics 0 2 0 0 0 0 1 1 2

• Advertisers and their positions changed each time a search was made and was different depending on the time of day

• AO.com and Sonic Direct appear to be bidding the highest and/ or have the most budget

• Some advertisers like Tesco, only showed at night when other advertisers were turned off

• These results makes understanding your position and bid strategy very difficult, as visibility and positions are constantly changing?

• Question – did my search behaviour influence the results?


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Use Benchmark Max CPC to avoid bidding too low

• By bidding significantly lower (51p) than the benchmark bid (86p) the search impression share was very low (<15%)

• The actual CPC was also lower at 38p

• This bid has to be compared with the conversion rate for this site and the actual ROAS

• Could you bid higher or is it best not to bid for this item at all?

• Why can other advertisers afford to bid higher (is it a loss leader or is their conversion rate better e.g. due to a lower price?)


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Avoid bidding too high

• Bidding too high will result in you being shown for multiple models or variants of the same product, particularly when there are only a few competitors

• Your click through rate may be lower across all ads - so this could adversely affect your Quality Score for your Shopping Ads

• Alternatively, searchers could click on all ads, giving you a high bounce rate and higher costs (bounce rates for Shopping Ads are typically >70%, due to browsing behaviour)

• You need to reduce bids across all of these items, to avoid cannibalising your own sales


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Strategies for bidding on generic phrases

• Generic search terms trigger different models with different prices

• Look at your search term reports to determine performance for generic phrases (in Dimensions tab)

• Consider adding negatives for generic terms if CTR and/or conversion rate is low?

• Reduce bid if you have many products appearing for the same term

• You could consider remarketing (once it is available) i.e. only bid on generic phrases if the user has been to your site previously


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Tip 3 -Strategies for dealing with poor performance on mobiles


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Strategies for Shopping Ads on Mobile

• Many users think there are only 3 ads on mobile as they do not realise they can scroll horizontally

• Additional ads may not get clicked on (with negative effect on CTR/Quality Score)

• Conversion rate is lower (typically <50% desktop)

• Use mobile bid modifiers to reduce CPC so the overall ROAS is similar to desktops/tablets

• Try creating “device specific” ad groups:• Ad groups for mobile – lower bid with high

+mobile bid modifier• Ad group for desktop/tablets – higher bid

with -100% mobile bid modifiers (to drive mobile traffic to the mobile ad group)

• Cross device conversions are still difficult to measure. Users may research on mobile and buy on other devices


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Tip 4 -Invest in feed management software


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• Support multiple platforms - allowing easy expansion into new channels - Google/Bing, Shopping comparison engines (CSE), Affiliate feeds, Marketplaces (eBay, Amazon etc.), Social ads

• Easy to set-up – you create one “feed-in” (usually your Google Shopping feed) and the software creates multiple “feeds-out” (bespoke for each specific platform)

• Some offer creation of dynamic AdWords text ad with parameters e.g. price inserted from feed for a specific SKU

• Bid management – including rules based• Reporting by product, category, brand etc.• Manual adjustment of feed content tailored for specific platforms

i.e. allows you to modify content outside of website • Large choice of software suppliers - some with low entry costs

Why you should use Feed Management software?


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Feed Management software

Price of feed management software:• Software packages from £50 - £2k+ per month• Many charge for each additional channel• Some charge a percentage of sales

Feed-Out Feed-Out and Orders-In Other software types

• FeedOptimise• OneFeed• SingleFeed• Feed Manager• GoDataFeed• SummitFEED• FusePump

• ChannelAdvisor• Intelligent Reach• Sellbrite• Linnworks• SellerExpress

• Competitive intelligence e.g. SEMrush, Adthena, Adgooroo

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

http://www.feedoptimise.com/

http://www.onefeed.co.uk/

http://www.singlefeed.com/

http://www.feedmanager.co.uk/

http://www.godatafeed.com/

http://www.summit.co.uk/

http://www.fusepump.com/

http://www.channeladvisor.com/

http://www.intelligentreach.com/

http://www.sellbrite.com/

http://www.linnworks.com/

http://www.sellerexpress.com/

http://www.semrush.com/

http://www.adthena.com/

http://www.adgooroo.com/

http://www.marinsoftware.co.uk/

http://www.acquisio.com/


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Example of dashboard (FeedOptimise)


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Item level reporting and bidding


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Part 2:How to avoid account disapprovals

and other pitfalls


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Pitfall 1: Site-wide disapprovals


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• Terms and conditions and company information (absent or unclear)• Policy violations e.g. lack of address details, B2B prices excluding

Tax/VAT• Duplicate serving (more than one site with same products from

same company)• Image quality or violations e.g. watermarks or promotional elements• If you get disapproved it can take 2-3 weeks to get reinstated!

Common causes of site-wide disapprovals

Analytics data for Shopping campaigns – clicks and revenue


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• Price, stock, URL (landing page), images• Correct information (accurate and transparent)• 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 policieshttps://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494

• Shopping policieshttps://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188484

Understand the Google policies for Merchant feed and Shopping Ads

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



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Pitfall 2:Availability and pricing issues


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How to avoid losing sales when you are out of stock

• Note – if you retain “out of stock product pages” on your site for SEO purposes – you will need to adjust your feed, so they do not show in Shopping Ads - otherwise you may be disapproved


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Impact of competitors with lower prices

Competitors dropped price

• Use price tracking software to provide alerts when competitors’ drop prices

• Also look for sudden drops in CTR and Conversion rate

• Decide in advance how you are going to respond; do you reduce your prices or reduce your advertising?


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Multi-price and tax issues with B2B sites

This ad could be disapproved due to policy violation on pricing and tax!


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“Approved” way of displaying VAT and multi-packs for B2B sites


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• Use daily XML feed (or preferably the Shopping 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:

Managing price and availability changes

• 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.



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Part 3:What’s new and what’s coming soon!


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• Need Remarketing tag (or Google Dynamic Remarketing tag)

• Currently in beta, need to enrol with your Google rep, once enrolled you will see a new “Audience tab”

• Google will create default audiences for you:• All visitors• Product views• Cart Abandoners• Past buyers

• Set bid adjustments for Shopping campaigns for users who have been to the website before (like RLSA)

Remarketing with Shopping Ads


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• An article last week by the Wall Street Journal and insight from the Virtual Shopping Summit (by CPC Strategy) have both predicted that Google will shortly launch a Buy Button in order to provide a marketplace service to compete with Amazon and eBay

• CPC Strategy thinks that the scheme may be only available to Merchants that are in the Certified Shopping Scheme (as this provides some level of quality control)

• They also suspect that PayPal may be offered as a payment gateway – which is now possible due to eBay and PayPal being split into separate trading companies

Google Buy Button and marketplace

http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-google-outsell-amazon-and-ebay-1431730741

http://www.cpcstrategy.com/google-shopping-virtual-summit/

http://www.cpcstrategy.com/


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• The Buy Button will only be shown for certain advertisers next to Shopping Ads on mobile devices

• Buyers that click on Buy button you will be taken to the Google Product Page where they can choose product variants and pay with Google Wallet and possibly PayPal

• Buyers do not go to Merchant site but the buyer may be able to opt in for emails etc.

• Google will not take a commission but just the click cost • Google may store buyers’ credit card details to improve

conversion rates for future sales• The merchant will still have to provide fulfilment but may

receive limited details about the customer

WSJ Journalists speculated that:


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smx london 2015 google shopping ads - tips and whats new

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