Increase Conversions with Google Shopping
You have less than 100 days to switch your PLA campaigns to Google Shopping Campaigns. Learn how to make the switch form PLAs to Shopping Campaigns smoothly, while utilizing Shopping Campaigns new features and best practices to increase conversions on Google.
A few highlights from the webinar:
- The current state of Google Shopping Campaigns
- How to switch an old PLA campaign over to the new model
- Best practices for switching over
- Advanced PLA best practices
View The Webinar OnDemand:
View The Webinar Slides OnDemand:
Webinar Transcript:
Drive Profit with Google Shopping Campaigns
Mary: Hey, everybody. Thanks again for joining us here at CPC Strategy with Google Shopping to learn more about how to convert higher on Google Shopping campaigns. Just to reiterate what I just had said a little while ago, we will be sharing the recording of this webinar with all registrants. So, if you signed up or if you were on the recording, on the webinar now, you will get that recording in the next week, so don’t worry about that.
Additionally, if you have any questions during or following the webinar, feel free to reach out to us @CPCStrategy. You can do so through [email protected] And you can also reach us via social using the hashtag #cpcwebinar.
Going to get started here since we’re coming on 11:00. And just to get you guys started, my name is Mary. I’m the Content Director at CPC Strategy. Kind of a huge Google and eCommerce nerd. So, if you have any questions and you’re not able to reach CPC, I’d love to help you delve into your campaigns or learn more about Google or answer eCommerce questions of any nature. So, you can totally reach out to me and my e-mail is [email protected] I will be driving the webinar today. So, please keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times.
Today, our speakers are Nicole Premo from Google and Jeff Coleman, who is our Director of Retail Search. Both amazing experts that are going to really help you learn how to convert higher on Google Shopping. Both have lots of experience with Google and I’m very fond of both of them, so I’m sure you’ll get a lot of insights from them today.
And again, if you have any questions, use the “Chat” box. If you have any questions, you can use the hashtag #cpcwebinar. And we will be sending the webinar recording later next week.
Also, following the webinar, there will be a brief Q&A section. So, if you have questions for either Nicole or Jeff, you can reach out to them during that section.
About CPC Strategy
A little about CPC Strategy before we get started. At CPC, we help online retailers increase conversion by matching online shopper intent with retailer protects. So, what the heck does that mean? More specifically, we help retailers sell more on search channels, like Google, which is what we’re talking about today, by highlighting relevant products for the right search.
So, matching exact products from a retailer with what searchers are actually looking for online. We’ve been working with Google since the day that we started. And just recently, we actually got accredited as a Google Shopping partner. Which is kind of a big deal, so we’re excited about that. And kind of highlights how we are definitely Google Shopping and Google experts.
Additionally, we’ve put a lot of great content out there about Google, about Google shopping, about retail search. And you can find some really helpful webinar recordings, white papers, studies on our resources page, which you can see at this button right there.
Expert Speakers
All righty. So, moving into our speakers. Again, our first speaker today is Nicole Premo, who is a professional Googler and Google Shopping campaigns expert. I’ll let Nicole kind of delve a little bit more about herself when she starts telling you about how to convert more on Google.
On our side, the CPC’s Google expert today is Jeff Coleman, who is the Director of Account Management here. Jeff has been working with Google for a very long time. And he is also Google Analytics and Google AdWords-certified. So, he has been working with Google, he knows what he’s talking about. And he actually trains our in-house people to manage Google. So, if there’s anybody who knows anything about Google, it is definitely Jeff Coleman.
With that. I’m going to let Jeff kind of take over here and let him tell you a little more about himself. And then, also, what he’s going to talk about today.
Jeff Coleman: Thank you, Mary. Sorry about that, I’m going to go ahead and start my presentation. So, I’m going to be getting into how to convert on Google Shopping campaigns. And we’re going to be going over a little bit more on what we’ve seen as we’ve transitioned our clients over to the new Shopping campaigns. And we’ll discuss a few tips on making sure the transition is a smooth one. And we’ll also look at some of the new features that Google has rolled out, specifically for the new Shopping campaign. And I’ll wrap it out just with some advice on how to make a transition and how to make that transition a smooth one and some best practices there.
I believe Nicole is going to get into a little bit more detail on exactly how to build out a campaign and how to structure a campaign. So, that section will save her [inaudible 00:08:48] a little bit, since she’s going to be talking in more detail on that.
The new Shopping campaign’s launch was to see was that performance would be the same as the old PLA campaigns. But that’s not actually what we saw. As we transitioned retailers over to the new campaign type, we saw, on average, a 25% boost in ROAS, a 4% boost in orders. And on average, cost actually decreased by around 29%. I won’t speculate on Google’s methods or motives here. But typically, when we switch over to the new campaign type, we start to see some better results. And I don’t think that that’s a coincidence.
One caveat to this is that over the first few days to a week, traffic might actually dip compared to what you saw with your old PLA campaign. Don’t be alarmed, don’t worry. Stick it out and keep optimizing that new campaign. Because typically, traffic will come back up to normal, if not higher than normal than what you saw with your old PLA campaign.
On top of that, the data collection and reporting tools are infinitely more robust with the new Shopping campaign type. And have given us a lot more to work with when it comes to optimizing Google shopping accounts. I’ll get into a little bit more detail on how to get that data and how to use it a little bit later.
Switching to New Google Shopping Campaigns
So, let’s talk about how to make the switch. You have your old PLA campaign; you’re ready to switch to the new Shopping campaign, what do you do? If you follow these steps in order–and there’s eight in total–you should be all set for a new transition. So, even if you only complete one step per week, you’ll be all set just in time for the August deadline.
First step, create your new Shopping campaign. No-brainer, right? That’s the easy part. And Nicole is going to go into more detail on exactly the ins and outs of setting that up, so I’ll let her kind of get into that in a little bit more detail. But for now, the first step, basically, is just setting it up. And then, you’re going to pause that campaign. What you don’t want is to set up the campaign, start it, you don’t finish and then it’s all of a sudden, running and collecting traffic. So, definitely want to make sure that you pause that right off the bat.
Next, make sure you copy over all of your settings. Your budget, bid adjustments, ad scheduling; all of that should be the same. And you can obviously monitor all of that through your “settings” tab. But one mistake that we see a lot of retailers make when they’re transitioning over to the new Shopping campaign is that they don’t actually take all of their settings. They kind of forget about some of the little ones, like the mobile bid adjustment or your ad scheduling, things like that. Definitely want to make sure you get all of those copied over.
If you have AdWords labels, make sure to copy those over to the custom label columns. Not every retailer had AdWords labels. So, if you don’t know what I’m talking about here, don’t worry about it; you can tune out until I get to the next slide. But if you do have them, you’ll want to pay attention.
Google allows you to have five custom label columns, but you can only put one value in each column. With the old AdWords labels column, you could have multiple values in one column, but you can’t do that with the custom label columns. So, if you have multiple AdWords labels, make sure to copy each one into its own custom label column.
In this example, you can see our product had two AdWords labels for the old PLA campaign. In the new Shopping campaign, those two labels need to be put into their own custom label columns.
Creating Product Groups
So, now you’re ready to build it out and start creating product groups. Again, I don’t want to get into too much detail here, because I know Nicole is going to review exactly how to build these out in her section. But the general rule of thumb is that you should try to maintain the same structure here that you had with your old PLA campaign. Unless, of course, your old PLA campaign just wasn’t performing well. In that, in which case, you should probably maybe rethink the structure a bit. But in general, try to keep things consistent in terms of structure, so that you’re not seeing huge swings in performance when you transition.
If in your old PLA campaign, you primarily focused on a set of brands, start by building out brand product groups. If you primarily focus on a set of categories, start with product type or Google product category. In general, try to keep the same structure, as that will make the transition go quite a bit smoother. Plus, it’ll help you pinpoint any areas or any problem areas just in case something gets overlooked in the transition. The more that you keep consistent, the easier it’ll be to pinpoint those problems.
Once your product groups are created, it’s time to copy over your bids. This can be the most tedious part of the transition depending on how detailed your PLA campaign was. But you can set bids in mass by clicking the “Edit drop down” menu above your product group list. So, if you have a bunch of product groups that should all have the same bid, you can easily set all of those bids at one time just by selecting that drop down menu. And we’ll see that in a little bit more detail a little later as well.
If the fee has processed properly, you’ll see all your brands, categories and labels in the window that appears when you build out new product groups, along with the number of products in each brand, category or label. If that product count looks correct, then you’re good to go. As you can see here in our product group for products with the condition “New,” we can see the number of products is showing to the right-hand side under the “Products” column. And we know from experience that that’s the number of products that are in the feed. So, we know that that matches up, our feed is good to go.
Going Live with a New Shopping Campaign
Turn it on. This is D-Day. This can be an exciting time for launching your new campaign. One quick tip here: remember to leave your old campaign on for a couple of days, just in case you make a mistake when building out your new campaign. You don’t necessarily have to leave your old campaign on. You could be just fine turning it off right when you turn on a new campaign. I like to err on the safe side of leaving the old PLA campaign on. That way, if you made a mistake when building out your PLA campaign or maybe you didn’t transfer all the settings. Maybe you accidentally left your budget as $1 instead of developing your budget or something like that. Then, that old PLA campaign will still be running, it’ll still collect all of that traffic that you might have missed when building out your new one.
If everything looks good, then you can go ahead and pause your old PLA campaign. And you’ll be up and running with your new one.
New Google Shopping Campaign Features & Best Practices
Now, we can start to get into some of the features that Google has rolled out with the new Shopping campaign type, as well as some just general best practices. So, we have a quick video playing on this slide showing you how to add the impression share metric. And we’ll have a series of videos playing on the next few slides showing you how to actually add some of these new features and how to take advantage of them. So, if you want, you can just tune me out and watch the video. And that’ll show you how to get some of these metrics.
But the first one that we’re going to go over today is the impression share metric. And if you’re following along with the video, I’ll just quickly guide you through how to add that.
You navigate into your campaign; navigate into your ad group. You’ll see a “Customized Columns” menu at the top left-hand side right above the graph that’s showing you traffic and historical performance.
If you click on that “Customized Columns” button and you’ll see a competitive metrics menu on the left-hand side. And that’s where you’ll find all the new competitive metrics. So, benchmark, click-through rate, benchmark, CPC, which is the benchmark bid, as well as impression share.
In Shopping campaigns, you can’t get impression share on an ad group level. You have to go into each ad group to get it on a product group level. That impression share metric for those of you who are more familiar with the text outside of things, tells you the percentage of times your product ad is being displayed for relevant searches.
So, in general, you want your best converting products to have a high impression share. Product groups with a low impression share aren’t getting that much exposure. So, if the ROI is positive, then you should be increasing your bids on those product groups to increase your exposure, as long as the ROI stays positive.
Bid Simulator
Next one we’ll go over is the bid simulator. Next to the bid for each product group, you’ll see a little square button with a graph on it. You click on that graph, a screen will be appear with the estimated traffic and impression levels at different bids for that particular group.
And the graph on the right of that screen that’s going to show up right now illustrates the diminishing effects of increasing a bid as your bid gets larger, but it also illustrates the improvements that you can get if you’re at a very low bid and you start to increase that bid. The bid simulator is available on most, but not all categories and brands. Google needs a relevant amount of data about a particular category or brand in order to estimate what a change in bid is going to do. So, if it doesn’t feel like it has enough data or if Google doesn’t feel like there’s enough data to make that estimation, you might not see impression share. But we do tend to see it for the majority of product groups.
In general, this is a great tool to use to estimate what kind of lift or potentially drop you might see from increasing or decreasing your bid. We can see in this example that traffic doesn’t really start to pick up until around a $0.90 bid. So, any bid tests I run below that aren’t likely to yield much of a difference in results.
Conversely, if I’m at the $3 bid mark, I can see that I really don’t lose much visibility by dropping to the $2.55 bid. But I’m saving almost $600 in weekly ad spend. So, there’s a pretty significant difference there just by bringing the bid down a bit.
It’s also a great illustration of the general principle that your bid decreases become even more effective at lower levels. So, if I’m at the $2.50 bid, a $0.50 increase in bid doesn’t have as large of an impact on traffic, as it would if I was moving from, say, a $0.50 to a $1 bid, where we can see the change is much more significant.
Skew Level Reporting
Skew level reporting. This is one of the coolest features about the new Shopping campaign type. And as data junkies, it’s probably our favorite feature. You can run these reports on either the campaign or the ad group level. If you simply navigate to the “Dimensions” tab and this is true of any campaign independent of the Shopping campaign. But for the Shopping campaign, if you navigate to the “Dimensions” tab, you can click on the “View Drop-Down” menu and select “Shopping,” then select “Item ID” and you’ll start to generate that report.
You can also download the report by clicking on that little square button with the down arrow next to it. And that’s true, again, of any report that you generate in AdWords.
This is probably the most important slide in my presentation. So, if you don’t remember anything else from this presentation, please remember how to generate these reports and please start using them as soon as possible to implement product-specific bid strategies. These reports are great for identifying top-performing skews that you want to bid up on, or poor-performing skews to bid down on. Like I said earlier, this is definitely the section that our analysts use most when optimizing campaigns. Because in order to manage a product-based campaign, you need to know how individual products are performing. So, you definitely want to monitor this section.
This is also probably the most underutilized strategy that we see when we’re auditing campaigns. Is that retailers don’t have an effective method or they just don’t have a method at all of increasing bids or decreasing bids on the product level. Sometimes, they tend to leave things a little general. So, if you can start to implement a product level bidding strategy for even just a small subset of your products, you’re already going to be ahead of a lot of your competitors.
Mobile Traffic
Let’s talk a bit about mobile traffic. We’ve seen huge increases in mobile traffic across vertical so far this year. But conversion rates on mobile traffic are notoriously low, even if you have a mobile-optimized site. Having a mobile-optimized site can dramatically improve your conversion rates, compared to not having one. So, I definitely encourage you all to invest in one if you haven’t already. And either way, with so much mobile traffic coming in these days, you’re bound to get some sales from it. But again, the conversion rates and ROI do tend to be a bit lower than what we see on desktops or tablets, so make sure to bid accordingly.
I recommend starting with a negative bid of around 25 to 50%. And you can always adjust from there, depending on performance. And again, I’ve got a quick video on the next slide showing you how to actually set a mobile bid in your campaign.
So, here’s how you set that bid. You navigate again to the “Settings” tab. You’ll see a “Devices” tab appear below that. Click on that. Click on the “Bid Adjustment” next to “Mobile Devices” and you can either increase or decrease your bid here. Like I said in a previous slide, typically, I recommend starting off with a negative bid of 25 to 50% to start out, depending on your budget or your goals.
Once you have about 30 days of conversion data, then you can start to adjust your bid based on performance. I wouldn’t make huge changes in your bid adjustment here. Typically, I like to start with 5 to 10% changes just to avoid large swings in performance. But if you’re seeing really strong performance in mobile traffic, you can always go with a more significant bid increase. Conversely, if you’re not seeing a lot of volume there or a lot of velocity there, you can go with a more significant bid decrease. It’s going to depend on the performance that you’re seeing for your individual campaign.
Geotargeting
Geotargeting. So, you can also set bids according to the geographic location of the customer. And I’ll walk you through how to set those bids in the next slide.
Inevitably, you’re going to see some states perform better than others, so this can be useful just from an ROI perspective. However, this can also be useful for retailers with brick and mortar stores. So, consider increasing your PLA bids in cities or areas where your stores are located in to help build your brand presence in that area, to potentially drive more customers into the stores.
Typically, what we see with those types of local campaigns, is that they just tend to A, naturally convert better because people are aware of your brand presence. And B, like I said, they can help drive people into the stores. So, it’s typically a best practice to increase your bids in those areas where the stores are located.
You could also use that same section to exclude areas you don’t ship to. So, for example, if you can only ship to the contiguous 48 states, then you probably should not be buying traffic in Hawaii or Alaska. So, you would down-bid on those states here.
And again, another quick video showing you kind of where to set those geographic bids. So, you can start by selecting that “Settings” tab and then click on “Location.” And if you scroll down, you’ll see this bright red button, you can’t miss it. It says “+ locations.”
Once you click that, you’ll get the option to start adding states or cities or different metro areas that you want to bid on. I won’t actually take you through that process here because it can take a few minutes to actually add all the states that you want. But if you want to start by having just a standard bid modifier across every state or start by collecting data across every state, you could just paste in a list of all 50 states into the “Locations” tab. And then, you’ll start collecting data for every single state.
Creating an Ad Schedule
So, just as consumer habits can vary by device or location, we also see consumer behavior vary by time of day. Not all shopping hours are created equally and you don’t want to waste money on times that aren’t converting for you.
Typically, we’ll see buying patterns follow a sort of bell curve throughout the day. Where orders will pick up in the mid-morning hours, peak around the early afternoon and then start falling off again later in the evening. You’ll want to monitor those patterns for your own store, but you should be bidding down during the poor converting times of the day and bidding up during the higher converting times of the day, to help shift your budget into the parts of the day or customers are searching for you and customers are likely to buy.
You want to at least 60 to 90 days of data before making large-scale adjustments here. And the reason I say that is that if you’re only looking at one particular day or one particular week, it’s very easy to look at maybe one part of a day or maybe Monday of the first week had a bad afternoon. That might not be indicative that Monday, as a whole, in the afternoon, is going to convert poorly for you. It might just be indicative of one poor day. Or maybe that Monday was Memorial Day and you didn’t get a whole lot of sales anyways.
So, you want to make sure you’re giving yourself a large-enough sample size to evaluate whether or not certain times of the day or certain days of the week are going to be profitable for you. So, that’s why I would always recommend using 60 to 90 days or two to three months worth of data when you’re evaluating changes here.
To set up an ad schedule, again, we have another quick video for you. To set up an ad schedule, you can go back to your “Settings” tab, select the “Ad schedule” tab. And then scroll down and you’ll see a big red button that says “+ Ad Schedule.” Seems pretty similar to the locations tab, huh?
Once you click that button, you’ll have the option of setting different bids for different times of the day. And just like with the “Locations” tab, you have a lot of options here. So, I won’t take you through every single possible option. But one thing to keep in mind is that you have a maximum of six time blocks throughout the day. So, you can’t break out 24 different segments for each hour of each day. You have to limit it to six groups.
So, typically, what we start out with is segments from midnight to 4:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., 8:00 a.m. to noon and then the same segments in the afternoon. And you’ll get six four-hour time blocks throughout the day that you can use to start evaluating performance.
And those time blocks aren’t going to be right for every single retailer, but they usually provide for you to try and figure out when during the day are your sales coming in? And over time, as you collect data on that, you can start to customize those time blocks.
Google Merchant Promotions
I’ll finish up my section today just by quickly touching on a customer-facing optimization you can make. Google Merchant Promotions are a great way to get more visibility for your ads and best of all; they’re free, which is nice. Mary is going to be tweeting out the link to sign up for Merchant Promotions. If you haven’t already, the program is open to anyone, so please do so. Even if you don’t have a promotion ready, you might as well sign up and get into the program. And then, when you do have one, you’re all right.
Once you create a Merchant Promotion, any products you select as eligible for that promotion will get a cool, new special offer link under the ad advertising your promotion. And as you can see, it can definitely help ads and visibility to your ads. One caveat is that that giant blue arrow that we put there is unfortunately not part of the program, we added to that. So, sorry if we got your hopes up about getting that giant blue arrow.
You can use that link we tweeted out to apply for the program. And once you do, you’ll need to create a special data feed just for your promotions. Don’t worry though, it’s pretty simple. You’ll only need one row per promotion. So, you can even create it manually if you want to; it shouldn’t take that much time.
One requirement is that a merchant promotion has to add value for the customer that they wouldn’t get just by visiting the site. You can’t use this to advertise a sale price that a customer would get just by going direct to your site. This would be for a special coupon code, for example, that a customer could use to get an additional discount, on top of maybe whatever the current list price is. That’s just one example, but the rule of thumb is you have to offer an additional value beyond what the average customer would get. But again, if you do have that type of coupon or something like that, it’s really easy to apply for the program. Again, it’s free. I definitely encourage any retailer who can take advantage of it to do so because you get that cool, blue link and it helps your ads stand out.
And this will wrap up my section. I’ll just leave you guys with a quick reminder. And Nicole will touch on this a bit during her section, too. That your deadline to switch over is only a couple months away. But I would encourage you to start making the switch as soon as possible.
I know just the act of switching to a new campaign type can be daunting, but there are quite a few new features that are available with the new Shopping campaign type that we went over today or that I just went over in my section. And Nicole will get into a little bit more about how to build out a new campaign and how to structure it in her section and some additional best practices. So, with that, I will turn it over to Nicole.
Mary: Awesome, thanks so much, Jeff. Nicole, if you want to go ahead and share, this would be great. Thanks.
Nicole Premo: Awesome. Thanks, everybody. So, hi everyone, thanks so much for having me and thanks to CPC Strategy for inviting us to join this webinar. Just a little bit more about me before I dive into my content. My name is Nicole Premo and I’m the Partner Education Manager for Google Shopping. So, what that means kind of in layman’s terms, is that I sit between kind of our Google Shopping product team as well as our product specialists and help develop the best practices that we share with our partners, including you guys, including CPC Strategy to make sure that you’re successful with Google Shopping and with our new Shopping campaigns.
Benefits of New Google Shopping Campaigns
All right, can we go to the next slide? Great. So, I want to take a moment and do a little bit of zooming out. So, we covered some great best practices. And now that you have a sense of what it will take to upgrade your campaign and maintain your return on ad spend, let’s take a step back and talk a little bit about why Google is making this change and how you’ll benefit from not only upgrading before the end of August, but actually taking some time to upgrade in a way that you’re setting yourself up for the very important queue for holiday shopping season. And you’ll be taking advantage of the new Shopping campaign features that allow you to optimize even further than you were able to with regular PLA campaigns.
So, I think what we can talk about here is that Google Shopping allows you to connect your products with the people who are searching for them. So, in this image, you get the sense of this guy climbing up the mountain. And what we want to show you is that this person climbing up this mountain at some point had to buy his gear. So, very likely, he was inspired to take a trip perhaps watching a National Geographic show or something like that, pulled out his phone or tablet, did some quick Google searching. And found the jacket, the boots, the pants, the backpack that he would need for this expedition he was taking.
So, with Product Listing Ads, you’re very easily able to submit your product info and then target the shoppers in the moments that matter when they’re ready to evaluate products and make those purchase decisions.
So, within that context of Product Listing Ads, we have heard that retailers are finding success, which is great. People are finding that they improve their revenue by using Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads. So, essentially, Product Listing Ads give them a digital shelf for showcasing their inventory to online shoppers.
So, in our conversations with retailers, we also heard that they are seeking operational improvements that allow them to understand what’s happening with their campaigns and deep dive into their products a little bit better. We have also heard time and again, that retailers organize, plan and price their inventory first and foremost in order to manage their business.
So, what this means from our perspective is that in order to simplify how you advertise your products with Google, we need to give you the same type of levers that you would use in managing your store. So, some examples that we heard time and again is based on trends in seasonality, you want to be able to easily promote that products that match that seasonality and that trend by simple things like moving them to the front of your store, moving them near the cash register. And you want to be able to do this same type of thing in your equivalent in your campaign.
Retail-Centric Campaign Management
We want to give you the ability to manage your campaigns like you manage your store. So, the first key benefit of Shopping campaigns is that they provide this retail-centric campaign management structure. Previously, as many of you probably know, you have two standalone objects with your data feed on the one hand and your Shopping campaign on the other. And it can take considerable work to manually map and match those two things.
Now, with Shopping campaigns, you’re able to browse your products directly in AdWords. And you’ll see inventory numbers based on different criteria from your feed. So, if you know a certain brand has a majority of your inventory, you know that’s a key place that you need to invest more time and resources to manage.
And it’s very simple to manage your products now with what are called product groups. It’s very easy to associate bids with groups of similar inventory or even individual items. And then, also promote your sales with peering campaigns like campaign priorities.
Upgrade Deadline
And so, with this by late August, we’re asking that all advertisers upgrade their regular PLA campaigns to a Shopping campaign. If you don’t and you have an unpaused regular PLA campaign running at that point, we’ll automatically upgrade you. But we strongly encourage you to do it on your own, so that your campaign is set up and optimized the way you want it heading into the shopping season.
Great, so now that we’ve covered kind of what are Shopping campaigns at a high level, let’s dive into some upgrade basics, so you can see the tactical things you’ll need to do. The good news is that there are three basic steps to upgrade your Shopping campaign, all of which are fairly simple.
So, think about it this way. The first thing you’re going to do is, of course, create a Shopping campaign. Like we said earlier, the next thing you’ll do is pause your regular PLA campaign. And last but not least, you’ll dive into those best practices that we covered in order to customize and tailor your Shopping campaign.
So, it seems pretty simple, but just for the sake of 100% clarity, in order to create a Shopping campaign, you’re going to click the “New Campaign” button. And then, unlike previously, where you had to choose “Search Network” only, this time, you’ll be choosing “Shopping.”
So, what you can see here is we’re emphasizing that Shopping is its own campaign type with its own campaign management structure. So, it gets its own campaign sub-type and own workflow. So, again, click “New Campaign” and choose that “Shopping” option.
Pausing Regular PLA Campaigns
Next, once your Shopping campaign is you’ve set a budget and a bid, you’re going to want to pause your regular PLA campaign so that you’re not competing against yourself. Now, if you’re planning on doing a more complex build-out, you may not pause your regular PLA campaign right away. But if you do want to pause right away as soon as you create that new Shopping campaign, keep in mind that it can take about a day for that Shopping campaign to start running. So, usually within six to eight hours, you’re good to pause that regular PLA campaign.
Subdividing Campaigns
So, the last step here is to start customizing a Shopping campaign by subdividing your product inventory into those separate product groups that we talked about a little bit earlier. Again, products groups are a way to organize and bid on your products, either at a group or an individual product level.
So, in this sense, a product group is a way for you to select which products you want to bid differently on or want to be able to manage the bids for separately. So, you can see in this screenshot that this retailer is subdividing inventory specifically for their apparel and accessories in their “Electronics” categories. So, by breaking out these products, they’re able to set that $0.30 bid for apparel, $0.75 for electronics, and then all the other inventory in their data feed gets a $0.50 bid with that “everything else” product group. So, let’s walk through an example like this together.
When you create that Shopping campaign, you are automatically started with what we call an “All Products” group. So, simply by setting up a campaign, what you’re doing is effectively setting one bid for 100% of the inventory that’s eligible in your data feed. So, this makes it very simple to get started. But obviously, you’re going to want to get a little bit deeper and bid deeper differently based on different categories, which is what you can do by subdividing.
So, to start subdividing, it’s very simple. You’ll click the “+” button next to that “All Products” group. What you see here is that pop out window that is pulling values directly from your individual data feed, so that you can know what’s available in your feed and what you want to start subdividing.
Within this window, you have the drop-down menu that gives you six main options for how you’ll start segmenting your products in the product groups. So, at the top here, we have “Category,” which pulls from the Google Products category in your feed. We have “Brand,” “Item ID,” if you want to target individual products. “Condition,” so that’s for those of you who have large, used or refurbished inventory. “Product Type,” which is your own categorization of your products, as well as one of your custom labels.
So, once you choose which attribute you’d like to start subdividing by, in this case, we chose “Category,” you can now choose which values from your feed you actually want to break out. So, keep in mind that you break out 100% of the eligible categories, or you can just break out a handful of your most important ones.
So, in this case of Acme Superstore, again, they chose to break out that “Apparel and Accessories” and “Electronics” categories. Those categories are very high-margin, very high-volume. And they include a lot of Acme Superstore’s inventory. So, they want to be able to manage the bids on those two categories, in particular, and then, everything else can just kind of fall into the “Catch all.”
So, here’s what we’re left with. Now, we have this campaign broken out into three major categories, like we talked about earlier. Again, I would just note that anytime you start subdividing, the everything else in “All Products” or everything else catchall is automatically created for you. So, again, think of that as just your way of streamlining your management, so you’re focusing your effort and your time on the categories or the products that will really move the needle in terms of your return on ad spend.
So, obviously, “Apparel” is a huge category and can include many subcategories. So, let’s assume that I want to subdivide further. I can do this up to seven times total, so six additional from the point of where I am now.
And to do it, I follow the same process as before. Clicking that “+” button, choosing which attribute I’d like to subdivide by and then following that process.
So, once I’m done breaking out my additional products like jewelry and shoes, for example, you can see that I have a lot more specificity in terms of how I can promote and bid on the product categories that are important to me. Note that I can also do this by brand, so if there are particular brands of jewelry that I really want to focus on or even particular individual IDs, I can continue breaking out to whatever level of granularity I look for in terms of managing my products.
So, a couple of other things to note is that you’ll notice that the bids are roughly correlated with the individual categories, presumed return on ad spend or margins. So, for instance, jewelry is probably a higher margin, so that has a higher bid. And my everything else typically has the lowest bid because it’s more generic, it’s kind of that catchall category.
One last note is that you can see I’ve chosen to exclude costumes and accessories. It’s not exactly costume time of the year, so maybe I just don’t want to bid on that at all. I can click on where I would have the bid and then excluding it is an option. Essentially that means that those ads are not eligible to show, even on relevant search queries.
So, with that said, I’d encourage you to be thoughtful about your exclusions. Because again, your products only match when people are looking for them. So, people have costume parties and you may want to choose to not exclude that, despite it not being peak costume season.
So, with that, I will turn it back over to Mary.
Mary: Great, thank you so much, Nicole. And again, guys, I apologize for that little bump earlier. There were a lot of people live-tuned in today, so I’m anticipating that’s why that transition happened.
Again, thank you so much, Nicole. Personally, I know that the logistical elements of this kind of stuff, especially when you’re transitioning over to something new can be really scary. And so, I appreciate that walk through. I think it was significantly helpful. It made it really clear in terms of what actions would be appropriate and kind of going into those details, so that was really helpful for me. Thank you for that one.
Just for everybody else, we’re going to move into the question and answer section of this webinar now. So, if you have been entering questions in that “Chat” box, we’re going to try and answer all of those, in addition to other questions via social or e-mail. And again, if we are unable to answer your question during this time period, don’t worry; we will reach out to you via social or via e-mail. And if you don’t get a response, feel free to reach out to us that way as well.
