Ecommerce

Q4 Google Shopping Best Practices and Advanced Strategies

By Tinuiti Team

With a record-breaking holiday season in Q4 2017 that saw traffic jump by 43% and revenue by 30%, a Google Shopping advertising strategy is an absolute must for ecommerce retailers that want capitalize on the upcoming shopping season.

Especially considering the surge in revenue coming from Q4 mobile shopping and Google’s mobile-friendly enhancements that capitalize on the trend, like Showcase shopping ads.

Consumers spent over $19.6 billion online during the five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday in 2017 — a 15% YoY increase boosted by mobile shopping growth.

Here’s a list of best practices and advanced strategies for Google Shopping campaigns and Product Listing Ads that we advise our clients and readers to make full use of as we head into another record-breaking Q4 holiday season.

As consumers continue to gravitate toward mobile for product discovery and shopping decisions, leveraging a sophisticated Google Shopping strategy is a must for capitalizing on the upcoming Q4 shopping season.

 

 

-Josh Brisco, Senior Retail Search Manager & Bing Evangelist at CPC Strategy

 

Google Shopping Q4 Preparation: The Basics

1. Reflect & Recap Past Performance

Before you jump into a conversation about Q4 strategy, it is important to reflect on your recent Q3 campaign performance and also last year’s Q4.

This is an opportunity to review key wins at the channel, campaign & product level (as well as areas for improvement).

Ask yourself the following:

 

A recap of this year (and last year’s) performance should help inform your decisions to clarify and set attainable goals for Q4.

This is also a chance to outline your new initiatives and top priorities. For example, are you expanding your catalog or launching new products or brands?

Consumers start shopping earlier every year

Our survey showed that 40% of shoppers plan to buy their gifts before Thanksgiving.

Advertisers should capitalize on this extended holiday funnel by planning and executing their paid media strategy earlier rather than later.

cpc strategy holiday shoppers 2018
Source: The 2018 Holiday Shopper Forecast

 

2. Build Out Your Promotional Calendars Early

With a crowded holiday schedule, it’s important to map the promotions you plan to run on your accounts ahead of time with a promotional calendar.

A detailed promotional calendar should help organize which products are being promoted and during which days.

You may also want to use this to map out your social content calendar to coordinate these promotions across social channels as well.

 

google shopping q4 prep

 

Don’t forget the following holidays in your promotion schedule:

 

3. Expect Budgets & Bidding To Increase

Traffic will spike in Q4, especially in the months of November & December. In addition to traffic, average CPCs will rise as competition increases. To capitalize on increased demand, retail brands will need the budget to cover increased costs.

 

google pla increase
Clicks and CPCs for Product Listing Ads increased dramatically during last year’s Q4. Source: Merkle

 

You’ll want to ramp up your bids on the days leading up to a major holiday so that you can capture audiences early on as they are exploring and comparison shopping, with even higher bid modifiers on the actual holidays.

“Ensure that you are inflating your bids on the bigger shopping holidays because the competition is going to increase as conversion rates go higher,” says Brisco.

 

 

 

 

3. Make Use of Automated Bidding

Automated bidding can also be useful when managing many campaigns at the same time, so make use of them. However, Brisco cautions that you should test your automated bidding strategies before implementing them for Q4.

“Automated bidding strategies can also be useful for Q4,” says Brisco.

“It’s best to test them out now before your promotions actually run so that you can verify they are working as intended.”

 

4. Optimize Your Product Feeds & Get Your Ads Approved

Make sure your product feeds are in good health before heading into the busy quarter.

This means using custom labels for SKU segmentation, uploading your promotions and marking free shipping SKUs to Merchant Center, testing different titles and descriptions for holiday-specific messaging, and filling out additional product attributes to provide as much data as possible.

Check out our post on 8 Google Shopping Product Feed Optimizations for more tips on getting your product feed Q4 ready.

 

google shopping product feed optimization

 

Retailers should also make sure their ads are 100% approved before they turn them on.

You don’t want to go through the trouble of optimizing all your ads for Black Friday and Cyber Monday – only to find out they have been disapproved by Google the day of the sale.

According to Google, all ads, whether loaded in an active or paused state, will be reviewed within one business day. Especially during cyber week, Google will be bulking up their workforce to get these ads reviewed as quickly as possible.

Pro-Tip: The only exception to this rule is Google Shopping special offers, which is reviewed on the actual start of the promotion. 

 

5. Ramp Down Bidding After Final Ship Dates & Back Up Again Between Christmas and New Year’s

Ramp down your bidding after your final ship date.

Unless you have an omnichannel presence where your products can be purchased in-store, you’ll want to ramp down your bidding modifiers after your final ship date.

On the day just before Christmas, for example, most people can no longer receive their shipments in time, so they are essentially browsing for what to purchase in-store. Even though volume might remain high, CVR and orders will drop off. You want to make sure to adjust your budget (& bids) accordingly. Lower your bids during this period to avoid wasted ad spend.

Make sure to scale back after your final ship date.

The Q4 shopping season doesn’t end after Christmas. There is a significant trend in traffic that takes place between Christmas day and New Year’s.

During this time, consumers search for accessories for gifts received, browse end of year sales, and spend their gift cards and holiday money online.

You can capitalize on this week of increased traffic and sales by ramping up your bids and budgets again between Christmas and New Year’s.

 

Google Shopping Q4 Preparation: Advanced Strategies

6. Layer in Remarketing With RLSA Campaigns

Reactivate recent visitors with RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) for users visiting your site the week of Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday to stay front and center during the shopping holidays.

Targeting people that have previously been to your site, past purchasers, or audiences that have interacted with your business in one form or another is a powerful opportunity for driving lower funnel conversions and repeat purchases.

 

7 advanced adwords rlsa tactics cpc strategy

 

When potential customers leave a site, remarketing lists help retailers connect with those shoppers while they continue to search for what they need on Google.

Conversion rates are substantially higher for audiences that are familiar with your brand or have been to your site when compared to normal users. If you want to focus on the users behind the searches and not just the keywords themselves — that’s where RLSA becomes valuable.

 

nick manessis cpc strategy

 

-Nick Manessis, Lead Retail Search Manager at CPC Strategy

 

Make sure you have global sitewide tagging installed on your website

To make full use of data collected for your remarketing initiatives, you’ll want to ensure that you are correctly tracking all sitewide behavior and conversions with Google’s new sitewide tag.

This is especially important for gathering conversion data from Apple Safari users that can no longer be tracked due to Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.o.

7. Use Customer Match Targeting

Advertisers can also leverage Customer Match to re-engage last year’s holiday shoppers who purchased during Q4.

Customer Match allows advertisers to upload their customer and promotional email address lists into AdWords. From these email lists, retailers can build campaigns / ads specifically designed to reach their audience.

With Google Customer Match, retailers can:

 

Although Google Customer Match is designed to help retailers reach their “highest-value customers” by strengthening connections with your known customer base on Google Search, it also helps retailers forge new relationships across other channels including YouTube TrueViewGmail Native Ads.

8. Include Merchant Promotions (formerly Special Offers)

Last year, merchant promotions were a big deal for Shopping performance in Q4.

Merchant Promotions – also called special offers – give retailers an opportunity to highlight their products and better their chances of click-through rate and conversion.

 

pla custom offers

 

Online advertisers can feature coupons or promotions right in the search alongside their product or store information on Google’s PLA grid.

 

Don’t wait too long to submit your Google Promotions feed.

If retailers submit a promotion too late, the feed could get rejected. At that point, retailers are forced to remap and assign a new ID. By the time the process is approved, you could run the risk of missing out on Black Friday traffic completely.

Although Black Friday and Cyber Monday are known to increase search volume – this doesn’t necessarily translate to an increase in sales for every business.

It goes back to understanding the impact that Black Friday and Cyber Monday have on certain accounts. For businesses that sell gifted items like electronics or apparel – it’s going to fly but not so much for a company that sells curtain drapes or light fixtures.

 

anthony artuso

 

-Anthony Artuso, Retail Search Manager at CPC Strategy

The verticals that benefit most from Special Offers on Black Friday and Cyber Monday include (but are not limited to):

 

9. Segment Your Shopping Campaigns Using an ISO Strategy

ISO Shopping campaigns leverage priority settings and negative keywords to isolate and allocate more aggressive bids and budget to certain high-value searches to get max impression share on top Search Terms during Q4.

This advanced strategy gives advertisers more control over which search queries their products show up for. It also allows them to isolate and dedicate budget to search queries that historically convert well.

With ISO campaigns, although we can’t target keywords directly, we can leverage negative keyword lists in an alternative campaign and then utilize the priority settings so that searches funnel into the right campaign.

You can use these keyword lists to target every part of the Google Shopping Funnel.

Google Shopping Full Funnel Campaign Strategy

ISO campaigns are constantly gathering new data, so it’s important for advertisers to avoid the “set it and forget it” mentality. Shifts in the market are inevitable due to seasonality or trends – so it’s critical that advertisers keep a close pulse on which search queries are performing well for their products.

 

10.  Leverage Showcase Shopping Ads For Increased Upper Funnel Volume

Showcase Shopping Ads can place your products in front of shoppers earlier in the customer journey by displaying for non-branded searches.

More than 40% of shopping-related searches on Google are for broad terms like “women’s athletic clothing” or “living room furniture.”

 

 

These mobile-optimized ad units enable customers to explore and discover what they want to buy by swiping through brand collections for a broad category or search term.

Advertisers that can surface their brand offering here will benefit from the greater search volumes of Q4.

“We continue to see increased volume here and search term coverage, and expect this trend to continue through Q4,” says Josh Brisco.

If retailers are not leveraging this ad format, they will be losing out on impressions for these type of searches.

 

11. Use Geo-targeting Modifiers

We also recommend getting more aggressive with geo-targeting modifiers for best performing areas on the days leading up to Black Friday/Cyber Week.

Geography-based bid changes or modifiers is a feature which allows advertisers to change bid percentages based on locations.

Keep the following things in mind when setting up Geo bid modifiers for Google Shopping Campaigns:

 

Pro-Tip: Depending on your situation, you might want to get even more granular by drilling down to the city/zip code level if you haven’t already.

 

12. Use Auction Insights To Stay Ahead of Competitors in Q4

With more advertisers putting more spend into Shopping than ever before, it’s important to know exactly when impression shares begin to rise.

Our experts leverage Google’s Auction Insights to compare their performance with other advertisers who are participating in the same auctions as them. The Auction insights report is available for both Search and Shopping campaigns.

Roman Fitch, Senior Lead Retail Search Manager at CPC Strategy, says that this type of information can help retailers make strategic decisions about bidding and budgeting choices by showing specifically where they are succeeding and where they may be missing opportunities for improved performance.

These insights enable you to review when your competition started ramping up in shopping the year prior by seeing when impression share starts to jump.

 


 

Additional Q4 Prep for Google Search Text Ads

In-market Audiences

The enormous spike in shoppers exploring and comparing products on Google Shopping this quarter make In-market audiences an effective tool for targeting consumers ready to make a purchase.

in market audiences for search ads

Powered by machine learning that analyzes a trove of search queries and user website behaviors, In-market audiences can help you reach users that are determined to be researching or in-market for a particular product.

In-market audiences can be particularly useful if you want to hedge your bets on prospecting audiences that are likely in the process of buying something you sell.

adam harms cpc strategy

-Adam Harms, Senior Retail Search Manager at CPC Strategy

 

Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are a specific type of ad format that shows additional information “extending” from your text ads about your business.  These give your ad more prominence on the search results page and can be added manually and / or automated.

adwords extensions guide for retailers

 

According to Roman Fitch, Retail Search Manager at CPC Strategy, ad extensions such as sitelinks, call outs, and structured snippets can be an effective way to feature Cyber Monday / Black Friday specials about your business.

 

Scheduling your call outs is really important because it ensures they’ll only run at specified times and eliminates the possibility of sending conflicting messaging, not to mention it saves time.

roman fitch cpc strategy

-Roman Fitch, Senior Lead Retail Search Manager

 

Retailers can create custom scheduling (by the day / hour) to cater to each of the upcoming sales including Black Friday, Pre-Cyber Monday, and Cyber Monday.

Also, it’s important to remember the custom scheduling time default is set to the retailer’s time zone. Marketers should take that into consideration when setting up their custom schedules. (For example, if you are managing an account in the U.S. that is based in Australia).

 

Price Extensions

Price Extensions on mobile for text ads can be used to highlight your top products and promo pricing for the shopping holidays.

Google AdWords Price Extensions help advertisers:

 

Pro-Tip: Make sure your site is mobile optimized. According to Google, Price Extensions link to your mobile site, so it’s important to make sure your site is mobile-optimized.

 

Ad Copy Changes

You can highlight your holiday sales by creating a new batch of ads with updated ad copy featuring “Cyber Monday / Black Friday” or simply utilize ad extensions to highlight your sale.

An example of an ad copy change would be to include Cyber Monday in your title and/ or description such as “Nike Shoes – Cyber Monday Sale” & “20% Off This Cyber Monday Only.”

It can be risky to completely update your ad copy (especially if it’s just a one day sale) because when you change ad copy, especially headlines, you run the risk of decreasing your quality score.

It’s important to remember that ad rank (a combination of bid, ad quality, and the expected impact of extensions and other formats) is greatly impacted by quality score changes.

If you change your headline, you might lose a little bit of your quality score and could be fighting an uphill battle from the beginning of that day – trying to get your quality score back up.

lewis brannon senior retail search manager

-Lewis Brannon, Senior Manager, Retail Search at CPC Strategy

 

The silver lining is even if retailers lose some ad authority at the beginning of the day – they can still close out the day with good volume.

If retailers have access to a quality score tracker (a custom, javascript-based technology) – they should be able to track their quality score through Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the ad copy vs. ad extensions debate, there isn’t a one size fits all type of answer, but this is definitely something retailers and marketers should be aware of.

If you do decide to go ahead and update your ad copy- we recommend monitoring your quality score closely so you can be better informed when making this decision next year.

“In my opinion, I would probably stay away from changing the ad copy headline because the headline has the most impact on quality score. Unless you’re average position is really low and your site links don’t normally show – then I would probably default to using fresh ad copy to make sure your message gets some visibility,” Brannon said.

“But, if you are brand with a solidified quality score and high ad rank, you might want to rely solely on ad extensions to highlight your offers, and avoid sacrificing quality score / ad rank on your top performing ads.”

Don’t Forget About Amazon

No matter how effective your Shopping strategy is, a good portion of your shoppers will complete their journey elsewhere — such as your ecommerce website or Amazon store.

q4 holiday shopping where
A whopping 81% of shoppers who plan to look for gifts will use Amazon (up 9% points from 2017).
You’ll want to leverage your Q4 Shopping strategy in tandem with sophisticated strategies for Facebook, Bing, and Amazon to activate holiday shoppers throughout the funnel on all major digital channels.

 

Q4 Bidding Optimization Best Practices Checklist

 

You Might Be Interested In

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

*By submitting your Email Address, you are agreeing to all conditions of our Privacy Policy.