How to Integrate Penny-Bidding into Your Google Product Feed
Benefits of Penny-Bidding in Google Product Feed
Generally, when retailers submit their product feed to Google Shopping- they tend to exclude some of their less popular items. The thought process behind this is – “Why would I want to submit a product that is going to lead to an increase in spend and poor ROI?”
Google Shopping is unique in that it allows for open market bidding – meaning there’s no minimum bids that retailers have to adhere to. They can choose to bid as low as 1 penny (penny-bid) for any product in any category.
Penny-bidding alleviates the need for a merchant to remove a product entirely from their Google product feed. Merchants would want to do this for low converting products, or products with low average order value (AOV).
Penny-bids help low-performing products:
- Get indexed within the Shopping tab
- Qualify for long-tail traffic
“For retailers – when it comes to submitting their entire product feed, they think that it’s going to lead to increased spend and poor ROI, but if they have the right structure in place and are managing on the product level – they can still submit those additional items that may not be as popular or may not have the best conversion rates already,” Katen Raj, Director of Client Development at CPC Strategy said.
By applying a penny-bid to less popular items – this allows the product to qualify for long-tail searches.
“With long-tail traffic – there might not be as much competition and the maximum a retailer is going to paying is only a penny per click. Maybe the penny-bid doesn’t get the products to show up on the SERP but it does get indexed within the Shopping tab and are potentially able to find customers that way,” he said.
Apply the Penny-Bid Logic To Low Performing Items
Below are two examples of how penny-bids influence low-performing items:
Example 1: An athletic outdoor gear retailer has a pink jacket in his feed that doesn’t convert often. Instead of removing the jacket from his catalog, he applies a penny-bid to it. Even though the jacket only acquires an average of 10 searches in 3 months – if it does convert (even just once) it would be well worth keeping the item in his catalog.
Example 2: A running shoe manufacturer is advertising their best selling shoe, but they only have a size 14 left. With penny bids retailers can create rules for when their inventory only has one size left. That way your product will only show up for someone who is specifically looking for a size 14, without wasting ad spend.
For more on penny-bidding in Google Shopping, email [email protected]
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