THE GOOGLE SHOPPING GUIDE: 2015 EDITION

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THE

GOOGLE SHOPPING GUIDE: 2015 EDITION

Key Initiatives To Address For Peak Performance In 2015

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Introduction

Implementation: Getting Started on Google Shopping

Optimization: Managing Data-Driven Shopping Campaigns

Expansion: Taking Full-Advantage of Google Shopping

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www.CPCStrategy.com | 619.501.6138 | [email protected]

To Our Readers,

Since becoming a pay-to-play program in 2012, Google Shopping has thrived and quickly innovated to become a high-value, high-volume sales channel for retailers.

The 2015 Edition of our Google Shopping Guide covers a program already cemented in a new significant change: Shopping campaigns. With high SERP exposure, lower CPCs than traditional text ads, and better CTRs than text ads, Google Shopping has proven to be an ultra-profitable source of incremental revenue for retailers.

Ultimately, Google’s ongoing investment into Shopping has resulted in a program that has already seen rapidly growing consumer adoption, a consistent record of innovation, and a more prominent role in the holistic retail Sales & Marketing portfolio.

This guide will help retail advertisers navigate the program and provide insight into what CPC Strategy deems the key factors to success in 2015.

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Getting Started

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Implementation:

Getting Started on Google Shopping

Retailers getting started on Google Shopping will need to understand that there are 2 very central aspects to Google Shopping performance:

1. The Google Merchant Center Feed

2. The Shopping Campaign Architecture

There are optimizations that can be made post-launch, but in order to create the foundation for success on the channel, both the feed and account structure need to be optimally constructed.

The Google Merchant Center Feed

The product feed is arguably the most important factor influencing success on Google Shopping. As it pertains to management, there are 3 core concepts that advertisers need to develop

processes to address:

Compliance

Is your product feed formatted to GMC’s exact specifications? Are any of your products in potential violation of Google’s official (and unofficial) restricted products policy? This latter question is particularly important for Health & Supplement retailers, where specific ingredients will flag the feed.

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Here are some examples of ingredients/products we’ve found to be on the “unofficial” restricted products list:

• Bhelliom Enterprises (Brand)

• Astragalus Extract

• He Shou Wu

• Apricot Kernels

• Muscle Marinade (Purus Labs)

• Suppress NT (Nutrition Alliance International)

• Avidex

• Black Dragon by Blue Poppy Originals Google’s feed specifications here.

Comprehensiveness

Just like a traditional AdWords text ad has a Quality Score associated with it, we’ve found there to be a similar component for the Google Merchant Center. No, this is not a metric that Google has made official or public, but nevertheless, the Data Engineers here at CPC Strategy have identified and taken advantage of what can otherwise be thought of as “SEO for Google Shopping.”

Upon launching a Google Shopping campaign, it’s critical that the product feed is not only formatted correctly, but enhanced to the point where the product content is as comprehensive as it can possibly be.

• Hyland’s Vaginitis

• Hyland’s Arthritis

• Source Naturals Muscle Mass

• DHEA

• L-Carnitine

• HyperQuell 60 caps by Blue Poppy Originals

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This involves appending product titles and descriptions with relevant product attributes and addressing blank product attribute columns. This feed exercise alone puts the Shopping campaign in the best position to succeed upon launch.

Relevancy

The quantity and allocation of data is only an early-stage aspect of true feed optimization. High-quality feed optimization involves the ongoing process of improving product data relevancy by planting key search terms within the feed. These search terms should be

discovered and analyzed by the actual campaign manager and then populated within the feed. The long-term product is a feed that not only incorporates all of the readily available product content, but also the keywords that shoppers are using to find those products. The results are product listing ads that are triggered and subsequently surfaced on the Google SERP for the bottom-of-the-funnel, longtail queries that convert at a higher rate and at a lower CPC than less-specific shopper queries.

The Account Architecture

Google Shopping updated its campaign structure to become Google Shopping campaigns in late August 2014. Essentially, the program improved an already user-centric merchant login by adding new useful organizational tools and a new, more catalog-focused campaign structure for advertisers.

The major difference between Google Shopping campaigns and the original Product Listing Ad campaign format is how the campaigns are structured within AdWords.

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The most notable difference is Google’s apparent emphasis on the feed, making product information more readily available within the AdWords interface.

Before diving into the logistics of laying the foundation for the Shopping account, it’s very important to perform extensive analysis on historical catalog performance and audience trends. This involves a discovery period where a retailer’s Marketing team needs to:

Identify the Top 20-30 SKUs and Most Profitable SKU Segments

This will play the biggest role in how the account is broken out. Typical product segments include campaigns by brand, product category, seasonality, top sellers, poor performers, low-margin items, high-margin items, etc.

Determine the Site’s Customer Profile & The Average Customer Lifetime Value

(CLV) for the Store

Google Shopping is a great channel for rapid customer acquisition. Will your site’s current capabilities to convert and retain customers justify your initial bidding strategy?

Map Out the Store’s Path to Conversions

While this may feel like it’s outside the scope of Google Shopping, it’s important to identify the website’s historical conversion history across multiple parameters, including location, time of day, and device.

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Shopping campaigns are structured so that product groups are cut from the product feed, thus segmenting the remaining products and leaving less and less available inventory for

subsequent segments.

Once the largest product segment is laid as the foundation of the pyramid, the scope of available products narrows as extensions of that foundation.

Each sub group can only be added one layer at a time, and with each layer the number of products available for that layer decreases. So as more targets are added, there will be the option to add targets for “Everything Else.”

Product Group 1 Product Group 2 Product Group 3

Product Group 4

Category: All Apparel

Shoes Nike Shoes

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10 Feed Attributes

There are 10 ways to add the first layer through different attributes from the feed:

1. Category (Google Product Category)

2. Brand 3. Item ID 4. Condition 5. Product Type 6. Custom Label 0 7. Custom Label 1 8. Custom Label 2 9. Custom Label 3 10. Custom Label 4

The sixth option here is Custom label. The 5 available Custom Labels columns are similar to the old AdWords Labels column with one exception. There can only be 1 custom label per column. To create product groups with custom labels, access to the feed will be necessary in order to manipulate these custom columns. These custom product groups are typically based on attributes such as “best seller” or “Holiday.”

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Optimization:

Managing Data-Driven

Shopping Campaigns

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Optimization

:

Managing Data-Driven

Shopping Campaigns

Optimization for Google Shopping is the stage when the experience, resources, and talent of the actual channel management team are most prominently put on display. The goal of optimization is to simultaneously maximize both the profitability and volume for the channel. This often involves the ongoing processes of strategically manipulating ad visibility, restructuring the account, and enhancing the product feed.

With Google’s most recent Shopping updates in Q4 2014, it’s clear that they’ll continue to peel back the insights available to retail advertisers if it means improved performance and, of course, increased Shopping budgets.

Before diving into tools for optimization, we recommend watching this explanatory video on all the moving parts in the Google Shopping auction.

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Building out the Account Based on

Historical Performance

Product information is the foundation of campaign success on Google Shopping. Understanding product performance and big data trends for the PLA account will dictate how profitable the channel is during crucial, high-volume sales periods.

Utilize internal data – typically via Google Analytics and the ecommerce platform’s analytics – alongside a regular analysis of AdWords performance to determine Shopping strategy for the highest ROI.

Consider leveraging the following AdWords reports for Shopping campaigns:

Ad Performance Report

Run an ad performance report in AdWords to monitor account status, Click Through Rate (CTR), and Average Cost Per Click (Avg. CPC) metrics.

Top Sellers (Top Movers) Report

Top sellers are important to leverage all year, but especially useful to leverage during Q4. The idea is that for most retail advertisers, 90% of Google Shopping revenue will come from just 10% of the product catalog, and so it’s critical to identify and maximize visibility for these top-performing SKUs.

Run a top movers report to identify any changes in clicks, conversions, and cost for ad groups – whether positive or negative – to identify items which are doing well and those which should probably be scaled back.

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Auction Insights Report

Use the Auction insight report to compare campaign performance in the AdWords auction to determine where PLAs rank in the Shopping auction and PLA impression share alongside competitors.

Search Funnel Reports

Use Search Funnel Reports to optimize top of the-funnel traffic without compromising ad spend. This report also helps advertiser’s to understand the multiple consumer touch points that led to an order. For more info on this concept, this video helps wrap it up nicely:

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Performance Indicators to Keep a

Close Eye On

Clicks

Notes when an ad is clicked on Impressions

How often an ad has appeared on a search results page or website on the Google Network

Cost

Sum of the cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) during this period

Average Position

Explains where an ad ranks compared to other ads in the same auction

Converted Clicks

Number of clicks that convert within a chosen conversion window (typically 30 days)

Status

Identifies the ad as live or enabled Click Through Rate

Measures how often people click an ad after it’s shown to them. It is often used to help determine the effectiveness of an ad Average Cost Per Click (CPC)

Average amount that an advertiser is charged for a given ad

Cost/Converted Click

Cost divided by the total number of converted clicks.

Click Conversion Rate

Number of converted clicks divided by the total clicks that can be tracked to a conversion.

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Bidding Strategy

Very few retailers are reaching their maximum potential on Google Shopping since there are so many moving parts that influence channel performance. 30-60 day performance reports and competitive metrics at the SKU-level are essential to informed bid adjustments.

Make bid changes based on campaigns that perform well, tempered with tribal knowledge of the store’s seasonality, goals, and general site performance. The same goes for products and product segments that don’t lead to conversions – the reality is that some products and product types simply won’t see very much search volume or convert well. However, you’ll always want to keep these products alive with at least a penny-bid.

Bulk Bid Changes

Similar to making manual changes to the inventory file, making Google Shopping changes one-by-one is overly laborious and time consuming. AdWords bulk uploads allow advertisers to make multiple changes to ads including:

Ad group changes Campaign changes Product group changes

Google advertisers can make all of the above changes within the AdWords login, enabling campaign modifications to be made on a larger scale and speeding up reaction time.

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AdWords Editor

AdWords Editor is a free and downloadable tool for AdWords advertisers to manage large accounts. And as of December 2014, AdWords Editor 11.0 brings huge improvements in how efficient advertisers can be in making bulk changes:

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are irrelevant terms that have proven to lead to non-converting clicks. Negating specific keywords on a consistent basis is highly critical to maintaining campaign profitability by sculpting spend efficiency.

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AdWords Scripts

AdWord scripts are an extremely useful reporting tool for account changes and bulk updates. Advertisers can also leverage AdWords scripts to facilitate automating certain PPC tasks.

However, creating and implementing scripts can be fairly technical and are typically reserved for more advanced PPC marketers.

Leverage AdWords Scripts to automate:

Ad Group Quality Score

Daily/Weekly/Monthly Account Reports Setting Campaign Rules

A 3rd party service like Optmyzr can help create custom scripts.

Bid Simulator

Google’s Bid Simulator is a tool which provides projections for ad performance based off of different max bids. The tool notes ad clicks, costs, impressions, and conversions so

advertisers can test different bids and gauge effectiveness against competition without actually implementing any bids.

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The Bid Simulator has proven remarkably instrumental in helping to inform bids adjustments.

Impression Share

Impression share highlights how many impressions an ad has generated relative to competitor ads. The maximum of 100% might seem like a worthy accomplishment, but it’s critical that the advertiser is able to find a highly profitable balance between bid and impression share %. Interestingly, it’s very possible that a 94% impression share might have twice the ROI of the same ad with a 95% impression share.

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Benchmark CTR

The Benchmark CTR dimension shows advertisers competitive metrics for sellers who carry similar products. Google reports competitor performance including average click through rate (CTR) and bids.

This allows advertisers to compare bids and campaign performance, a particularly useful tool for highly price-driven verticals.

Target Outranking Share

The Target Outranking Share tool was made available in November 2014, and it allows advertisers to compete with specific advertisers for particular SERP space.

Bid Modifications by Time-of-Day, Geotargeting,

and Device

Time-of-Day Bidding

Google’s custom Ad Scheduling allows online advertisers to change when ads appear on search based on time of day, and day of the week. Day-parting is a bidding tool which allows advertisers to optimize ad exposure based on user behavior and conversion metrics surrounding time.

Ad scheduling (also known as “dayparting”) enables advertisers to identify specific times and days during which ads should run, how often, and at what rate.

Target Outranking Share is a new

Google flexible bid strategy which

“automatically sets bids to help you

outrank another domain’s ads in

search results. “

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Advertisers who are well versed in optimization and purchase behavior can also “automatically modify their bids based on time-of-day and day-of-week cycles in campaign performance”. Like all AdWords tools, how advertisers use ad scheduling will vary based on the ecommerce site, ROI goals, inventory, budget, seasonality, and other relevant variables. Analyzing 30-60 day performance data at the product-level for certain times of the day is a good place to start.

Intuitively, paying the same CPC for a click on a washing machine PLA at 3am vs. a click at 2pm is not a best practice.

Advertisers can use Ad Scheduling to:

Limit visibility to hours of the day or days of the week which don’t convert Reduce ad spend for days of the week and times of the day that don’t convert Increase ad exposure for peak times

Adjust ad times to work with geo targeting and other campaign variables Avoid removing products or category ad groups

Highlight different campaigns during different time periods to maximize profitability and visibility

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Geotargeting

Geotargeting allows retail advertisers to increase or decrease bids based off of location-based performance data. For example, it’s very possible that a marine products retailer receives the majority of their orders from San Diego, Miami, and other coastal cities. If the historical conversion data affirms this, it wouldn’t make sense to pay the same CPC for a click from a city like Omaha or Reno, and so it may be advisable to increase bids for clicks from coastal cities. Advertisers should understand the difference between target location options when setting up geo-bid for Shopping campaigns:

“People in, Searching for, or viewing pages about my targeted location” (default)

All visitors from all targeted locations who have shown interest in a city you’re targeting by their search activity.

“People in my targeted location”

The searcher is physically located in a target location.

“People searching for or viewing pages about my targeted location”

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Device Bidding

With cross-device purchases on the rise, utilizing Mobile traffic correctly is increasingly

important for advertisers, particularly on Google. Many times a retail advertiser will make the mistake of either:

A. Keeping all mobile bids the same as desktop

B. Completely shutting off mobile bids (-100%)

While conversion rates from mobile traffic remains lower than desktop traffic on Google Shopping, it is important to remember mobile traffic still plays a role in the conversion funnel and still leaves the door open for future retargeting. More significantly, mobile traffic has proven to be critical for driving in-store sales, so this should be a strong consideration for retailers with B&Ms.

Semantic Feed Optimization

A Marketing Manager handling Google Shopping will need consistent access to the product feed for semantic feed optimization to be possible. This is critical to long-term success on Google Shopping and is often disregarded because either the PPC agency handling the channel doesn’t have feed access or the in-house Marketing Manager doesn’t sync up with the IT department (who often handles the product feed).

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Semantic feed optimization is the ongoing process of planting relevant search terms into the feed. Over the long-term, this enhances feed relevancy for relevant, longtail searches, which in-turn activates an advertiser’s PLAs for the searches that are most likely to convert.

Thorough and consistent analysis of converting search term reports is necessary here.

Questions About Your Product Feed?

Review Your Google Shopping Strategy With An Expert

A complimentary 60-minute analysis and assessment of a retail advertiser’s existing AdWords account, product pages, product feed attributes, and business KPIs. The Audit is conducted by a professional Retail Search Strategist over a screenshare and conference call.

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Expansion:

Taking Full-Advantage of

Google Shopping

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Expansion:

Taking Full-Advantage of

Google Shopping

CPC Strategy’s defined “Expansion” stage undertakes initiatives and explores opportunities that either directly benefit PLA performance or branch off of the channel. The reality is that Google Shopping is more than just an effective source of incremental revenue for a retailer – it’s also a rapid customer acquisition channel and an effective branding tool.

Google Special Offers

Google special offers display advertiser sales alongside product ads on search. Special offers feature a seller coupon or deal on search as part of the Google Shopping ad:

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Google Special Offers are an easy way to highlight ads on the Google SERP and within the Shopping tab while leveraging existing sales the store is running. This was a huge ad differentiator during the discount-heavy Thanksgiving weekend.

Seller Ratings

The majority of reputable sellers have a high volume of seller ratings on Google Shopping.

Seller ratings (otherwise known as Seller Reviews) typically populate in the Shopping tab, and are

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Most retailers with ratings in the hundreds or thousands are employing the services of a third-party review aggregator like Shopper Approved, eKomi, Bazaarvoice, or Yotpo.

Product Reviews

Product reviews on Google ads are a newer iteration of visible search reviews (as of July 2014) which increase search space for advertiser ads while boosting branding and consumer trust. Like seller ratings, product reviews help PLAs stand out on the SERP and contribute towards higher click-through rates.

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* Note: While seller ratings only appear for 3.5 or more stars, product reviews show will surface with a rating as low as 1 star.

For more Product Ratings, consider:

3rd party product review sites such as Ekomi and Bazaarvoice

Submitting your own product reviews for Product ads

Opting out of Product Ratings for poor quality products (since product reviews are visible even if you haven’t signed up for them)

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Google Trusted Stores

Google Trusted Stores is a program which displays a trust badge for a retailer on Google Shopping as well as a badge on the actual retail site. Certification is a somewhat tedious process but it’s a step which will further work to differentiate ad placements on search and leverages legitimacy from Google’s branding authority.

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Dynamic Remarketing

Google Dynamic Remarketing allows advertisers to display dynamic (interactive) product-level ads to visitors who have visited their site. The program re-engages consumers with hyper-relevant ads.

These behavior-based audience segments include customers who:

• Visited the site (Bouncers)

• Visited the site and viewed a specific product

• Visited the site and added a product to the shopping cart but didn’t complete a purchase (Cart abandoners)

• Completed checkout (Past purchasers)

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Local Inventory Ads

Local Inventory Ads, or LIAs, is Google’s latest omnichannel initiative for Google Shopping. While still currently restricted to larger retailers, the program is designed to highlight inventory that is available nearby a shopper, thus promoting in-store sales.

Implementation is weighty and somewhat complicated, involving the syncing of local inventory feeds, the site product feed, as well as the retailer’s Google Business locations. However, it’s clear that Google is committed to investing in this program and expanding it to more retailers with B&Ms.

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What Now?

Review your Google Shopping Strategy with a

Retail Search Expert

CPC Strategy’s Retail Search Audit is a complimentary 60-minute analysis and assessment of a retail advertiser’s existing AdWords account, product pages, product feed attributes, and business KPIs. The Audit is conducted by a professional Retail Search Strategist over a screenshare and conference call.