OK – what have Google gone and done now?
Let’s have a quick recap of what they have thrown at us in just the last couple of years: Google Adwords. Google Base. Froogle. Google Shopping. Google Product Listing Ads. Google Remarketing. Google Shopping Campaigns……..”What are they all and what do I do with them all?”
For the uninitiated it can be hair-tearing-out stuff indeed!
What it means for online retailers?
Google have recently being rolling out new versions of the Adwords/Shopping combinations. We wrote about the difference between these two main features last year.
Suffice to say, Google has been increasing the exposure of it’s pay-per-click models, in conjunction with regular algorithm updates which have effected the vast majority of online retailers’ organic search results.
Whilst the two aspects are not directly related, it can be assumed that Google’s plan is to continue to expand its monetised operations, whilst simultaneously trying to offer online merchants better access and channels to market. A win-win for Google.
If you sell items on the internet then you cannot ignore this latest development from Google. Google Shopping Campaigns are set to become the standard. Indeed, Google has scheduled Product Listing Ads for expiration in the later half of 2014.
What are the main benefits of Google Shopping Campaigns (as described by Google?)
1. Retail-centric way to manage your products
Shopping campaigns allow you to browse your product inventory directly in AdWords and create product groups for the items you want to bid on. For example, if you’re a fashion retailer, you’ll see what types of shoes are in your data feed and how many boots you can promote. You use the product attributes derived from your data feed such as Google product category, product type, brand, condition, item id and custom labels to organize your inventory into product groups. Custom labels are a new, structured way to tag your products in your data feed with attributes that matter to you, such as ‘margin’ to separate your high- and low-margin products. To see all the items you can bid on, the Products tab will show you a full list of your approved products and their product attributes.
2. Advanced reporting to measure product performance
Regardless of how you choose to structure your product groups, Shopping campaigns offer the unprecedented ability to view your performance data by product or product attribute. Since performance metrics are associated with the item and not the product group, you can filter and segment data by your product attributes. This includes Google product category, product type, brand, condition, item id and custom labels. For example, you’ll see which Apparel & Accessories categories drive the most clicks, without having to break out your clothing category into a separate product group.3. Competitive data to size your opportunity
To help you optimize and scale your PLAs, Shopping campaigns provide insights into your competitive landscape. In the Product Groups tab, you can add benchmark columns to see the estimated average CTR and Max CPC for other advertisers with similar products. The competitive performance data you see is aggregated and averaged, so all performance data is anonymous. Coming soon, you’ll have impression share columns to help you understand the opportunity lost due to insufficient bids and budgets, and a bid simulator will help you estimate the amount of impressions you’ll receive as you adjust your bids.
In summary………
As an online retailer you need to be exploiting every available digital marketing channel, including Google Shopping Campaigns along with email marketing, social media marketing, on-site optimisation etc.
It can take some effort and time on your behalf to extract the best possible results out of this new feature, however we, at teclan, have already seen ROI rates of 1000%+ for Google Shopping Campaigns i.e. £1 ppc spend = £1000 in sales and revenue returned.
If you would like to know more, or would like teclan’s Digital Marketing team to manage your very own Google pay-per-click marketing campaign then please get in touch.