2015 Practical Guide to Using Google Shopping ads or PLA's (Presented to SEMrush)

@AnnStanley
Guide to Google
Shopping Ads
Presented on 7th May 2015
By Ann Stanley
Managing Director of Anicca Digital

@AnnStanley
Anicca Group
Digital & Search Marketing
(Paid advertising, SEO, PPC,
Analytics, ecommerce)
Marketing training (and
qualifications) for business
professionals
Owned & Earned media
(SEO, Content, PR, Social,
Email, MAS)
More leads and sales Educating your team Building your brand

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Some of our clients

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Contents
1. Importance of using Shopping ads for
eCommerce sites
2. Product feeds from your website
3. Best practice on setting up your campaigns, ad
groups and product groups
4. How to avoid possible pitfalls and account
disapproval
5. Top tips and methods to improve your results
6. What’s new and what’s coming soon!

@AnnStanley
Part 1:
Importance of using Shopping
ads for eCommerce sites

@AnnStanley
Google results for ‘hotpoint fridge’*
Pay per click
text ads (via
AdWords)
Pay per click
text ads (via
AdWords)
Organic or
natural
search results
Shopping Ads
(paid ads via
AdWords)
Google My
Business
listings
*keyphrase chosen to illustrate different types of results
Google My
Business
listings
Organic or
natural
search results
Below
the fold

@AnnStanley
Why Use Shopping Ads?
• Only for ecommerce websites (other inventory ads
coming soon?)
• Higher click through rate (CTR) = more website traffic
• Usually converts better than text ads
• You can display a Shopping and text ad at the same
time (is this cost effective?)
• Huge growth in Google Shopping ads – with many
advertisers getting the majority of their revenue from
these ads rather than text ads
• Bing Shopping ads available in USA and in beta in the UK
• Facebook and Amazon have developed their own
versions of product ads

@AnnStanley
Digital advertising in the UK –
(2014 full year results)
• UK digital ad spend in 2014
reached record high of
£7.194 billion with 14% year-
on-year growth
• Mobile reached £1.62 billion
of this, representing 23% of
total. Mobile had 63% year-
on-year growth, driven by
social, video and in-app ads
• Social ads grew 65% year-
on-year to £922m with 56%
on mobile (£517m)
Source: www.iabuk.net/blog/digital-adspend-goes-stellar-in-2014

@AnnStanley
Marin 2013 – data from their users
(global)
Product Listing
Ads (PLA) Spend
PLA Share
of Spend
PLA CPC
Note: Shopping ads replaced
PLA’s in August 2014

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Kenshoo – USA vs. UK data

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Adobe – USA Data
According to data from Adobe Digital Index:
• Google shopping ad spending in the US retail sector grew 47% year over
year and 53% quarter over quarter in Q4 2014.
• Meanwhile, spending on Google text ads was down 6% year over year.
• PLAs accounted for one-fifth of US retail search ad clicks in Q4 2014
(mainly because many sites using AdWords are not ecommerce)

@AnnStanley
Merkle RKG - USA Data
RKG found that:
• US retail paid search
clicks for PLAs and Bing
Product Ads combined
rose 50.8% year over year
in Q4 2014, vs. 6.4% for
text ads.
• Spending on the two
product ad types
combined rose 45.4% in
the retail sector between
Q4 2013 and Q4 2014,
while growth for text ads
was 10.4%.
• CPC’s were down for
product ads - this was
mainly attributed to
cheaper Bing Product ads

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AdGooroo – top USA spenders by
ad format
• 9 out of the 20 advertisers had over 70% of
their ad spend allocated to Shopping ads
• Amazon (who does not use Google
Shopping ads in the US as a point of
principle) and 4 other advertisers had less
than 50% of their ad spend allocated to
Shopping ads

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Part 2:
Product feeds

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How To Setup Shopping ads
LINK
Create & Export
Product Feed
from your website
Set up Shopping Campaigns
and Ad Groups
Set Max CPC Bids

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Creating a Merchant Centre
account

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Merchant Centre – Data Feed

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Merchant Centre – Uploading a Feed

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Feed Requirements
• ID
• Title
• Description
• Google Product Category – e.g. Clothing & Accessories >
Clothing > Dresses
• Product Type - This can be made up by you – use website
categories
• Link - Landing page – must have price and click to buy
option
• Image Link - Image URL
• Condition
• Price
• Brand
• Availability
• GTIN - Unique product identifier

@AnnStanley
Google Policies
• Correct information
• Price, Stock, URL (Landing Page)
• Membership sites must allow non-member purchasing
• Prices should be fixed, not for auction use
• Prices should include tax
• International e.g. language and currency of country
Product feed Policies
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494
Shopping Policies
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188484

@AnnStanley
Ecommerce plug-ins for creating
products feeds
http://www.woothemes.com/products/google-product-feed/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/purple-xmls-google-product-feed-
for-woocommerce/
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-
connect/simple-google-shopping.html

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Linking Merchant Centre to
AdWords

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Part 3:
Best practice for setting up your
campaigns, ad groups and
product groups

@AnnStanley
Setting up a new Shopping
Campaign
• New Shopping campaigns
were introduced to allow
more granularity and provide
competitive metrics for
marketers
• Old PLA campaigns were
upgraded to Shopping ads in
August 2014.

@AnnStanley
Shopping Campaigns settings

@AnnStanley
Planning your campaign and
product group hierarchy
• Typically create campaigns for:
– Product types (from your feed)
– Brands (from your feed)
– Brand in combination with Product type
˃ Plan out your hierarchy in advance:
Product Type > Brand > Item ID
Brand > Custom Label 0 (Margin) > Product Type > Item ID
Brand > Product type > Custom Label 1 (Price band) > Item ID
Targeting Options

@AnnStanley
Using campaign filters
Campaign Brand A
First Hierarchy Category
Second Hierarchy Custom Labels
Third Hierarchy Item ID
Using campaign or
inventory filter:
Without using inventory filter:
Campaign Shopping
First Hierarchy Brand
Second Hierarchy Category
Third Hierarchy Custom Labels
Fourth Hierarchy Item ID
• Campaign is Brand specific –
so it can be allocated its own
budget.
• Ideally you want each
variation of the first hierarchy in
a new ad group.
• Campaign can include all
brand variations in one
campaign (just use Ad
Groups to separate brands) –
so it can be allocated an
overall Shopping budget.

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Creating a campaign priority and
Inventory filter

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Creating a campaign filter

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Other campaign settings and
creating an ad

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Example product group hierarchy
Brand (Campaign)
Product Type
Item ID
Product Type
Item ID

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Creating the product group
hierarchy

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Part 4:
How to avoid possible pitfalls and
account disapproval

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Feed quality and disapproval
• Some information
about your feed is
imported into
AdWords dashboard
• You need to access
Merchant Centre for
full view

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Merchant centre – feed status

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Site-wide disapprovals
• Terms and conditions (absent or unclear)
• Policy violations e.g. Lack of address details, prices
excluding Tax
• Duplicate serving (more than one site with same
products from same company)
• Image quality or violations
• Can take 2-3 weeks to get reinstated!

@AnnStanley
Managing price and availability
changes
• Use XML with daily feed (or preferably the API), to keep data in
Merchant Centre synchronised with your website
• Disapprovals are often for competitive sectors that employ price-
matching with many price changes per day
• Use automatic item updates via Schema Microdata.
• Google says:
– Enabling automatic item updates in your account allows us to
update your items on Google Shopping based on the schema.org
microdata we find on your website.
– Issues such as latency between updates on your website and
updates to your data submissions to Google Shopping can result in
inaccurate or stale product data.
– For example, if your most recent data feed contains an item that
costs $4 but your product landing page lists it as $3, we will update
the item to $3 on Google Shopping.
– Automatic item updates are currently offered for price and
availability information only.

@AnnStanley
Multi-price issues
This ad could be disapproved due to policy violation on prices!

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B2B sites with prices excluding VAT
This ad could also be disapproved due to policy violation on including Tax!

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“Approved” way of displaying VAT
and multi-packs for B2B sites

@AnnStanley
Feed management software
Feed out
• Feed Optimise
• One Feed
• Single feed
• Feed Manager
• Go Data feed
• Summit Feed
• Fuse Pump
Feed out – Orders in
• ChannelAdvisor
• Intelligent Reach
• Sell Brite
• Linn Works
• Seller Express
• Software packages from £50 - £2k+ per month
• Some charge additional costs for each channel
• Some charge percentage of sales

@AnnStanley
Advantages of using Feed
management software
• Easy set-up with one feed in and multiple feeds out (each
bespoke for specific platform)
• Some offer creation of dynamic text ad with parameters e.g.
price inserted from feed for a specific SKU
• Easy expansion into other platforms:
– CSE
– Affiliate
– Marketplaces
– Social ads
• Manual adjustment of feed content i.e. allows you to modify
content outside of website for specific platforms
• Bid management – including rules based
• Reporting by product, category, brand etc.

@AnnStanley
Example of dashboard (Feed
Optimise)

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Item level reporting and bidding

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Using feed management software
to create Merchant Promotions

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Feed content management/
overwrite

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Other tools
• Competitive intelligence e.g. SEM Rush
• Bid management e.g. Marin, Kenshoo, Acquisio

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Part 5:
Top tips and methods to improve
your results

@AnnStanley
Search Terms For Shopping
Campaigns

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Use of negatives
• Add negatives at the campaign or ad group level

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Bidding too high
• Being shown for multiple models or variants
• Reduce bids across all of these items, as you will cannibalise
your own sales

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Use of promotions
Ad text created in
AdWords – this only
shows occasionally
Special offer created in
Merchant Centre

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Creating promotions in Merchant
centre

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Creating a promotion in Merchant
Centre (cont.)

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Searching for generic phrases
• Generic search terms trigger
different models with different
prices
• Look at search term reports to
determine performance for
generic phrases
• Consider use of negatives if
conversion rate is low?
• Reduce bid if you have many
products appear for the same
term

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Effect of competitors with lower
prices
Competitors
dropped
price

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How to avoid loosing sales when
you are out of stock

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Which ads are shown? –
Limited budget and time of day?
6am
12pm

@AnnStanley
Frequency and average position
6am 12pm Stats
Ad 1 Ad 2 Ad 3 Ad 4 Ad 5 Ad 6 Shown Frequency Av. First
showing
AO
1 1 1/2/3 1 1 1 6 8 1.0
Sonic
Direct
2 3 2 2 0 2/5 5 7 1.8
Currys
4 4 0 4 5 4 5 5 3.5
Argos
3 0 5 3 0 3 3 3 2.3
Very
5 5 0 5 0 0 3 3 2.5
Tesco
0 0 0 0 2/3/4 0 1 3 0.3
Euronics
0 2 0 0 0 0 1 1 0.3
• Positions and presence changed each time the search was made
and at different times of day
• AO and Sonic Direct are bidding the highest and or have the most
budget
• Some advertisers like Tesco only showed at night when other
advertisers were turned off

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Mobile ads for PLA’s
• Most users think there are only 3 ads on
mobile as they do not realise they can scroll
horizontally
• Additional ones do not get clicked on (with
negative effect on Quality Score)
• Conversion rate is typically less than half
desktop (so bid modifiers should be used)
• Cross device conversions are still difficult to
measure, so users may research on mobile
and buy on other devices
• Recommend that you bid lower and then use
remarketing

@AnnStanley
Local Inventory ads
Loughborough
Rugby
Note: These locations are within 15 miles of my
search location (Leicester)

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Part 6:
What’s new and what coming
soon!

@AnnStanley
Ratings (stars) in Text ads

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Product reviews in shopping ads
• Aggregated product
review of many ratings
• No minimum stars
(unlikely text ads)
• 5% CTR uplift in USA
• <1% click through to
Google Product page

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Google Certified Shops

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Remarketing with Shopping ads
• Set bid adjustments for Shopping campaigns for
users who have been to the website before
• Increasing bids for known customers and continuing
their shopping experience

@AnnStanley
Thank you
Ann Stanley
ann@anicca.co.uk
anicca.co.uk
+44 (0)7930 384443

2015 Practical Guide to Using Google Shopping ads or PLA's (Presented to SEMrush)

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