SMX London 2015 Google Shopping ads - Tips and whats new

20th May 2015
Practical Tips
to Improve
your Google
Shopping Ads
Ann Stanley
Founder and
Managing Director,
Anicca Digital
@annstanley

searchmarketingexpo.com
@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
• Co-founded Anicca in
2007
• My role is consultant,
trainer and Managing
Director
• Current team of 18
• Main focus is search
(SEO/PPC) and
ecommerce marketing
• New Conversations
agency offering PR and
social (integrated with
SEO)
About Ann Stanley and Anicca

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
• Top tips and strategies to improve the
performance of your Shopping Ads
• How to avoid account disapprovals and other
pitfalls
• What’s new and what’s coming soon!
Contents

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
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
Mainly ads
shown
above the
fold

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Growth in Shopping Ads
Q4 2014 vs. Q4 2013 (USA)
Merkle RKG (USA Data)
• Clicks from Google and Bing
Shopping Ads combined rose
50.8% year over year vs. 6.4%
for text ads.
• Spending on Shopping Ads
increased 45.4%, while text
ads was 10.4%.
• CPC’s were down for
Shopping Ads - this was mainly
attributed to cheaper Bing
Product ads

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Part 1:
Top tips and strategies
to improve the performance of
your Shopping Ads

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Tip 1 –
Enhance your ads with
promotions, product reviews and
Certified Shopping

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Use of ad text and Merchant Promotions
• Create promotional
text for all your ads
in AdWords – even
though they only
show occasionally
• Merchant Promotions
created in Merchant
Centre for specific
products
• We recommend
having month-long
promotions due to
Google’s long
manual approval
process

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Creating promotions in Merchant Centre

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Using feed management software to
create Merchant Promotions

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Product reviews in Shopping Ads
• Aggregated product review
of many ratings on the
Google Product page
• No minimum stars (unlike text
ads)
• 5% CTR uplift in USA
• <1% click through to Google
Product page
Google product Page

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Google Certified Shops
• Google Certified Shops
symbol rarely shown in the UK
Shopping Ads at the moment
• USA research shows uplift in
CTR and conversion rates

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Tip 2 -
Bid management and other
strategies to ensure your ads get
seen (but without cannibalisation)

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Variation in ad frequency and position
6am 12pm Stats
Ad 1 Ad 2 Ad 3 Ad 4 Ad 5 Ad 6 Times
Shown
Total
Frequency
Av. First
showing
AO.com
1 1 1/2/3 1 1 1 6 8 1.0
Sonic
Direct
2 3 2 2 0 2/5 5 7 2.2
Argos
3 0 5 3 0 3 3 3 3.5
Currys
4 4 0 4 5 4 5 5 4.2
Very
5 5 0 5 0 0 3 3 5
Tesco
0 0 0 0 2/3/4 0 1 3 2
Euronics
0 2 0 0 0 0 1 1 2
• Advertisers and their positions changed each time a search was made and
was different depending on the time of day
• AO.com and Sonic Direct appear to be bidding the highest and/ or have the
most budget
• Some advertisers like Tesco, only showed at night when other advertisers were
turned off
• These results makes understanding your position and bid strategy very difficult,
as visibility and positions are constantly changing?
• Question – did my search behaviour influence the results?

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Use Benchmark Max CPC to avoid
bidding too low
• By bidding significantly
lower (51p) than the
benchmark bid (86p) the
search impression share
was very low (<15%)
• The actual CPC was also
lower at 38p
• This bid has to be
compared with the
conversion rate for this site
and the actual ROAS
• Could you bid higher or is
it best not to bid for this
item at all?
• Why can other advertisers
afford to bid higher (is it a
loss leader or is their
conversion rate better e.g.
due to a lower price?)

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Avoid bidding too high
• Bidding too high will result in you being shown for multiple models or variants of the
same product, particularly when there are only a few competitors
• Your click through rate may be lower across all ads - so this could adversely affect your
Quality Score for your Shopping Ads
• Alternatively, searchers could click on all ads, giving you a high bounce rate and higher
costs (bounce rates for Shopping Ads are typically >70%, due to browsing behaviour)
• You need to reduce bids across all of these items, to avoid cannibalising your own sales

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Strategies for bidding on generic
phrases
• Generic search terms trigger different
models with different prices
• Look at your search term reports to
determine performance for generic phrases
(in Dimensions tab)
• Consider adding negatives for generic terms
if CTR and/or conversion rate is low?
• Reduce bid if you have many products
appearing for the same term
• You could consider remarketing (once it is
available) i.e. only bid on generic phrases if
the user has been to your site previously

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Tip 3 -
Strategies for dealing with poor
performance on mobiles

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Strategies for Shopping Ads on Mobile
• Many users think there are only 3 ads on mobile as
they do not realise they can scroll horizontally
• Additional ads may not get clicked on (with
negative effect on CTR/Quality Score)
• Conversion rate is lower (typically <50% desktop)
• Use mobile bid modifiers to reduce CPC so the
overall ROAS is similar to desktops/tablets
• Try creating “device specific” ad groups:
• Ad groups for mobile – lower bid with high
+mobile bid modifier
• Ad group for desktop/tablets – higher bid with
-100% mobile bid modifiers (to drive mobile
traffic to the mobile ad group)
• Cross device conversions are still difficult to
measure. Users may research on mobile and buy on
other devices

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Tip 4 -
Invest in feed management
software

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
• Support multiple platforms - allowing easy expansion into new
channels - Google/Bing, Shopping comparison engines (CSE),
Affiliate feeds, Marketplaces (eBay, Amazon etc.), Social ads
• Easy to set-up – you create one “feed-in” (usually your Google
Shopping feed) and the software creates multiple “feeds-out”
(bespoke for each specific platform)
• Some offer creation of dynamic AdWords text ad with
parameters e.g. price inserted from feed for a specific SKU
• Bid management – including rules based
• Reporting by product, category, brand etc.
• Manual adjustment of feed content tailored for specific platforms
i.e. allows you to modify content outside of website
• Large choice of software suppliers - some with low entry costs
Why you should use Feed Management
software?

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Feed Management software
Price of feed management software:
• Software packages from £50 - £2k+ per month
• Many charge for each additional channel
• Some charge a percentage of sales
Feed-Out Feed-Out and Orders-In Other software types
• FeedOptimise
• OneFeed
• SingleFeed
• Feed Manager
• GoDataFeed
• SummitFEED
• FusePump
• ChannelAdvisor
• Intelligent Reach
• Sellbrite
• Linnworks
• SellerExpress
• Competitive intelligence
e.g. SEMrush, Adthena,
Adgooroo
• Bid management e.g.
Marin, Kenshoo, Acquisio

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Example of dashboard (FeedOptimise)

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Item level reporting and bidding

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Part 2:
How to avoid account disapprovals
and other pitfalls

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Pitfall 1:
Site-wide disapprovals

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
• Terms and conditions and company information (absent or unclear)
• Policy violations e.g. lack of address details, B2B prices excluding
Tax/VAT
• Duplicate serving (more than one site with same products from
same company)
• Image quality or violations e.g. watermarks or promotional elements
• If you get disapproved it can take 2-3 weeks to get reinstated!
Common causes of site-wide disapprovals
Analytics data for
Shopping campaigns –
clicks and revenue

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
• Price, stock, URL (landing page), images
• Correct information (accurate and transparent)
• 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
Understand the Google policies for
Merchant feed and Shopping Ads

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Pitfall 2:
Availability and pricing issues

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
How to avoid losing sales when you are
out of stock
• Note – if you retain “out
of stock product pages”
on your site for SEO
purposes – you will need
to adjust your feed, so
they do not show in
Shopping Ads -
otherwise you may be
disapproved

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Impact of competitors with lower prices
Competitors
dropped price
• Use price tracking
software to provide
alerts when
competitors’ drop
prices
• Also look for sudden
drops in CTR and
Conversion rate
• Decide in advance
how you are going to
respond; do you
reduce your prices or
reduce your
advertising?

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
Multi-price and tax issues with B2B sites
This ad could be disapproved
due to policy violation on
pricing and tax!

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
“Approved” way of displaying VAT and
multi-packs for B2B sites

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
• Use daily XML feed (or preferably the Shopping 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:
Managing price and availability changes
• 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
#SMXLondon
Part 3:
What’s new and
what’s coming soon!

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
• Need Remarketing tag (or Google Dynamic Remarketing
tag)
• Currently in beta, need to enrol with your Google rep,
once enrolled you will see a new “Audience tab”
• Google will create default audiences for you:
• All visitors
• Product views
• Cart Abandoners
• Past buyers
• Set bid adjustments for Shopping campaigns for users who
have been to the website before (like RLSA)
Remarketing with Shopping Ads

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
• An article last week by the Wall Street Journal and insight from the
Virtual Shopping Summit (by CPC Strategy) have both predicted
that Google will shortly launch a Buy Button in order to provide a
marketplace service to compete with Amazon and eBay
• CPC Strategy thinks that the scheme may be only available to
Merchants that are in the Certified Shopping Scheme (as this
provides some level of quality control)
• They also suspect that PayPal may be offered as a payment
gateway – which is now possible due to eBay and PayPal being split
into separate trading companies
Google Buy Button and marketplace

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon
• The Buy Button will only be shown for certain advertisers next to
Shopping Ads on mobile devices
• Buyers that click on Buy button you will be taken to the Google
Product Page where they can choose product variants and pay
with Google Wallet and possibly PayPal
• Buyers do not go to Merchant site but the buyer may be able to
opt in for emails etc.
• Google will not take a commission but just the click cost
• Google may store buyers’ credit card details to improve
conversion rates for future sales
• The merchant will still have to provide fulfilment but may
receive limited details about the customer
WSJ Journalists speculated that:

@AnnStanley
#SMXLondon

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