Here at Search Rescue we just love Google Shopping! Google Shopping (previously known as product listing ads or PLAs) can be one of the most efficient digital marketing methods available if managed correctly.
However if you don’t configure the campaign well the wheels can fall off and it can be a futile exercise. Furthermore it can be frustrating troubleshooting issues given that Google shopping utilises a separate Google software that being Google merchant Centre.
Here are five tips that can help improve the efficiency and outcome of your Google shopping campaign.
1 Automated bit strategies. Make sure you use Google’s automatic did strategies on your campaign. These can deliver incredible results. Manual bid strategies tend to be extremely inefficient and difficult to manage particularly when you have hundreds of products. A special mention here is maximise conversion value at a target return on ad spend (ROAS). We prefer not to set a ROAS target as it can heavily impact your spend rate in a sensitive competitor landscape.
2 Google merchant Centre. Regularly login to your merchant centre to ensure that the diagnostics page is not showing many disapprovals. Merchant centre is where you can see which of your products are in fact serving / not serving and of those not serving, the reason for that and how to resolve.
3 Search term report. Just like Google search campaigns, your Google shopping campaign can broad match to irrelevant terms. While broad match in shopping tends to be more accurate than search it is still essential to check the search term report regularly to ensure you’re not wasting money on terms and / or products that you don’t sell
4 Product groups. Within shopping you have the ability to ‘cut’ your products into various groups and thereby choose to advertise some products but not others. For example if you sell widget machines and widget accessories but accessories are not very profitable you may choose to only run the Google shopping on your widget machines through cutting the products imported.
5 Competitor behaviour. Make sure you check the prices, primary images and headlines of your main competitors. Given that Google shopping allows the searcher to easily compare equitable products from suppliers at a glance, if your product isn’t the cheapest or most enticing we have found this can affect results significantly.
