'Net Features : google shopping

5 Simple Steps to Set Product Targets for Google Shopping

Administrator — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:00:00 GMT

:: By Jacques van der Wilt, DataFeedWatch & WordWatch ::

Google Shopping is a great channel for Web shops, but many merchants are still struggling to figure out how to set product targets for their Product Listing Ads campaign.

We've developed a successful standard operating procedure for setting up new PLA campaigns by sticking to these five simple guidelines:

1. Start Simple: Brand & Product Type

If you are creating the first Google Shopping campaign for your shop, keep it simple. You need performance data before you can set any fancy product targets. So start getting that data in a simple way: Set product targets for each brand or each product type or each combination of the two. Don’t worry whether that is the best you can do: get started and get the data you need.

2. Performance Data: Don’t Spread it Too Thin

If your product targets get two conversions per month, your data is too thin. It will be weeks before you have enough statistically relevant data to change your bids and then it will be another month before you can evaluate it.

So it’s great that you set 80 product targets for all 10 sneaker-types of each of your eight brands, but you buried yourself in detail. Set your product targets for brands only or product type only and start collecting the data.

There is one way to get the best of both worlds: create one adgroup for each of your eight brands and put product targets in there for each of the 10 product types. That’s still 80 product targets, but you can aggregate the data on brand-level and get enough data for your first optimizations.

3. Top Performers Get Their Own Product Target

If you have a few products that make most of your sales, you should get them ‘their own’ product target. Don’t do that for the best 100 products because you will bury yourself in data. But if five or 10 products make >50% of your revenue, you want to monitor and optimize the performance of these Product Listing Ads closely.

4. Group by Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the single most important reason for grouping products into a single product target. If all your tennis shoes (regardless of brand) have similar conversion rates, you can group ‘m together. Bidding up or down may affect impressions, but conversions happen on your site, when the customer has already arrived to your store.

So dig into Analytics and find similarities. You may find that tennis-shoe-conversion is not dependent on brand, but that the pink ones convert better than the other colors. That means that you want to create an additional product target for pink tennis shoes (set an AdWords Labels for color) and set a higher bid. You’ll get more conversions and still have a lower CPA.

5. Mind Your Margin

Cash is King. You may have successfully executed the previous four steps, but always keep your eye on your Gross Margin. If your Tennis-shoes and your Tennis-socks have a similar conversion rate, you still don’t want them to have the same product target: With a $20 gross margin on shoes you want to bid a lot more than for the socks with a $2 gross margin. So always combine the wisdom of the first four steps with the financial rationale of step five.

One way of ensuring that there is a fit between your bid and your margin, use AdWords grouping to group all your products based on price (or margin if you have that in your data feed). Then you can set separate product targets, with higher bids for high-margin products.

About the author

Jacques van der Wilt has worked in online media for more than 20 years. He has held leadership positions in both the US and Europe. In the past 10 years he has worked as an entrepreneur and founded several start-ups. He is also a mentor at accelerator Startupboothcamp. As founder of WordWatch (automated bid management) he became an expert in search engine marketing for medium sized advertisers and with its spin-off DataFeedWatch (a web-based tool for merchants to optimize their data feed for Google Shopping and other comparison shopping channels) he established a leadership position in managing data feeds and Product Listing Ads campaigns.

5 Tips for Optimizing Product Listing Ads

Michael Garrity — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:15:00 GMT

Since Google introduced Product Listing Ads (PLAs) as part of its Google Shopping initiative last year, Internet advertisers and online merchants have been working hard to find the best possible ways to optimize the performance of their PLAs.

These product-specific and information-rich advertisements are displayed when consumers conduct product-related searches and are visible in a sponsored section on the SERPs. So far, they can increase click-through rates by as much as 73 percent, conversion rates by 35 percent and provide a 46 percent higher return on ad spend for merchants.

However, in order to get numbers like those (or even better), it’s important to clean up your product feeds (where Google pulls the information for each individual product from) and carefully set up your PLA campaigns.

Here are five things you can do to improve the overall performance of your Google PLAs:

Title Specs

What’s in a name? Well, for busy consumers, it can be a lot, especially because titles will indicate the queries that you’re likely to show up for. That’s why you should be thoughtful when giving your products a title in your product feed. For starters, be sure that it is no longer than 70 characters; otherwise, Google will truncate parts of the title. In addition, be sure to put the most important (read: significant for keyword-based searches) information at the front of the title, since Google will only show the first couple of words in the SERPs.

Information and Descriptions

While both product titles and descriptions should include essential keywords for the searches that you want those specific products to appear on, they shouldn’t be overstuffed with keywords. In other words, ensure that they include necessary information while also being readable and interesting for consumers. Also, don't worry where you place your keywords in the descriptions, since they don’t actually show up in the PLAs; they’re really there so that Google can more easily separate similar products.

Price Products Accurately

Google will almost certainly penalize any PLAs that inaccurately list the price of the product in question. Keep in mind that if you have package pricing, you will have to include the lowest possible price that someone can add items into their cart for. For instance, if customers must buy a minimum of 20 products for $2 each, the price should be listed as $40, not $2.

Ad Groups

One way to gain greater control over the bidding, offer copy and targeting of each product is to create a separate ad group for each product category. When you do this, you can either use the product categories Google uses for Google Shopping, or customize your own parameters to categorize groups of products in the most relevant way possible. In addition, you should be careful when putting bids on a catch-all ad group, as Google will serve the PLA from the ad group with the highest bid, ignoring all of the others. That being said, you can also optimize your best-selling ad group and make it more visible by giving them higher bids.

Testing Ad Groups

When you set up your ad groups, you should create custom targets that will focus on the first targeting option and your individual product IDs. This allows you to see what queries each of your products are showing up for and provide more visibility into which of your products are converting well. The reports you glean from this testing will show you which of your feed’s copy listings are most effective, and which products you can increase your bids on due to their higher conversion rates. You should also monitor the average position for you groups that usually perform well, and if you see that your average position changes when you haven’t done anything, it’s probably because other merchants (e.g. your competitors) are increasing their bids; you’ll need to do the same in order to stay competitive.

Google Promo Credit for International Merchants

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 12:20:00 GMT

Google’s rollout of its Product Listing Ads model for Google shopping is going swimmingly – so much so in fact that it's swimming right across the pond, announcing last month that the program would be going international.

The rollout is expected to continue until the end of Q2 2013, but Google isn’t wasting any time encouraging merchants to try the new service. Today, Google announced a promotional credit of 10 percent for merchants who apply and create a PLA campaign promoting all of their products in Merchant Center by April 12, 2013. Advertisers must have an active Adwords account with a billing address in either Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, or United Kingdom to take advantage of the offer.

On a related note, Google also announced an update to its feed specification for Google Shopping for international merchants. The update, which will take effect in March 2013, will force advertisers using the reduced Product Ads Feed spec, to bring those feeds into compliance with the new requirements – which can be seen here for those affected countries.

Comparing CSEs - Who's on Top?

Amberly Dressler — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 17:30:00 GMT

The prom king – and queen – for that matter of Comparison Shopping Engines is Google. With the announcement and impending launch of Google Shopping, search’s royal court is prepping for an all Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) shakedown and changing the CSE landscape forever. The Web’s most competitive CSEs will need to follow suit with many of Google Shopping’s inherent upgrades – like providing a better shopping experience for users with more merchant updated info, and, in turn, providing merchants with higher conversion rates.

Here are the CSEs we think are doing a pretty good job, for consumers and merchants, already.

Google Product Search

Google’s huge advantage to both retailers and consumers is that it’s the most popular search engine in the world and has a solid reputation to work off of. This CSE is feature rich for both parties. Consumers have the ability to see seller ratings, product condition, tax and shipping, total price and base price. This info obviously influences buyer’s decisions, as, according to CPC Strategy’s 13th edition of their CSR ranking report, Google has the highest conversion rate of any other CSR. Using Google Maps, shopping results also include nearby stores where the product is available. In the future, Google merchants can be more competitive by placing high bids for top position, add rich product info like images, merchant’s name, and more.

Amazon

Amazon has one foot in retail, and the rest of its virtual body in CSE. Its comparison features are what savvy buyers expect, which is conveyed in Amazon’s astronomical sales and traffic. Amazon focuses on selection, price and convenience, and buyers are, well, buying it. One-click checkout gives consumers one of the most convenient checkouts available. For merchants, their cost-per-click rate is pretty average for the industry, but it’s the traffic that really gives Amazon its power.

Nextag

Nextag offers a straightforward approach to comparison shopping. A shopper can see the basic, compare prices list with seller’s name, seller’s ratings, product availability and price. Thirty-plus million people use the service each month and according to a report by CPC Strategy, they come only second to Google in revenue. Features like the ability to track price alerts, save shopping lets, etc., improve the user experience and convert prospects into buyers.

Shopping.com

Shopping.com, an eBay company, is a site to bookmark for consumers. It not only returns results for countless of retailers, but also includes eBay listings, which gives shoppers a large variety of options. For merchants, their cost-per-click rate is 10 cents lower, on average, than Nextag’s (according to CPC Strategy Report), but its traffic and revenue is higher than all the other guys, besides the three listed above.

PriceGrabber

Merchants looking for a low cost per click should check out PriceGrabber. At 26 cents on average (according to CPC Strategy Report), it’s the lowest on the market. Consumers also receive highly competitive prices within their search results. Reviews are very easy to leave, which may not always be a good thing for merchants. The purchasing power of PriceGrabber’s consumers is extremely impressive, though. According to the company, the average sale order of PriceGrabber shoppers is $450-plus, with 67% of the 26 million unique shoppers, being college educated with an average yearly income of $71,000-plus, according to the company’s website.

Shopzilla

The ability to sort search results by a number of different options (e.g. prices ascending/descending, store ratings, etc.) and obtain comprehensive product details is convenient, but the number of results don’t rival some of the bigger guys listed above, at least for this gal’s searches. However, Shopzilla reaches more than 40 million shoppers each month and connects them with more than 100 million products, according to the company’s website.

Pronto

For merchants, Pronto’s cost per click is nearly as high as Nextag’s (at 41 cents on average, according to CPC strategy), but it boasts 70-plus million products for shoppers and the ability to shop by category and filter search results. There’s a few discerning aspects like the lack of updates on its Company Information page (In the News and Press Releases, specifically) and a broken List Your Products link, but the shopping verticals like ProntoStyle.com, ProntomHome.com, etc., provide great tools for consumers and a more targeted buyer for merchants.

What's New With Google Shopping?

Michael Garrity — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 20:15:00 GMT

The Internet was buzzing last week at the beta launch of Google’s latest service, Google Shopping. As always, the most recognizable name on the ‘Net is trying to wedge its way into another industry, but what will this mean for the e-commerce industry?

First of all, it’s important to understand exactly what Google is up to here, in case you haven’t heard. Essentially, Google is re-branding its Google Product Search services with a whole new business model. Soon, only merchants that pay to advertise with Google will be listed in the company’s product search.

In other words, Google has created a secondary retail-focused search engine that exclusively features paid advertisers.

However, as far as anyone can tell right now, this will definitely also play a role in regular search engine results, at least when users are searching for a specific product (or when a search can be construed as product-related). When Google presumes that the user has a potential intent to purchase, they’ll offer up paid (sponsored) listings next to the Web search results, so that they’re actually the first thing users see. Although the organic results will remain the same, they will not necessarily be the focal point of the SERPs any longer.

Of course, these product listings are more than just text ads, as they feature images, descriptions, links to the retailer’s sites and the current price. All of this is presented as a single, separate experience from the rest of the search results.

Either multiple product listings partitioned off in their own “sponsored” box, or a single product can appear on the right side of the page that includes a more detailed description. The former is typically designated for more general product searches, while the latter is reserved for very specific product queries (see examples below).

This practice combines product ads and Google Product Search, and helps to ensure that the paid listings don’t actually affect the organic search results – if we’re still calling Google Search organic. While this is all currently in a very experimental beta period, it's clearly an idea to which Google appears committed.

So, what does this mean for online retail, Google ads and product search?

Well, for one, it will force merchants to keep their ads up-to-date and accurate, since they are going to be charged as advertising partners just for the opportunity to list their products. This will be easy for them, as Google Shopping ads will come complete with an API that merchants can use to update their listings.

Bidding will be different, as now merchants will no longer be competing for keywords, but rather bidding how much they’d be willing to pay, if their listings appear and get clicks or generate conversions. Higher rankings will then depend on a combination of perceived relevance and the price of the bid.

Theoretically, these Google Shopping listings will help weed out redundant or irrelevant results for searchers, making them more enticing to consumers and, thus, more profitable (or worth the investment) for retailers.

Most of all, this whole scheme seems to be Google’s attempt to combat major e-commerce retailers, specifically Amazon. Whereas before Amazon was something of a one-stop shop for consumers looking to buy online, Google has now presented itself as an (arguably more efficient) alternative, allowing users to base their purchasing decisions on more product options from a wider variety of retailers.

This could drastically alter the e-commerce landscape and give smaller online retailers a much better chance at competing with the big boys.

Of course, it also runs the risk of shutting out those same smaller businesses that don't have the budget to afford buying product listings. Those companies that survive on the Web largely through the existence of free product search listings could also see some negative effects from this change.

Details are slim at the moment, and there is no official word on when Google will do away with free product listings, but the company did state in a blog post that it would like to have Google Shopping up-and-running by the fall of 2012.

Merchants have two incentives for transitioning to the new format, a 10-percent monthly credit through 2012 for ads created by August 15, or a $100 AdWords credit for existing Product Search merchants who fill out a form by the same date.