All posts by : Anna Simpson

Comparison Shopping Services (CSS) have been around for a while now, allowing ecommerce retailers to showcase ads on Google Shopping. This came about in 2017 when Google was hit with a record fine of 2.42€ for promoting its own shopping comparison service within the SERPS. Off the back of this ruling, Google decided to allow other companies to promote products via their own comparison shopping services to compete alongside Google. 

What are the benefits of a CSS provider?

The main benefits of choosing a CSS provider is the financial discount that you, as an advertiser, can gain. A CSS provider receives a 20% discount in CPC in order to compete against Google’s own service. An advertiser can expect to see this discount directly in their ad’s accounts, through a reduction in CPC that is needed to match the position of a listing from Google. For example, if a product using Google’s CSS costs £1.00 per click then a competitor CSS provider could expect to see the same impression share for just £0.80. This can have a huge impact if media spend is high & these discounts start to add up.

CSS providers are only available for products being sold in the following countries:

• Austria
• Netherlands
• Belgium
• Norway
• Czech Republic
• Poland
• Denmark
• Portugal
• Finland
• Romania
• France
• Slovakia
• Germany
• Spain
• Greece
• Sweden
• Hungary
• Switzerland
• Ireland
• United Kingdom
• Italy

What do I need to do?

In order to get set up with a CSS provider, you just need to make sure that you have a Merchant Centre account set up that only includes the allowed countries as above. This can then be switched over to the CSS provider & their implementation team should be able to take the reins from there. After this process, you should be good to go with your campaigns in Google Ads.

How do I know which CSS provider to pick? 

There are multiple CSS providers that you can choose offering a range of different benefits, from experience and service models to their own way of billing. The main thing to think about is what you want to get from the CSS provider; if it is solely to manage the shopping ads & get a discount then the primary factors to consider are:

• The name of the CSS provider – this will appear alongside your ads so there will be a semblance of association between the two brands
• The billing strategy of the provider – some providers have a monthly subscription fee, some use a percentage of spend, and some base it on CPA so only charge when you actually make a sale.

As online retail continues to grow there’s never been a better time to make savings in such a competitive market. Making the change now means that even the smallest of savings can start building up & be reapportioned into ad spend, thus increasing growth opportunities & market share. If you’re interested in making the jump, Google has provided a tool to get you started which shows all of the available CSS providers & their specialisms to help you pick the right one for your business.

We can also guide you towards the right shopping ads for your campaign. Speak to us today

In today’s world of automation, it can be hard to know the best ways to optimise campaigns when Google gives us less and less data each day. With the launch of Performance Max with no search term, channel split or ads data, it can feel frustrating as an advertiser trying to understand performance. 

With PMax, as with Smart Shopping previously, there is a lack of control in that we can’t push specific products, we just have to let the algorithm take the lead. For ecommerce businesses with a lot of SKUs this can seem counterintuitive, as we may need to ensure visibility of certain products or ensure that the best sellers aren’t taking all of the budget. Now you could split these out into separate campaigns, but what if we want to segment this out due to performance – something that can change on a regular basis? It would take so much time looking through thousands of products pulling them out of one campaign and adding them back into another multiple times a week. If only there was a way to do this automatically…

Script

By using a script, we can automatically apply custom labels within a Google Sheet to products that don’t meet certain criteria, whether that be an amount of clicks, impressions or conversions. This will allow us to segment out products that aren’t getting as much visibility as we would like through the use of custom labels. Once that specific product surpasses this threshold, the custom label is removed so that it can once again run in the primary campaign now that Google has more data on it.

Supplemental Feed

By using a supplemental feed you can add new information in an overlaid feed to the one that gets uploaded. This makes it easier for segmentation purposes, using custom labels or changing product attributes without having to alter the actual feed that is pulled into the Merchant Centre. We can then use Google Sheets, provided by the Script, to upload into a new Supplemental Feed which will override the primary feed data, populating those custom label fields with the updated version. From here you can launch ‘low clicks,’ ‘low impressions’ or ‘low conversions’ campaigns by segmenting the products out by these new labels.

And there you have it; easy segmentation based on actual performance within your Google Ads account ensuring that all products get as much visibility as possible.

If you’re interested in finding out how this could work for your campaigns, get in touch with us.

When it comes to ecommerce, Google Shopping is a great way to get your products in front of the right people at the right time. At some point however, this can become ineffective so how can you use Google and its tools to grow the volume of sales in a way which works for your business?

Google Shopping allows you to advertise hundreds of thousands of products matching users’ search queries to product attributes within the feed. When dealing with this amount of products, it’s easy to get lost in the structure of shopping campaigns and how to segment them out effectively, especially as Google’s standard subdivisions only really include “Brand” and “Product Category.” Whilst these are great from a top level, they don’t offer the amount of detail or internal insights required to create an effective shopping strategy.

Custom Labels

Custom Labels allow you to group together products in ways which aren’t covered by Google’s own attributes. It provides greater flexibility in subdividing products and setting up the campaigns to work in your favour, based on different scenarios within your business. To do this you have 5 different “custom label” attributes to use, which means that you can mix and match different ones together to be really granular in your targeting. This can be set up in your existing shopping feed by adding the additional fields with the relevant information. 

There are multiple ways that you can segment custom labels out, but here I will touch on five that have worked well in my experience.

1. Stock/Shipping

Many ecommerce businesses will have faced stock and shipping issues, especially during Covid, the aftermath of which could hurt both sales and cash flow. By applying custom labels you can easily split products up into different categories based on their availability and delivery times. You’re then able to increase bids and visibility for products that are in stock and ready to be delivered within that week, and decrease visibility for those that have shipping delays or issues. In addition you can alter ad copy to highlight product availability. This is a great way of maintaining cost effectiveness, whilst also ensuring that customers are happy and aware of stock status.

2. Best Sellers/Worst Sellers

With Performance Max, and previously Smart Shopping, a lot of Google’s algorithms favour the products that sell well and pull back on those that don’t. This is great in the sense that we are getting visibility for best sellers. However, it doesn’t help to grow sales for those that are getting less visibility. By using custom labels you can highlight which are the best selling products and isolate them into their own campaign. This allows the under-serving products to generate more visibility as they are not having to compete against products with higher search volumes. This can be really effective in helping to grow sales within an ecommerce account, as it isn’t always about just pushing the products that you already know sell. 

3. Margins

Margins are crucial to the profitability of a business and it isn’t always the highest priced products that have the best margins. Yet Google will be bidding based on product value which isn’t always the most effective thing to bid towards. Therefore, grouping your products by margins allows you to adjust the ROAS (return on ad spend) of each segment in different campaigns, ensuring your spending is as cost-effective as possible for the business. That means you can have a higher ROAS for lower margin products and lower ROAS for higher margin products, giving the best profitability potential. 

4. Value

If your product range is pretty consistent margin wise, you can group products by value instead. This allows you to really push the higher value products in their own campaign, rather than competing against potentially better selling but lower value products. The result of this can be increased visibility, driving volume and growth of both higher and lower value products.

5. Product Types

If your store has a huge product catalogue, you may want to push one type of product due to weather, seasonality or trends, which can be difficult to do if all of your products are in an automated shopping campaign. Therefore, some businesses could find it beneficial to use custom labels to split products out by product type. This means that the algorithms can learn specific user behaviours and search queries for different products, rather than all products being grouped together which might have completely different user journeys.

Custom Labels Conclusion

All in all, custom labels are a great way to not only segment out products and enable them to serve more effectively, but also to be able to see much more detailed data within the interface. We can now understand and analyse product performance with an extra layer of internal data, using the background information to help guide optimisations and strategy, thereby improving efficiency for both us and our client accounts.

Ask how we can make your shopping ads work harder for you today.

Display advertising is an amazing way of getting brand exposure on the internet for a very low price. Ads can be shown on over 2 million websites online, meaning that the reach is massive. Not only that, it’s global. This is an incredible opportunity to generate awareness and drive traffic to your website for a huge amount of users, but how much is too much?

Having this much reach is great in theory but, realistically, how many of these users are going to be engaged with your ads and how many have no relevance to your business whatsoever? This is where audience targeting can come in handy to help make things a lot more granular. 

Types of Audiences

There are many different types of audiences you can use in Google Ads, which can help to hone in on specific users that are most relevant to your business. These include:

Which you use depends on what you’re trying to advertise/achieve. It could be that there are themes the target audiences are interested in, or it could be an age-related product or service. This criteria would then make the decision a lot easier to make. 

Why is this beneficial?

Choosing your audience type allows you to take a chunk of users who are more relevant to your brand and advertise only to these. The result is that you gain a higher percentage of engaged users who are more likely to interact with your business and, therefore, produce a better ROI and a more efficient campaign. 

What are the drawbacks?

There are certain drawbacks to audience targeting. Sometimes human bias can influence the way in which we pick and choose the right audiences for a campaign. You may subconsciously select audiences that aren’t actually the most effective and end up missing out on another portion of potential customers. Additionally, what you think you may know about your audience may not actually be fully accurate, especially when it comes to demographics:

These people are completely different and will have completely different interests and purchasing behaviours, yet are still classed as the same with demographic targeting. So it’s important to take this into consideration.

The other factor to consider is that some segments may convert a lot higher than others but have absolutely no connection or relevance to your business. It’s potentially quite silly to just take this data and run with it, without a little bit of a reality check on whether this makes logical sense.

So what should I do?

The most effective approach would be to use in-market or custom intent, as these are more “intent” based ways of targeting your audiences. These audiences are actively searching for your product or service, giving a much higher level of engagement with the brand. This, again, does limit the potential exposure, so a mixture of display campaigns with different audiences can help to maximise success.

Audience targeting overall

Audience targeting can be great, if taken with a pinch of salt. Google’s algorithms can end up being a lot broader than anticipated and sometimes this data can be generalised. What may look like a solid trend could really just be a coincidence, with someone being categorised in a certain audience list entirely without merit.

My advice would be to not exclusively use specific audiences until actual data has been generated and analysed. The best way of doing this is to use observation targeting setting to gather relevant data on possible audiences, rather than taking the leap and bidding for only specific audiences. There is also a lot more that can go into a display campaign, including placements and topics to help to find the right audience looking at the same types of websites as your target audience. As with most paid ads strategies, do your due diligence and test test test!

We’re happy to talk through our paid advertising services, or any other digital marketing you’re after. Drop us an email today.

The shift to RSAs from ETAs is an interesting one. I imagine some marketers will be sceptical as is the case with any sudden and uncontrollable change made by Google. However, the results we have seen for our clients have led to an increase in click through rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CVR), and a decrease in costs per acquisition (CPA) across the board, so there are clearly benefits to the change.

With Google utilising machine learning more and more, this was an inevitable change and a natural next step in today’s world of automation. But, as with anything, there are benefits and drawbacks to the change, which we’ll go through below.

The Positives

There are many benefits to RSAs; it allows for real-time testing instead of having to manually set up and analyse A/B testing of ad copy. This happens automatically through RSAs, with around 43,680 different combinations thanks to the increased number of headlines and descriptions. Marketers therefore save time and resources otherwise spent setting these up and having to analyse the data manually. It also means that Google can use auction time insights and signals to match relevant copy to the intent of the users’ query, a previously more static element in ETAs which now gives the user a much more relevant ad than we could manually create.

The Drawbacks

The downsides to RSAs are related to control and data visibility. With Google creating these combinations automatically, you don’t actually have the control to decide exactly what gets seen by the user for each search. This means that the choice in headlines and descriptions has to be carefully selected so that each works with the rest. Google also gives limited visibility around the combinations, only highlighting the impressions each has rather than actual performance metrics. It’s a definite downfall, as marketers can find insightful trends from this data that they may have utilised elsewhere.

Ad Asset Combinations

This has now been taken one step further with the announcement of “Ad Assets” taking over what was previously known as “Ad Extensions”. These are now an integral part of campaign set up, and is great if you are the type of person to forget to add these on in the separate part of the interface. This again takes Google’s machine learning approach to the next level, reporting on not only the different combinations of headlines and descriptions, but now including these combinations with different ad assets (extensions) to really understand which work the best together.

This is now a set-in-stone change & expanded text ads can no longer be edited or created. It’s therefore definitely worth getting on board and adopting the best practices to give the highest potential for success with RSAs. Our advice for a successful RSA set up?

• – Fill in all headline asset spaces with key USPs and features
• – Create different descriptions to utilise the machine A/B testing 
• – Pin any assets that you definitely want visible in all ads.

These simple steps are key to getting the most from RSAs and increasing CTR and CVR for your own or your clients’ accounts.

Speak to us about text ads or any other paid advertising for your next campaign