Paid Search Archives - Page 2 of 4

GA4: Lost Cookie Consent Data

20th April 2023

With the implementation of cookie consent policies, many businesses have faced challenges in accurately reporting their website performance. However, GA4 has introduced a new feature that addresses this issue and allows for more accurate reporting figures. In this blog, we will explore how GA4’s modelled data to estimate figures that can help you optimise your reporting process.

The Challenges Of Lost Cookie Consent Data

Since the introduction of the cookie consent policy, which had the aim of protecting the users’ privacy and providing more control of their data, you may have noticed skewed reporting figures. Without the proper consent, tracking codes or cookies will not be executed properly, leading to incomplete reporting data. This can affect your ability to accurately measure website performance and make data-driven decisions.

GA4’s Modelled Data

To address this challenge, GA4 has introduced a feature that uses modelled data to estimate figures based on historical data and intent signals, which are higher than those in Universal Analytics. This allows businesses to have more insights into the performance of different channels and optimise their strategies accordingly. By using the modelled data you can get a better understanding of your website’s performance even with the limited or lost cookie consent data.

This is particularly useful if you’ve experienced a drop-off and want more insight into the performance of different channels, making optimisation easier. It can also help to streamline your process and reduce the amount of time and effort required to manually adjust figures.

Benefits of GA4 Modelled Data:

⚡Improved reporting accuracy: With modelled data, you can get a more accurate picture of your website’s performance, even when cookie consent data is lost or limited. This can allow for more informed decision-making and optimisation strategies.

⚡Streamlined Reporting Process: Modelled data can help streamline the reporting process by reducing the time and effect required to manually adjust figures. This can save you time and valuable resources and allow you to focus on more important tasks.

⚡Insight into the performance of different channels: Modelled data can provide businesses with insights into the performance of different marketing channels, helping them understand which channels are driving results and which ones may need optimisation.

Considerations and best practices

While GA4’s modelled data feature can be very useful, it’s important to keep in mind the following considerations:

💡Check accuracy with clients: Modelled data is an estimate and may not be 100% accurate. It is important to check figures with your clients to ensure the accuracy of the estimated data before making any significant changes to your reporting optimisation strategies.

💡Continue monitoring and adjusting: Modelled data should be used as a tool to aid decision-making, but it is important to continue monitoring and adjusting your reporting as necessary. Regularly reviewing and comparing estimated data with actual data can help identify any discrepancies and ensure data accuracy.

💡Use as a complementary tool: Modelled data should not replace observed data completely. But rather be used as a complementary tool. It’s important to understand the limitations of modelled data and use it in conjunction with other data sources to get a holistic view of website performance.

Reverting back to observed data:

If you prefer to use only observed data you can turn off modelled data in the settings by following these steps.

Go to admin in your GA4 account.
Click on your Property Settings.
Under the Property column, click on Reporting Identity.
Choose the “Use only observed data” option.
Save your changes.

In conclusion, GA4’s new feature for lost cookie consent data provides us with a valuable tool to estimate figures and gain additional insights into website performance. By using the modelled data, businesses can overcome challenges related to cookie consent policies and make more informed data-driven decisions.

GA4 Cross-Channel Tracking

6th April 2023

by Anna Simpson Paid Search

Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google’s web analytics platform, designed to help businesses gain insights into user behaviour across multiple devices and platforms. One of the significant changes in GA4 is the introduction of cross-channel tracking, which enables businesses to track conversions across different channels accurately. This is a significant advancement as it allows you to see precisely which channels influenced a conversion and allocate credit accordingly.

Cross-Channel Tracking

Cross-channel tracking in GA4 is a powerful tool that allows businesses to see how customers interact with their brand across different touchpoints. This, in turn, helps them to better understand the customer journey and optimize their marketing campaigns for maximum effectiveness. This means that you will be able to track your customer’s buying journey more precisely and be able to attribute the correct value to each touchpoint in the customer’s journey.

For instance, when it comes to Google Ads, this new feature will change the last non-direct click conversion import to full cross-channel credit, allowing you to see the complete value of your Google Ads campaigns.

To better understand the impact of this change, let’s consider a typical buyer journey. Suppose a customer clicks on a shopping ad but does not end up purchasing on day one. On day two, they organically search for the product and brand and complete the purchase.

GA4 Last Non-Direct Click

Using the traditional last non-direct click tracking method, organic search would get 100% of the credit for this purchase. In contrast, Google Ads would not receive any credit for the conversion.

GA4 Cross-Channel Credit

However, with the new GA4 cross-channel attribution, organic search would receive 50% of the credit, while Google Ads would get the remaining 50% – giving a 0.5 recording of a conversion in Google Ads. This means you can see which channels and campaigns are working best and making the most impact on your customer’s buying journey.

By using cross-channel tracking in GA4, you can now gain more visibility of how your campaigns are actually influencing the customer’s purchase journey. This provides more comprehensive data that can help you optimize your marketing campaigns better. It’s now possible to see how different channels work together to convert a customer, which can help identify areas for improvement in your marketing strategy. This allows you to make data-driven decisions about where to allocate marketing resources, ensuring that you get the best possible return on investment.

To set up conversion tracking in GA4, businesses need to define the specific events that they want to track as conversions. These events can be defined using the built-in events that are available in GA4 or you can create your own custom events. Once these conversion events are defined, you can use cross-channel tracking to track conversions across different platforms and devices.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the upcoming changes to GA4 conversion tracking using cross-channel tracking will provide businesses with a more comprehensive view of their customer journey, enabling them to optimize their marketing campaigns for maximum effectiveness. By attributing the correct value to each touchpoint in the customer’s journey, businesses can make better-informed decisions on their marketing strategies and drive more value from their campaigns.

Cedarwood Nominated For 12 European Search Awards

3rd April 2023

by Amanda Walls Cedarwood Digital News Digital PR & Outreach tips Paid Search SEO

Delighted to kick off the week by announcing that we have been nominated for 12 European Search Awards, it’s great to see everyone’s hard work rewarded over the last 12 months & to be recognised for some of the great client achievements we’ve had in this time!

Some of our nominations include:

🍉 Best SEO Agency
🍉 Best Use Of PR In Search
🍉 Best Use Of Search (Finance)
🍉 Best SEO Campaign
🍉 Best PPC Campaign

Looking forward to seeing everyone at the event in Lisbon in May! ☀️ 🍷🍹 You can find a full list of nominations here

Meta Targeting 101

30th March 2023

by Lucy Wilde Paid Search Paid Social

With Meta’s social media platforms being some of the largest in the world, it would be foolish not to advertise there. With over 2 billion users, Meta targeting options allow advertisers to hone in on specific demographics and interests, making it ideal to reach your desired audiences. In this blog post, we will take a closer look at the different targeting options available on Meta and how to use them effectively.

Audience Options

As always with Meta advertising, your journey begins at Ads Manager. To view your audience go to tools on the top left corner and click on ‘Audiences’.

This will bring you to a list of all your existing audiences – allowing us to create new audiences or edit existing ones.

Saved Audiences:

By using saved audiences you can include or exclude people based on demographics, interests, and behaviours. This is referred to as detailed targeting audiences by Meta.

🎯Demographic Targeting – This allows you to target users based on various demographic data, such as age, gender, location, education level, and more.

🎯Interest Targeting – This allows you to target users based on their hobbies, interests, and activities.

🎯Behavioural Targeting – This allows you to target users based on their digital activities, purchase behaviour, mobile device, or consumer classification.

Saved Audience’s best practices:

⚡ Detailed targeting works best the broader you can make it. If you narrow your target down too much you’re limiting the capabilities of Meta’s delivery system to show your ad to the right people – which will likely reduce the performance of your ad.

⚡ Turn on advantage detailed targeting, this is recommended by Meta to reach beyond your audience to drive the best performance for your ads.

Custom Audiences:

Custom audiences connect with those who have already connected with your business or product. You can use sources such as websites, app activity, customer lists and engagement to create these.

Website data is an important source as it allows you to target people who have visited specific pages of your website, and also people who have taken part in a number of events such as; Page View, View Content, Add To Cart, Initiate Checkout, Search, Purchase and, Add Payment Info. If you want to make it more specific there is an option to set the aggregated value. For example, View content > 2.

Another useful audience is catching your Instagram and Facebook engagers. By using the Instagram Account and Facebook Page Meta Source you can create audiences for people that follow your account, have engaged with a post or ad, or even saved a post.

There are so many audiences you can create so have a play around with it and see what you can come up with.

Custom Audiences Best Practices:

⚡ If you are using custom audiences do not add detailed targeting as well. This can confuse Meta’s delivery system as it has too many criteria to work with, which can be detrimental to ad performance.

⚡ When creating the audience give a clear name including the retention time that you have selected so you can easily find it when you’re using it within an ad in the future.

Lookalike Audiences:

Lookalike targeting allows you to target users who are similar to your existing customers or website visitors. These are created from existing custom audiences. When you set up a new custom audience you will be prompted to create a lookalike. These are ideal for businesses looking to expand their customer base by reaching users who are likely to be interested in their product or service. This is also a great audience to use if your custom audiences are too small to use within ads.

Lookalike best practices:

⚡ It is best to start small. We would recommend you start with a 1% lookalike audience, these are the most similar to your data source and are likely to have the best outcome.

⚡ Having a high-quality data source is an important factor in whether or not the audience is likely to complete the desired action. Avoid making audiences for website visitors as many of these would have left without completing another event. Whereas, using add-to-cart sources contains people with higher intent.

Rounding It All Up

Our last piece of advice is to test, test, test! Testing is so valuable when advertising on Meta. My go-to structure to test an audience is setting up three different audiences within the ad set level of the campaign and seeing which one performs the best.

In conclusion, Meta’s targeting options are incredibly powerful tools that help businesses reach their desired audience effectively. By using demographic, interest, behavioural, and lookalike targeting options, businesses can create audiences that are most likely to engage with their ads and convert into customers. By leveraging Meta’s targeting capabilities, businesses can create more effective advertising campaigns and achieve their marketing objectives.

PMax Vs. Shopping Campaigns: Which Is Right For You?

23rd March 2023

by Anna Simpson Paid Search

PMax Vs. Shopping Campaigns

Performance Max has been a buzzword among digital marketers since its release. It is Google’s newest advertising solution that utilises machine learning to optimise ad performance across multiple Google networks.

Many advertisers have claimed that Performance Max campaigns have delivered significant results, but is it always the best solution for every scenario – what happens when the latest and greatest technology fails to deliver the desired results? That’s what we recently experienced with a client who was going through a rough patch of low search volume and low purchase intent. Despite the sophisticated algorithms in Performance Max, the campaigns were struggling to deliver results. Daily budgets were not being hit, CPCs were rising, and revenue was not being generated at the required volume.

After much frustration, we made a bold move and switched back to traditional shopping campaigns. After just a few days of optimization, we saw a substantial increase in volume, leading to a remarkable 184% increase in revenue compared to the previous period. The return on ad spend also increased, so they weren’t sacrificing profitability for volume.

The experience was a reminder that sometimes the latest and greatest technology isn’t always the best solution for every scenario. It’s important to stay flexible and adaptable in our approach to advertising and be willing to switch back to tried and true methods when the situation calls for it.

While Performance Max campaigns are undoubtedly effective at delivering results, they can sometimes lack the human understanding of the need to drive volume, especially in times of low intent. Standard shopping campaigns, on the other hand, are designed to capture users who are actively searching for products, regardless of their level of intent. By targeting these users with a more volume-driven approach, the agency was able to generate impressive results despite the challenging search environment.

So while Performance Max campaigns can be a great tool for certain situations, it’s important to recognize their limitations and be willing to experiment with other approaches when the situation demands it. Sometimes, the best ideas are the ones that go against the grain. Being willing to challenge the status quo, experiment with new ideas, and take calculated risks in our advertising campaigns is key to unlocking untapped potential.

With this in mind, let’s dig into the pros and cons of each campaign type to help you decide what would work best for your accounts.

Performance Max

Benefits:

➡️ Advanced targeting capabilities: Performance Max leverages machine learning algorithms to automatically target relevant audiences across multiple channels and platforms, making it easier to reach potential customers.

➡️ Increased efficiency: Performance Max automates many of the tedious tasks involved in managing advertising campaigns, such as bid adjustments, ad placements, and audience targeting, freeing up time for marketers to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives.

➡️ Enhanced visibility: Performance Max allows advertisers to show their ads across a variety of Google networks, including search, display, and YouTube, providing greater visibility and exposure to potential customers.

Drawbacks:

➡️ Limited control over ad placement: While Performance Max automates many aspects of campaign management, it also limits control over where ads are placed and how they are displayed, which can be problematic for some advertisers.

➡️ High minimum spend requirements: Performance Max campaigns often have high minimum spend requirements, which can be a barrier to entry for smaller businesses and advertisers with limited budgets.

➡️ Limited transparency and insights: Performance Max provides limited visibility into the performance of individual ads, which can make it difficult for advertisers to identify and address issues or optimise their campaigns.

Standard Shopping

Benefits:

➡️ More granular campaign management: With Standard Shopping campaigns, advertisers have more granular control over the campaign structure, including the ability to create specific product groups, set bids at the product level, and tailor ad copy and landing pages to individual products or categories.

➡️ Easy to get started: Standard Shopping campaigns are relatively easy to set up and manage, making them a good option for advertisers who are new to Google Ads or who don’t have a lot of experience with advanced targeting capabilities.

➡️ Better suited for specific goals: Standard Shopping campaigns may be better suited for specific advertising goals, such as driving sales of a specific product or category, while Performance Max campaigns may be better suited for broader awareness campaigns.

Drawbacks:

➡️ Limited automation: Standard Shopping campaigns offer limited automation capabilities compared to Performance Max, which can make campaign management more time-consuming and labour-intensive.

➡️ More limited targeting capabilities: Standard Shopping campaigns do not offer the same advanced targeting capabilities as Performance Max, which can make it more challenging to reach specific audiences or optimise campaigns for specific goals.

➡️ Limited visibility across multiple platforms: Standard Shopping campaigns are typically limited to Google’s Shopping network, which may limit visibility and exposure compared to Performance Max campaigns, which can show ads across multiple platforms and networks.

Key Takeaways

So, what can we learn from this experience? Here are some takeaways:

💡Be flexible and adaptable in your approach to advertising. Just because a particular campaign type or technology is popular doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for every situation.

💡Don’t be afraid to experiment with new ideas and take calculated risks. You never know what might work until you try it.

💡Measure and analyse your results regardless of what approach you take. It’s important to measure and analyse your results to identify what’s working and what’s not based on what you are trying to achieve.

A Guide To Advantage+ Campaigns

23rd February 2023

by Lucy Wilde Paid Search Paid Social

.Facebook’s Advantage+ campaigns were first rolled out in August 2022, so by now, you’ve probably had a chance to check them out. If you haven’t, don’t stress, I’m here to give you the lowdown on what it is and how it works.

What is Advantage+?

Advantage+ campaigns are designed to be the most efficient solution to drive sales, using machine-learning algorithms to target your ads to the right people. Meta offers a simplified setup process that takes care of many of the more manual tasks, such as audience targeting and creative options. These automated shopping campaigns can give you more opportunities to reach people interested in your product, whether you are new to Meta ads or have more experience.

What are the benefits?

Some of the key benefits that Advantage+ offers include:

Simplified set-up: Advantage+ has streamlined the campaign setup process to make it super easy for you to do and reduce the manual work involved, such as bid strategy and ad optimisation.
Machine-learning: Advantage+ uses machine learning to identify the highest-value audience across all Meta platforms to target your ads. This increases your opportunity to reach people that are more likely to convert.
Streamlined performance goals: This helps you optimise to achieve the best outcome for your business.

However, the major drawback of these automated campaigns is that you have less control over the audience you are targeting. Additionally, the lack of freedom when optimising the campaign can impact your goals and objectives, meaning, these campaigns are not for everyone.

How to set up an Advantage+ campaign?

Go to Ads Manager and create a new campaign

Select ‘Sales’ as the new campaign objective

Choose the Advantage+ shopping campaign option

Manually input your campaign settings;

Rename your campaign
Select ‘Conversion Location’
Choose the correct Pixel and conversion event
Select the audience location
Set a daily budget and ad schedule
Choose the attribution setting for the campaign

Then you will move on to the ad settings;

Rename your ad
Select your Facebook page and Instagram account
Create a new ad or use an existing post and follow the instructions for ad setup and ad creative
Ensure your website destination is correct
Make sure your tracking is added

Once you’re happy with your new campaign, then review your edits and publish

What next?

If you are giving these campaigns a try, make sure that you have all tracking set up correctly with appropriate UTMs. Give your campaign time to go through the learning phase to allow it the best chance of success; try not to change the ad too drastically, otherwise, it will delay this period. And finally, once your campaign is active, be sure to regularly check its performance against KPIs to see if this is the right campaign style for you.

To conclude, Advantage+ campaigns are a simplified approach to getting the most out of your advertising budget. They are similar to Google’s Performance Max campaigns by using machine learning to optimise your campaigns. It’s great for all advertisers whether you’re a beginner or more experienced. If you haven’t already I would definitely recommend that you give these automated Advantage+ campaigns a try and see how they perform for your business. AI is on the rise in the marketing world, so it looks like these campaigns are here to stay.

Cedarwood Nominated For Three UK Paid Media Awards!

6th February 2023

by Amanda Walls Cedarwood Digital News Paid Search

2023 has got off to a busy start for our Paid Media team and we are delighted to have been nominated for three awards at the UK Paid Media Awards.

The UK Paid Media Awards recognise the contribution that paid advertising delivers to engagement, clicks, leads sales and ultimately profit, shining a light on the work being undertaken by paid media agencies which is best in class.

We’ve been nominated in the following categories:

📢 Shopping Ads Campaign Of The Year with Hayes Garden World

📢 Best Use Of Data with Patient Claim Line

📢 Best Small Paid Media Agency

The award nominations top off a busy month with January being our busiest month ever for new business and we welcomed five new clients into the fold at the start of February.

The new clients come off the back of our wins at the European Paid Media Awards where we took home:

📢 Retail Campaign Of The Year with Hayes Garden World

📢 Best Small Paid Media Agency

Look forward to seeing everyone at the awards night in London on March 15th and you can see the full list of nominations here

Using the Page Feed Feature with Dynamic Search Ads

29th December 2022

by Anna Simpson Paid Search

If you work for an ecommerce business that has thousands of products to advertise, you might think, “where do I even start?”

Obviously, Google Shopping is the go-to for ecommerce but how can we enable growth through text ads without spending time making hundreds of ads for each product? You could use expensive software that does this for you but most businesses would rather save money. So what’s the solution?

The answer is in Dynamic Search Ads and their Page Feed feature.

What are Dynamic Search Ads and how do they work?

Dynamic Search Ads have been around for a long time now. They step away from the traditional ‘keyword’ targeting of text ads and use the website’s content to return ads for relevant search queries. This helps advertisers find longer-tail keywords and search terms that they may not have previously considered, and that users are actively searching for in real time. Google scans the information on your webpage, understands the content and then matches this to relevant user searches, giving more visibility across a wider range of terms. You can set these up in different ways, either by using all webpages on your site, specific pages or ‘categories’ that Google thinks your website is related to. It then automatically chooses a relevant landing page and a dynamically generated headline to match the user’s query the best it can.

How does the page feed feature work?

The page feed feature allows you to upload a feed of data, full of different URLs, and tells Google to only use these URLs within Dynamic Search Ads. For example, uploading your shopping feed will supply Google with a list of product specific URLs all in one go, ensuring that users are only sent to these landing pages. This then gives Google the opportunity to understand each product and match it to relevant queries dynamically. In essence, this means that Google can automatically create ads related to each product you upload and return relevant ads for said product, without you having to manually create and adjust bids for each one.

How do I set up Dynamic Search Ads with Page Feed?

Setting this up is really simple. Firstly, you need to upload a page feed with the products you want to include, their URLs and any custom labels attached to them.

You then need to go into campaign view and set up a standard DSA campaign. Once you get to the Dynamic Search Ad part of settings you want to select ‘Use only URLs from page feeds,’ and click the feed you want to use. It’s as easy as that!

Best results

For best results, there are a few things to consider when setting up a DSA with page feed. Firstly, you want to make sure that the product pages have as much information about the product as possible. Google is using this to find relevant search queries, so, the better the content, the better quality searches they will appear for. Secondly, as the descriptions will appear for all products, you want to make this as generic as possible so that it makes sense across all ranges. Think generic USPs like delivery and returns information, any warranties and current offers, or even just company information. Finally, there are many ways to set up DSAs with page feeds and you can make more than one at any time. Therefore, you may want to consider splitting these out across different brands or different product types for better segmentation and reporting.

All in all, using Dynamic Search Ads with page feeds is a great way to advertise a huge number of products quickly and effectively. Like anything, there will always need to be time for learning and optimisation to ensure any irrelevant terms are excluded and to make sure that things are running efficiently, but this should be a quick way to get extra visibility for your store.

If you’re looking to ramp up your Google Shopping ads and campaigns, get in touch with us today.

Applying Offline Conversions to Drive Value

23rd December 2022

by Anna Simpson Paid Search

Google Ads is great for lead generation, allowing us to track certain actions that could lead to an offline sale through phone calls and form submissions. However, as industries get more competitive and users browse around more before committing, how can we ever really understand the true value of advertising when these leads may or may not turn into actual qualified leads that have high deal closure?

Here, I explain how utilising Offline Conversions within your Google Ads account can drive real monetary value for your business and spending budget, on leads that actually turn into sales.

What are offline conversions?

We all know that just because someone fills in a form on a website, it doesn’t necessarily equate to custom or income for your business. A lot of the time it simply indicates interest from a user without the commitment to buy. Yet when we are tracking conversions in Google Ads, measuring this commitment to buy is likely one of your goals, and so, although it’s great that we are able to attract users who are engaging with the site, this doesn’t generate monetary value.

So how can we start to bring in and track users who are actually generating revenue and completing the sales at the end of the conversion journey? With basic Google Ad accounts, the tracking stops at the form fill – but it doesn’t have to be that way. Offline conversions allows you to track that form fill right to the end of the sales funnel even though this isn’t being tracked online.

How do I set up offline conversions?

In Google Ads, we need to set up new conversion actions for each of the offline actions we want to track. This can be pulled from Salesforce or other data sources and CRMs.

Using the Google Click ID (GCLID) and the Customer Relationship Manager (CRM), we can follow each conversion to see whether they ended up making a purchase with your business. When a user fills in a form on your site, you can capture the GCLID which stays in the CRM with each open lead. As the user works their way through the sales process, we can track each stage up until the deal is closed. We can then upload these clicks and the ‘offline conversions’ that they completed.

How do offline conversions work?

Completing the set up as above allows Google to take the GCLID and map it back to the click that converted. This will add in these extra offline conversions and you will be able to see in the interface which of the campaigns are driving leads that generate actual value. You can then take this a step further by looking at each step of the conversion journey and applying different CPAs to each stage of the funnel. This will give a new level of data to Google, highlighting how much you are willing to spend for each type of conversion.

Google will firstly try to drive as many ‘Closed Deals’ as it can, before moving down to ‘Sales Qualified Leads,’ then down to ‘Marketing Qualified Leads.’ Finally, if it can’t find any of the above, Google will try to drive ‘Lead.’ This means that Google is now using this data to push for as many of the higher quality conversions as possible.

What are the next steps for growth?

By importing offline conversions you will hopefully be able to analyse the data more effectively. Alongside the actual sales data this should then help to drive better quality leads for your account. But how can we use this to grow? The next step to help drive growth and give Google as much information as possible is to attach revenue figures to the leads. This means that Google can take each conversion and the value it generated to understand the different types of users, their search behaviour, and buying signals, to effectively target more users and drive higher revenue. You can then start to utilise more monetary based bidding, maximise conversion value or Target ROAS to drive as many high value leads as possible.

Yes, I know it may sound weird using ‘e-commerce’ targets for lead generation but, at the end of the day, you want to drive value for the business, not just pretty digital metrics that end up falling off in the conversion funnel.

Final thoughts about Offline conversions

Offline conversion tracking is the next big thing in Google Ads; your competitors are probably doing it so you should definitely make a start. Try to implement it sooner rather than later to generate better quality data within your Google Ads account and start to drive better conversions. You can then showcase the true value of your PPC campaigns, not only driving leads but driving leads that actually matter.

Contact us to find out how we apply a range of Google Shopping practises to drive real value for your business

What Is A CSS Provider And Do I Need One?

16th December 2022

by Anna Simpson Paid Search

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

Combining Supplemental Feeds and Scripts for Better Performing Campaigns

9th December 2022

by Anna Simpson Paid Search

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.

Custom Labels – the most underrated Google Ads tool?

2nd December 2022

by Anna Simpson Paid Search

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.