Andrew is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Marin Software where he is tasked with building innovative digital advertising functionality that helps brands grow online. His voice at the company is largely that of the customer – helping ensure that Marin delivers what the market wants. Prior to his time at Marin, Andrew worked at independent agencies in New York and Austin, focused on eCommerce and lead generation. Andrew received a Bachelor’s degree in Communications from the University of Tennessee and enjoys traveling, listening to music, and spending time with family and friends.
Last week, Google announced on its blog that moving forward “search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free listings, helping merchants better connect with consumers, regardless of whether they advertise on Google.” This change is a major shift for Google as the company looks to expand its marketplace play as an alternative (dare we say, “competitor”) to Amazon’s dominance.
What do we expect to happen next:
More shoppers - COVID-19 and a surge in online shopping likely forced Google to make this move sooner than it was planning. As Amazon found itself struggling to keep up with order fulfillment, shoppers really took to exercising their shopping options across the internet, comparing to see who had what and how soon they were able to get it. As a marketer, now is the time to evaluate messaging, put your best foot forward, and meet new customers at the marketplace.
Impression share will be a key metric to focus on - Take a snapshot of where you were prior to the advent of free listings and keep this in mind as a benchmark or target to work toward. With a huge influx of new listings (and impression volume), impression shares for existing Shopping advertisers are most likely going to drop. Using impression share as an optimization goal is a wise option once you know what the adjusted range is.
Product feed optimization will become more meaningful - Now that Google Shopping is not “pay-to-play” only, there is a more important emphasis on having really high quality product content. With a growing field of competition, relevance is paramount. Listed below are a few of the more important must-do’s to get the most out of your feed:
Learn More
It’s a unique time to be in online retail, and any business that advertises products on Google should evaluate its own response to this change. If you are confident that your business can satisfy fulfillment with an expansion to Google Shopping, see Google’s help center for more details on how to get started. Google’s Shopping Insights page can also be a useful resource to understand trends and benchmarking numbers. Maybe it makes sense to expand step-by-step by listing select products or categories and adding more over time. It really depends on your goals and priorities.
As a reminder, you can always subscribe to our blog to get more tips on how to stay ahead of the game with your advertising efforts.
Are you looking for better performance out of your Amazon Advertising campaigns? We recently added a few new features designed to deliver results. We’ve teamed up some of the world’s largest brands to solve their retail challenges -- if you’re interested in learning how we can help you out click here.
Does your performance vary over the course of the week? Are you running out of budget too early in the day? Dayparting empowers our customers to apply bid modifiers by hour of day and day of week to automatically allocate budgets for Sponsored Product campaigns to the highest performing windows.
Some example uses include setting different bid schedules for weekdays compared to weekends, increasing bids in the afternoon when competitor budgets run out or bidding down lower-performing overnight hours. This unique Marin feature is a must-try for any Amazon Advertiser. .
The Sponsored Display ad sets itself apart from Sponsored Brand and Sponsored Product Ads because its ads can be displayed both off and on Amazon.com. Advertisers can increase their product awareness and demand across the web by reaching the right audiences for their business.
Marin offers full reporting capabilities for Amazon Sponsored Display ads and also provides campaign management. We also support scheduled actions to pause or activate campaigns on specified dates/times.
Do you know how many of the customers you are reaching with Google and Facebook ads are converting on Amazon? With Amazon Attribution you can. Amazon Attribution is a powerful solution for tracking on-Amazon sales driven by off-Amazon sources (search or social ads)).
Marin connects the Amazon revenue with the publisher cost to present the full picture together. For example, where previously a Google sitelink pointed to Amazon would only show cost and no sales, Marin will link the revenue from Amazon Attribution and tie it back to the object, allowing for powerful reporting and optimization automation -- eliminating the guesswork and enabling optimization through revenue-targeted bidding.
Want to learn more? Drop us a line!
The 2020 holiday season is still a ways off, but an understanding of what happened last season will give you a solid foundation for making this year’s plans. This article highlights some of the key trends we noticed in eCommerce advertising including a shift in ad spend between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, higher ROAS through mid-December, and highlight lower costs-per-click for advertisers through the 2019 season.
While reading, keep in mind the 2019 holiday shopping season was about a week shorter than 2018 due to a late Thanksgiving. In 2019, the window between Black Friday and Christmas day was 26 days compared to 32 days in the previous year.
eCommerce advertising data, led by Amazon Advertising, was indexed across Marin’s customer base for 2019 and 2018. Our methodology takes the October average for each metric and uses that as a baseline (100) for the rest of the data that year. Data in the graphs show whether any day was higher (100+) or lower (100-) versus the baseline of its respective year.
In 2019, our customer base spent slightly more (+2%) on Black Friday compared to Cyber Monday. This marks a shift from 2018 where Cyber Monday outspent Black Friday by nearly 40%.
So why the change? Potentially with the increased confidence in mobile shopping, Black Friday can be seen as another “online holiday” as shoppers find similar deals shopping on their own as opposed to lining up at the stores.
Cyber Monday and Black Friday are by far the best days in the holiday season when it comes to overall sales, but increase competition drives CPCs higher and pushes down ROAS. The good news is that ROAS rebounds through the rest of December, peaking at the shipping cut-off dates. One theory could be that many of those December sales were influenced by strong Black Friday / Cyber Monday advertising which “primed the pump” and led to a later-date purchase.
This ROAS growth illustrates where advertisers find their wins throughout the entire holiday season, not just its biggest volume days.
eCommerce CPCs saw less upward pressure in 2019 compared to 2018 making it a more stable environment for advertisers. The trends follow a similar pattern in each year, ramping up and peaking during the “Cyber Five Day” then leveling out through December, but the indexed CPC numbers were closer to the October baseline for all of December 2019 as opposed to being closer to 1.5x the baseline in 2018.
This could be the result of gained experience in the space, better planning, and better bidding decisions throughout the 2019 holiday season.
Now is the time to revisit your results from last year while it is fresh. First off, make sure you have a means to store your Q4 2019 data for reference when 2020 holiday season rolls around. To solve for that, Marin now provides a free reporting solution to store and access your performance data for eCommerce, Search, and Social. Also, start thinking about how aggressive ad spend on one day might influence increased sales weeks later, and the general “flywheel effect” with eCommerce. Last, consider new ad types, run tests, and implement workflows that will save time and put you in a better place through 2020.
With 2019 in the rearview we’re excited to partner with brands to help them hit their 2020 targets and will share findings and opportunities as we analyze Marin customer data through the year.
As you may know, the leading eCommerce publisher only retains performance data for the most previous 60 days on a rolling basis. This means that you will not be able to see 2019 Black Friday data after January 27th 2020. But how am I going to make year over year comparisons of peak seasonal periods, you ask. We’ve got the answer.
Marin Go is our free enterprise-class reporting tool that will automatically preserve your eCommerce, Search and Social data.
Marin Go is perfectly suited for eCommerce advertisers who need a robust, cross-channel solution to pick up where publisher reporting tools fall short. Marin Go allows advertisers to report on performance down to the keyword and creative level with flexible reporting, charting, and dashboard capabilities—at absolutely no cost.
Although time’s running out for you to save your 2019 Black Friday/Cyber Monday data, you still have a chance to successfully forecast your 2020 initiatives and perform year-over-year comparisons. Simply act now to secure your data and head into the rest of the year with confidence..
Remember the date: January 27th. And, be sure to use Marin Go to make the process easier. In addition to data retention, Marin Go provides a variety of benefits for eCommerce advertisers at any time of the year:
To make sure you hit the January 27th deadline to retain your data and make your ad campaign reporting easier:
Good luck and happy/easy reporting!
We all know by now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) smashed records once again as digital commerce continues to grow domestically and across the globe. What we found by looking at Marin customer data echoes this growth, but also highlights some key differences from this year compared to last during the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday—now known in the industry as the "Cyber Five."
For one, Cyber Monday was in December this year, which may have influenced BFCM advertising budgets—spanning two months as opposed to a typical BFCM that has both dates in November.
eCommerce data, led by Amazon Advertising, was indexed across Marin’s customer base for 2019 and 2018. Our methodology takes the mean of the first week of November and uses that as the baseline (100). Data for each day shows whether that day was higher (100+) or lower (100-) versus the baseline.
ROAS trended down
On Black Friday, conversion rate and revenues per click were up, but not by as much as the costs per click. As a result, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) was down. This implies high competition around peak seasonality. It stresses the need to place bets wisely and plan ahead so that you’re well-positioned to withstand the bid wars.
2019 ad spend increase lags into late November
The ad spend climb this year was more modest and sustained compared to last year, which saw sharp increases. Again, this was likely due to the higher number of days leading up to Black Friday this year, with the day falling on the 29th.
It’s noteworthy that in 2018, the four days in the lead-up to Black Friday had 2x the mean spend, whereas in 2019 only one day, the immediate day prior to Black Friday (Thanksgiving) saw a 2x increase before Black Friday.
Spike in pre-Black Friday CPCs
As the graph below shows, advertising CPCs rose sharply in the three days leading up to Black Friday. Black Friday CPCs were slightly higher than on Cyber Monday. Though the increase (1.5x the baseline) is consistent with 2018, this year it took advertisers only a couple of days to get there, versus last year’s steady, two-week ramp-up.
A boon for Google Shopping
Google Shopping CPCs were up 17% YoY through the “Cyber Five” period, perhaps due to new additional placements on YouTube that may have driven CPCs higher.
We’ll continue to monitor the year’s ad trends through the holidays—it looks like with growth across Amazon, Google, and others during the 2019 season as a whole will set records.
With the rise of Shopping ads campaigns and other dynamic ad formats, feed automation is now a crucial aspect of maximizing performance on search marketing programs.
Once you've prepped your product feed and inserted all the right keywords, there's an important next step: making sure your feed is optimized for peak performance.
Here, we discuss a few common optimization issues and how you can tackle them.
Before you start digging deeper into your product feed concerns, it’s important to identify problems and answer a few common questions from the get-go:
By resolving these types of issues, you can make sure your product data—especially your titles—are as optimized as possible to run clean feed-based ad campaigns.
Next, let’s dive into taking your high-quality product feed and building it into conversion-friendly ad campaigns.
First, a general rule of thumb is to apply the 80/20 rule:
Once you've set up this system, it'll be much easier to manage your product feed. The workflow becomes simple to extract or segment from the 60 percent into the top 20 percent, as you’re constantly finding high-performing products and breaking them out individually.
Also, your 20 percent catch-all allows you to maintain a good level of coverage for every product that’s shown in your catalog. (This is similar to keyword-based campaigns that have keyword and match-type combinations like broad, phrase, and exact.)
This structure is simple to use and supports smooth, clean product management for your feed-based ad campaigns.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to automating and optimizing your product feed. For other great tips, tricks, and information—including establishing the right bidding model, addressing data issues, handling cross-channel product feed challenges, and more—download our guide, Product Feeds Unleashed: Automating Your Ad Campaigns.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
Amazon is on a mission to help advertisers increase awareness and drive sales on its platform. To this end, they’ve made a suite of ad types available that more and more advertisers are embracing, including the focus of this three-part series—Sponsored Products.
With the Amazon Sponsored Products ad campaign type, you can create innumerable combinations of keywords, products, and other targets to advertise your product catalog. As Prime Day approaches and to get you up to speed with this robust ad type, let’s take a look, in our first article in the series, at some structural examples of Sponsored Products ads and the benefits of each one.
Amazon Sponsored Products allow for a really interesting interplay between keyword and product selection. This concept is especially important when considering what products you want to pair with your high-value brand keywords. In most cases, you want to use these keywords to do one of a few different things. Add brand keywords and then select products that are:
Use these keywords to your advantage and keep in mind the strategies don’t have to be mutually exclusive. With Sponsored Products, finding the right product selection can be just as important as including the right keywords.
How are you using the Purchased Product report? This report provides details on the actual ASINs purchased after a customer clicked your ad, whether the product was advertised or not.
[caption id="attachment_12928" align="alignnone" width="500"]
Purchased Product report[/caption]
For a Sponsored Products campaign you’re required to selectively add products to advertise. Only those products selected will show in your Sponsored Products ad. However, that doesn’t prevent someone from purchasing a product that’s not the same as the one advertised. This is where the Purchased Product report is useful.
One strategy is to use your best-selling product or variant as a lead-in Sponsored Product. This is a more conservative approach than selecting a wider group of products and leaving it to Amazon to determine which to advertise.
With the “one for all” approach, you’re able to review the Purchased Product report and understand if more products or variants should be added to the campaign, or possibly if there are undiscovered products that are being purchased more often than the one being advertised!
A Sponsored Products campaign set to Automatic can be extremely valuable in an exploratory sense. With this setting, there is no keyword selection—you get to leave all that to Amazon. This lets you focus on product selection and removes the guesswork.
After some time, review your Search Query reports to see what terms are working well, and break these out into a new campaign with a Manual setting. Using this process enables you to make data-driven decisions—picking keywords that have already proven to work, and assigning bids based on accrued historical data.
These are just a handful of the strategies to consider when using Amazon Sponsored Products. Here, we’ve only looked at keyword targeting, but things start to get even more interesting and sophisticated with the newly introduced Product Attribute Targets (PATs). More on those in a future article. For now, stay tuned for the next post in this Sponsored Products series, where we’ll go deeper into the targeting methods that Amazon uses for this ad type.
Google’s responsive search ads (RSAs) have been up and running since mid-2018, and several best practices are emerging that focus on a few key areas:
Here, we detail each of these ways search advertisers can create effective and high-performing RSAs.
The first step is to stop procrastinating—add a few RSAs to existing search campaigns alongside text ads. In the search ads app, there’s a recommendation link on the upper left side of the page that brings up the RSA ads that Google suggests adding to ad groups. If you opt to not use these recommendations, focus on a few high-volume ad groups, with a minimum of 100 weekly impressions.
It’s important to provide Google’s machine learning with enough impressions to test and understand which ads work best with which users. Choose headlines both with and without keywords, either by using dynamic keyword insertion or static headlines that use a variety of terms. When creating headlines and descriptions, think across the funnel—users search differently when they’re top of funnel versus about to make a purchase.
Be sure to max out the assets for RSAs and provide 8-10 headlines and 3-4 descriptions. Include a variety of creative that focuses on products, services, problems solved, benefits, types of users, and calls to action.
Remember that users respond differently to different approaches—one person may be looking for discounts, while another may be focused on luxury brands. The more varied the assets, the more Google’s machine learning can predict which messages will appeal to which users.
RSAs are designed to use machine learning to fully customize ads to meet user need based on what Google knows about them. Although pinning may be necessary for legal compliance within the organization, it also constrains the machine-learning algorithms to do what they’re meant to do. When using pins, maintain a variety in each spot. For example, pin two or three variations of a headline or description to each position to let the machine learning work.
RSAs may need fine-tuning or pruning of any low performers. Look for ‘0’ impression assets and see if they’re too similar to other assets (i.e., not enough variety in the headlines and descriptions). Remember to use dynamic and static keyword insertion to leverage great keywords.
And, don’t forget to make sure RSAs are compatible with campaign extensions. RSAs show up just like any other search ad—users don’t see a difference. To measure RSA impact, set campaigns to ‘auto rotate’ for an apples-to-apples comparison with text ads. As data accumulates, tweak and fine-tune RSA assets to continue to improve performance.
Many machine-learning innovations like RSAs are providing marketers with a valuable advantage: the opportunity to focus on being creative rather than being spreadsheet jockeys. The goal of all marketing is to connect with customers in a meaningful, personalized way. RSAs are one more touchpoint on that journey.
For more information on using RSAs to gain a tactical and competitive advantage, download our guide, Getting Started with Responsive Search Ads.
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Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
Everyone knows what it means when you say, “You are what you eat.” Well, a product feed is (quite literally) what your ad campaigns are eating. This is the diet that’s fed into your campaign structure and eventually constitutes various ad types across the primary platforms (Google, Amazon, Facebook), as well as hundreds of others. World-class athletes don’t sustain themselves on the daily corn dog, Fritos, and frozen pizza diet—nor do top brands promote their inventory with error-ridden product catalogs.
Here are a couple concepts to keep in mind for ensuring the long-term health and vitality of your advertising efforts.
Managing product feeds was historically one of those Wizard of Oz “man behind the curtain” jobs that rarely took priority over campaign management tasks like bidding and keyword expansion. The error here is viewing these as mutually independent of each other.
In fact, the product feed and campaign relationship is a left hand / right hand one, in which synergy yields the most efficient and results-driven performance. If you don’t know who’s managing your product feed—reach out, make a friend (and vice versa, feed folks).
As you implement best practices and consistently deliver clean, high-quality product data, the next step is understanding the performance effects and connecting more closely with your campaigns. Be sure to:
These strategies require investment in effort up front but yield good dividends for the brands that take the care to do it.
At the end of the month, Marin and Feedonomics will partner together on a webinar to discuss product feeds and ad campaigns, and give some real-world scenarios with the help of Hero Digital. Sign up today to join us on Thursday, January 31st, 10 am PT.
Speaker Bios
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics where he oversees all of Feedonomics’ Automation Processes. He loves taking the most annoying manual tasks and automating them. Brian has previously created several artificial intelligence websites and mobile apps that reached tens of millions of users per month. Brian received both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from UCLA, where he graduated summa cum laude.
Andrew Todd is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Marin Software where he is tasked with building innovative digital advertising functionality that helps brands grow online. His voice at the company is largely that of the customer – helping ensure that Marin delivers what the market wants. Prior to his time at Marin, Andrew worked at independent agencies in New York and Austin, focused on eCommerce and lead generation. Andrew received a Bachelor’s degree in Communications from the University of Tennessee and enjoys traveling, listening to music, and spending time with family and friends.
Emma Welcher has 6+ years of experience driving paid media strategy and performance for clients across a variety of industries and channels. From strategic planning to optimizations, Emma helps drive continued growth for lead generation and e-commerce clients. She is excited by how fast everything can change in digital marketing and the opportunity to leverage platform updates to stay ahead of the competition.
Just as they do with Sponsored Products, Amazon advertisers also have access to impactful placements with Sponsored Brands, which can help drive more clicks and better post-click customer interactions.
The prominence of these ads at the top of the page highlights the importance of testing. With so many variables (products, copy, images, etc.), advertisers have lots of testing options—and lots of ways to optimize for better performance.
Marin Tip: MarinOne supports reporting, automated bid management, and intuitive ad creation via Amazon’s API (beta) for Sponsored Brands campaigns.
Let’s craft some testing hypotheses particular to Sponsored Brands. Note that you can choose to run campaigns concurrently (one test and one control), or iteratively (week one control, week two test).
If you go with iterative, be aware of an apples to oranges scenario that may happen if volume is different for reasons beyond your control—for example, a sitewide sale that runs during the test week but not the control week. For reasons like this, this approach can be more difficult to qualify.
For a Sponsored Brands ad, you can select up to three products to showcase. Be aware of your keyword selection when deciding which products to advertise together. If you’re including broad, generic terms this might be a good campaign to include proven-winner products or bestsellers. If the keywords selected are brand-driven, consider including products that are new to market.
You should be able to easily measure performance by ASIN to see which should be featured in the Sponsored Brands ad and which shouldn’t. Promote products that have good reviews and images. Keep the other variables consistent and test to see which products get to stay.
The ad creative components for a Sponsored Brands ad require a custom message and a 400×400 pixel image. These elements open up lots of opportunities to test! Make sure the messaging copy lines up with your keyword selection and find out what messaging, in 50 characters or less, resonates with searchers.
Similarly, what image encourages shoppers to click the ad? There are the three images of your product selection, but how do you make the best use of the header image? You could use a logo or potentially a fourth product. Be mindful of Amazon’s creative acceptance policy, too, and the approval process these changes (and the aforementioned) all need to go through.
When you create a Sponsored Brands you have the option to drive clicks to your Store or to an aggregate page. A Store is a way for vendors and sellers to provide customers with curated content and a tailored experience on Amazon. Building a Store allows for a multitude of uses—including driving traffic via Sponsored Brands.
If sales is the primary goal, set a test to see where returns are strongest. A Store may provide a fuller, more immersive experience with your brand—to the point that no other brands or products will be featured. It’s all you. With headline copy, image, ASIN selection, and keywords all left static, which landing page experience produces the best outcome?
With this in mind, you should be ready to test. Remember to set the right parameters and frame your test before launching anything. You can get very precise and technical but the aim is more or less to change one variable, keep everything else consistent, and evaluate the impact that a single change has on performance. Now get out the lab coats and beakers!
Search advertisers are having an increasingly common conversation around the importance of product feed optimizations in the context of overall Shopping performance. Truly, you can’t maximize results of your campaigns by only managing campaign-side efforts or only tweaking the product feed.
To get the most out of your Shopping endeavors, it’s important to know what’s happening on both sides of the fence. This post explores a few scenarios to demonstrate why.
As long as they’re “in stock,” your products will continue to show on Shopping ads. This poses an issue when “in stock” means “only four left” or extremely limited sizes or colors. At some point, the product is no longer competitive. Be proactive by optimizing based on back-end inventory (excluding products in low supply) as opposed to waiting for performance to drop.
A product image can have as much impact on how a product sells online as its respective bid does.
If you’re only looking at CTR on the campaign side and notice a shift, perhaps it’s due to an image change on the feed side. It takes a unified approach to understand product attribute testing (like an image change) and the resulting impact on performance. Note that having multiple variables will blur results and make a test inconclusive—a proper test has a single variable.
In a worst-case scenario, a change in the feed can cause products to go offline. For example, think of an advertiser who has five product groups, all mapped out to Brand = definitions. These run for a few weeks and then, unbeknownst to the campaign manager, the Brand values for the products are all changed to something new.
This means the existing Brand = product groups would stop showing ads because there are no longer products in the feed that match that criteria. The same could apply to SKUs or any other criteria that depend on a product match in the feed itself.
Understanding that a feed attribute change can have a realized impact in a Shopping campaign is very important. Keeping this in mind allows you to test things like image variations (what’s the impact on clickthrough rate of a side image vs profile?) or titles (does adding brand name improve conversion rate?). Make sure that all the campaign-side optimizations (bids) are consistent, and you’ll get data-backed insights on what works and what doesn’t.
You’ve got your product feed set and sending to Merchant Center. You’ve created campaigns mapped from the attributes that make the most sense for your style of management. And, you’re pretty familiar with the set attributes you can use to define product groups:
Item IDBrandCategoryProduct TypeConditionChannelChannel ExclusivityCustom Labels
What about those custom labels, though?
Google allows for up to five custom labels per feed. Here are some effective and creative ways you can use them.
One clever way to use a custom label is to group SKUs together under a Parent ID. Think of this as a “Parent” and “Child” relationship where we group the Child SKUs under a Parent label.
For example, suppose you offer a coffee mug in different colors. Each variety has its own unique Item ID. You could assign the same “Parent” identification number to each of the variations, and then set a product group to define the set of the products—as opposed to having to map these individually by Item ID.
Product groups:
Custom_Label 0: 1234
Custom_Label 0: 1111
Custom_Label 0: 1213
Another interesting way to apply a custom label is to group products by their price point, or average order value. For example, you could apply values of “High,” “Medium,” or “Low” to products based on where they belong in the overall product mix. In your campaign, you could then segment out Product Groups based on these values, and utilize these levers to bid more or less aggressively on products based on their anticipated return and volume.
Categorizing products by how (or whether or not) they sell according to time of year can be a wise consideration depending on the nature of your business. Indicating these designations in the product feed allows you to increase or decrease bids across a range of products classified by time of year.
So, in the final days of summer, you could increase bids across all seasonal products and then, right after, immediately bid down on those after the heat breaks.
Product groups:
Custom_Label 1: Winter
Custom_Label 1: Summer
Custom_Label 1: Fall
These are just a few ways to apply custom labels—and give your campaigns levers to bid and segment on—that are completely specific to your account. The main takeaway is to use them.
Brainstorm what makes sense to be able to dictate volume by (whether or not a product is in peak season, whether or not it brings a high yield per order, etc.), then apply the values in the feed and create the defined product group in AdWords. Custom labels are the most flexible of the attributes available, so test them out and see what helps shift the needle in your overall Shopping performance.
Shopping has been a hot-button topic for some time now. While many customers have launched successful Shopping campaigns, there are some lesser-known features that may provide a quick additional boost or improvement to your current efforts.
Four such features are:
Marin fully supports performance reporting at the SKU level. With this extremely valuable data, advertisers can review products on a regular basis to see where individual SKUs prove to be candidates for segmentation or exclusion. If the SKU data warrants it, you can indicate a more aggressive or conservative bid.
To see SKU-level reporting enabled in Marin, work with your platform representative to append the appropriate parameter to the product groups, and to have the new feature enabled and backfilled.
Priority settings are extremely useful for advertisers who invest the time in building out multiple Shopping campaigns and want to maximize their effectiveness.
As Google describes the setting, “When you have the same product in multiple Shopping campaigns, you can determine which campaign should participate in the auction for that product with campaign priority. Your campaigns already have a priority: Low. But you can change this priority to Medium or High. These priorities determine the bid for any product that the campaigns share.”
The right mix of priority assignments and bid strategies by campaign solve the tricky issue of being able to control products that exist across multiple campaigns.
If you have metadata enabled on your site, it may be prudent to enable Google’s Automatic Item Updates feature. This allows Google to crawl your site and update Shopping based on the site’s inherent microdata information. This is mostly valuable in reconciling price discrepancies and/or availability.
Advertisers can choose from Google’s attributes for automatic updates:
Enabled in Google Merchant Center, a Promotion is an excellent way to differentiate your product from the competition and advertise your sale. You can assign Promotions to a subset of products or across all products in the feed, as applicable.
Google manually reviews all promotions for accuracy, so be sure to schedule these well in advance of the actual promotion launch so that the approval process won’t cause any delay. Also be sure you know Google’s Merchant Promotions Program Policies.
Get ahead of the competition by testing out some of this readily available advanced functionality! If you’re interested in speaking with a Shopping Consultant from Marin, get in touch with your platform representative. Or, if you're new to Marin, get in touch with our team.
