IRCE Workshop: Smarter Bidding Boosts an E-Retailer's Returns from a New Google Ad Format

This is IRCE workshop Smarter Bidding Boosts an E-Retailer's Returns from a New Google Ad Format, presented by Tom Novellino, CEO - Metaverse Corp. and Dave Schwartz, General Manager, Product Ads - DataPop This session is about Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs), which are being converted from PLAs to "Google Shopping Campaigns" by August.

PLA's have grown to > 25% of Metaverse's PPC revenue.

Feed quality and the data in your feed to Google really matters for product listing ads.

Make sure you understand what services your paid search agency provides for PLAs - uploading feeds? Bid management? Feed management? Reporting? They should be doing all of those things for you.

PLA Growth opportunities:

  • Optimize your feeds
  • Tie content in feeds to search terms
  • Use your paid search results as your guide
  • Segment your products to manage bids for better ROI
  • Considering segmenting by margin or price
  • Must switch to Google Shopping Campaigns by August, which allow for more granular feeds for bid management
  • Conversion optimization - review bounce rates on traffic vs paid campaigns

Active PLA Management

The feed is your ad experience - so make sure your feeds provide a great experience. For instance, keep your product titles in the feed to less than 25 characters, with product names targeted at search keywords.

Changing your product titles so they fit the format generalized color + brand + category see massive improvements - 239% revenue lift, ROAS increased 107%, CTR increase 16%, clicks increased 81

Most of your competitors are getting Google PLAs/Shopping campaigns wrong, so there’s a lot of opportunity for smart retailers.

New Google Shopping campaigns let you see all of your feed fields in AdWords and it introduces custom labels. You can annotate your feed with 5 additional labels about your product, such as:

  1. Price Range - 0-50, 50-100, 100+
  2. Margin levels - <25%, 25-50%, >50%
  3. Sale product - Yes, No
  4. % Discount - 0%, 10%, 20%, 30%+
  5. Inventory levels - In, Out, Low, Distressed

Some retailers are even pulling social data - items that are being pinned a lot, liked a lot, shared a lot on social platforms - into their custom labels.

What should I do next?

  1. Look at your feed
  2. Find your top sellers
  3. Test some copy variations
  4. Control your account structure

Analyze PLA and SEM data to identify gaps - target high performing SEM queries in PLAs, and identify keyword expansion opportunities.

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