What Google's Earnings Reports Tell Us About AdWords Trends?
- Amber Liu
- May 2, 2014
- 2 min read
Google has officially announced that the current Google Shopping product ad format will be fully replaced by Google Shopping Campaigns in August. Google Advertisers have roughly 100 days to switch to Google Shopping Campaigns. Use these tips to ensure it's a smooth transition.
Here are some helpful tips to get you set up with Google Shopping Campaigns:
Firtst, utilize shopping campaign tools.
Bid Simulator: If your bids are too high it will show you how many impressions you stand to lose and the difference in cost.
Multiple Ad Groups: Start by creating an All Products Product Group, and then choose your sub Product Groups based on your inventory data. You'll likely want to start with a category Product Group, and segment into more specific attributes like brand and best-seller.
Item Level Detail: Shopping campaigns highlights more granular product data within AdWords, which you can use to generate product reports and analyze historical data.
Impression Share & Benchmark CPC: Highlights competitor data which you can use to optimize bids.
Geo-Targeting: Modify your traffic based on location. You may not need to exclude any areas, but do some digging in AdWords and Analytics to make sure you aren't wasting any spend.
Mobile Traffic: Contrary to hype, mobile doesn't always perform well. Delve into your performance data to determine mobile performance, or test mobile in Shopping Campaigns to ensure you are leveraging your spend.
Dayparting: Changing how much visibility your ads get based on the time of the day and day of the week is huge. If you're not experimenting here you're likely wasting ad spend or losing conversions.
Second, switch to Google Shopping Campaigns smoothly
Don't run Shopping Campaigns with PLAs. Shopping Campaigns are replacing PLAs - structure Shopping Campaigns while PLAs are live and pause PLAs when you are ready to switch over. If you have Google Shopping Campaigns and current PLAs set up, you are running two ad campaigns that are going to overlap and waste your ad budget.
Build out slowly. The Custom Labels and initial Product Groups you choose for Shopping Campaigns are important. Start your campaign simple, and build out based on product performance. Pick one way of grouping products (e.g., category) and build out from there initially.
Be careful what you delete. Because Shopping Campaigns are structured on top of one another, if you delete a top product group, you can delete all of the product groups within it. It's possible to delete an entire campaign structure very quickly. I repeat: be careful what you delete.
