October 24, 2022
Our PPC Manager, Laura, has almost a decade's worth of experience in managing Paid Search accounts for online retailers. So, when it comes to demystifying the mammoth that is Google Shopping Ads, she's your gal. Laura's comprehensive guide covers both the basics and beyond to get you started with Google Shopping Ads...
Introduction
What Is Google Shopping?
Google Shopping is a product discovery experience - the goal is to make it easy for users to research purchases, find information about different products, their features and prices and then connect with sellers to make their purchase.
If you’ve ever searched for a product on Google, it’s likely you’ve already seen a Google Shopping ad before, as per the example below for the search query ‘Ankle Boots Womens’.
The Merchant Centre
Store All Information In One Place
‘But how do I give Google all this data?’ I hear you ask!
Well, for this we use Google’s Merchant Centre, which you can sign up to here.
Once signed up, you’ll need to provide Google with several details in something called a ‘Feed’.
How this is sent through to Google is up to yourselves and your developers, but there are three main ways most use:
- Scheduled Fetch: Google can fetch your feed directly from your server
- Upload: Upload files directly to the Merchant Centre via SFTP, FTP, Google Cloud Storage or manually.
- Website crawl: If there are no feeds currently in your account and you have the appropriate structured data on your website, Google can crawl your website to retrieve your product data.
Sometimes when uploading there are errors; Google will provide you with more details on how to resolve these though the ‘Diagnostics’ tab, and once you’ve got some products ready to go, you can start advertising on Google Shopping!
Campaign Types
Standard vs P Max
So, you’ve built your feed, you have your Google Ads account created - now you can start to advertise on Shopping.
Currently, there are two ways to serve ads on Google Shopping: through Standard campaigns and Performance Max (P Max).
Standard Shopping campaigns have been around longer than I’ve been working in digital (well over 9 years now!), and allow the user to have a lot of control over their campaign bids, what terms you do (or rather, DON’T show for through the ability to add negative keywords - search terms you can tell Google not to show an ad to), location bidding, time of day bidding and so much more.
Performance Max campaigns, however, rely almost entirely on Google’s Automated bidding strategies with little to no control over bids, terms being targeted, location bidding etc.
Performance Max gives this control over to Google by telling them what target they should aim for, such as return on investment, and Google will use it’s own learnings to reach this target.
Whilst Standard campaigns do allow for more control, it does mean that you spend a lot of time doing menial tasks; and you can only make changes when you have the time to do so.
With Performance Max, however, Google assesses thousands of indicators to determine when to show an ad and how much we should be paying for it at each and every auction.
Performance Max Campaigns
Optimise For Your Marketing Objectives
We’re fully aboard the Performance Max train here at Ortus!
We’ve seen incredible growth of our clients since enabling these campaign types - especially as P Max no longer just targets Shopping ads within on campaign type.
P Max allow advertisers to access all Google Ads channels; Search, Display, YouTube and more, all within one campaign.
Where Ads Can Show With P Max
The reason this is beneficial to your account is twofold; more brand awareness, and more data per campaign for Google to use to optimise for.
To target on all of these platforms, you will need to provide Google with imagery, and if you have them, videos.
Brand Awareness
By running Performance Max campaigns, it’s likely you’ll be targeting on more channels than you have perhaps advertised on previously; it will target customers on Search as they look for your products or related items, targeting keywords perhaps you hadn’t thought to target before.
As the customer browses the web - spending time perhaps on YouTube, Gmail, blogs, your ads can show to these customers throughout the Google Network, reminding them about your business.
More Data
Google recommends when using Automated Bidding Strategies to have a minimum of 50 conversions per campaign over 30 days to give Google enough data to optimise for customers most likely to convert.
As such, the more data Google has, the better they can optimise. With Performance Max targeting multiple Google Channels, the better chance there is for conversions, and as such the more Google can optimise; leaving you with better conversion rates, CPC bids and a higher ROAS.
Google studies indicate that introducing P Max to your account can incur an additional 12% conversion value when compared to the now retired Smart Shopping campaigns, which previously saw 30% additional value when compared against Standard Shopping campaigns (rSC).
This is additional revenue at the same ROAS targets as before.
Goals & Settings
How To Best Set Up Campaigns
tROAS bidding
We’ve mentioned frequently throughout this blog ROAS - well, for Performance Max campaigns, giving Google a ROAS target is imperative to giving the campaign the best chance of working well.
When creating the campaign, you can give Google such information through the ‘Bidding’ setting, as in the image below; if you’ve been running Google Ads in the past, have a look for your average ROAS target and set the campaign up to match it or just below.
If you’re new to Google Ads, we’d recommend looking at what returns will allow you to break-even or see profit and give the campaign this ROAS target.
If your goal is to initially just build traffic, then you can also click the ‘Change bid strategy’ button and change this from focussing on ‘Conversion Value’ to ‘Conversions’ - this will essentially tell Google to get as many sales as possible with little care for ROAS.
Similarly, you can use this option if you want to run on a Cost Per Acquisition basis (CPA) instead of a return focus; we sometimes use this for clients who have lower value items like Samples that sell extremely well, but cause the ROAS of the account to appear low.
We do sometimes implement this (without the tCPA option) for the first week when building campaigns out in order to build traffic quickly, which again provides Google with a lot of data, and then apply a tROAS/tCPA bid setting to it later.
Optimise For Customer Acquisition
Another nifty little feature of the Performance Max campaign is the option to optimise for acquiring New Customers (New Customer Acquisition).
With this option, you can give additional revenue to customers who Google mark as New Customers (you can tell Google who this is by creating audiences in the account, such as ‘All Visitors Last 30 Days’ or ‘Customer Match Lists’ (email subscribers you upload to the account) and advising that these are past visitors - anyone who doesn’t meet this criteria would be classed as Existing Users.
Adding additional revenue to customers who are classed as ‘New’ means that they should be converting at a higher ROAS due to the higher revenue value.
As such, when using tROAS bidding, Google’s automation will identify new users as those with a better ROS and as such should focus on targeting these users over existing customers.
Strategic Approach
Multiple Performance Max Campaigns
Sometimes, items on your site may have a varied range of margins - for example, a Lighting client may sell Chandeliers worth over £5,000, and then sell bulbs are generic lighting for just 1% of this price.
The Chandeliers may have a much higher margin available than for a standard bedroom light worth £60.
Therefore, you would want to apply a higher ROAS target for those smaller value items, and a lower ROAS target to the higher value ones as there’s more margin in these products.
Therefore, we’d suggest merging all items with similar margins into one Performance Max campaign, and create another P Max campaign for a different margin group, and so on.
This means you’re not straining Google’s automation by having too high a ROAS target applied for those lower margin items if they were grouped in with high margin items.
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