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\n\nSTEP 1: Fix Common Data Feed Errors\n\nSimple data errors can easily sink an account. Pricing is a common one. If you’ve introduced sales pricing or if your prices have changed, and those changes are either not reflected in the feed in Merchant Center, products will be disapproved and your account may be warned. Same goes for shipping changes – you cannot advertise free shipping if in fact there’s a charge to ship products.\n\nStock status is another big factor. Products do sometimes sell out quickly – but there’s no excuse for continuing to advertise products that have been out of stock for days or even weeks. Updating stock status regularly ensures ad spend stays with products that can be purchased by the customer.\n\nWe also sometimes see clients that have incorrect or outdated images or links associated with products. This issue can send conversion rate spiraling, as customers often don’t wish to purchase an item that represented differently on the site than in the ad. Dead links are even worse – customers can’t purchase anything from a 404 page!\n\n
\nData errors go beyond incorrect or mismatched information. Sometimes, data is missing altogether – and that can be disastrous for advertising.
\n\nEvery feed needs to contain the required fields for Google Shopping. These include the obvious suspects like title, product URL, and price, but also include attributes like brand and imagery. Certain products require additional information, including color, size, or condition. Bundles and multipacks are also treated differently and require some additional attributes in the feed.
Important note: All of the above is pertinent to the US. Feeds for sale in other countries may be subject to still further requirements, depending on local regulation.
There are a number of other fields that aren’t required by Google – but that you should absolutely use to segment and optimize your feed. Ensuring these attributes have consistent, up-to-date information goes a long way toward building a profitable Google Shopping strategy. We’ll cover product segmentation more in depth in the next section!
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\nOnce you’ve got all your products in the feed, and you’ve ensured the accuracy of all the data, it’s time to optimize.
\n\nTitles and descriptions are an easy place to start. It’s helpful here to have an idea of how your customers search for your items – check the list in Google Ads to find out. Once you’ve got that information, consider reworking the title or description to better resonate with your customer base. There are limits to this, obviously – you still need these attributes to be readable and within the appropriate character limits.
\n\nProducts like clothing, snack food, and furniture often have a lot of variants based on color, size, flavor, or pattern. If your products fall into one of these categories, you should ensure each and every variant has its own unique URL. Google uses landing page URL as the factor to determine unique products – so if all of your products of a certain parent SKU share a landing page, only one will be eligible to serve for a given term. This can greatly limit impression share.
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\nHonestly, this is where most of the issues we see related to #1-3 arise. Often, the data is perfectly up-to-date and accessible on the site, but relevant updates and changes have failed to make it to the product feed. Google Merchant Center is then operating with a bad or out-of-date data set – causing mismatches in data and a whole host of other problems.
\n\nWe recommend syncing the feed at least daily, if only to keep stock status and pricing as accurate as possible. Checking Merchant Center also puts you in a much better position to catch and fix errors promptly, before they can result in account warnings or even suspension.
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\n\nThe one universal rule for product segmentation in Google Shopping: don’t go too big, and don’t go too small. Many retailers lump every product into one or maybe two ad groups (in fact, Google recommends this strategy for its Smart Shopping campaigns.) Unfortunately, this isn’t a good strategy. Pushing too many products into a single product group seriously limits your ability to make data-driven decisions on your advertising. You’ll have a very limited ability to drive spend to the segments that are actually creating sales, and will have even less power to control spend on items that don’t convert.\n\nLikewise – you don’t want to segment your products too tightly. Doing so will give you a very small sample size for most products, making it extremely difficult to decide what’s working, and what isn’t. After all – it’s hard to decide based on two or three clicks whether a product should acquire more spend or not!\n\nOther than the universal rule, the rest is up to you. What’s important to measure, for your business? Which segments make sense, given your product lines and customer purchase behavior? Perhaps you should segment by brand, or by category. You can also introduce historical sales data to segment out top sellers or weak items, to direct spend in a way that makes sense for those products. Directing spend with intention is the best way to ensure a profitable Google Shopping strategy. \n\n\n
\nSegmentation is a two-pronged approach. We’ve covered product segmentation, which is the first piece of the puzzle. The second piece is query segmentation (or segmentation by query intent.) The premise is simple. Take a list of your search term data and divide the queries into three categories: generic, qualified, and product-specific. For example you might make the designations in the chart to the right.
\n\nSounds easy, right? Not necessarily, if you’re talking about thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of search terms! There are a number of ways to accomplish this. You can do it manually (although as we mentioned above, this is going to be an essentially impossible task for midsize or large retailers.) You can also use an ngram analysis, which splits keywords into categories according to likelihood of conversion. At Omnitail, we use a set of in-house tools designed especially to segment queries quickly and effectively.
\n\nThis process is crucial to our three-tiered campaign structure, which we’ll cover in the next section!
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\nAt Omnitail, we advocate for a three-tier Google Shopping campaign structure. Ideally this aligns to the segmentation you’ve already created above. For example, you could use a different campaign for each of your product segments, and apply the three tiers as a representation of query intent.
\nAt Omnitail we divide query intent into generic, qualified, and item-specific terms. Generic terms are least likely to convert because they show less purchase intent. Someone searching for “men’s socks” is less likely to buy your specific item than someone searching purposely for an item-specific term such as “omnitail men’s blue polka-dot socks”.
\nUsing these three tiers, you can direct spend according to the the likelihood of conversion—bidding more on item-specific terms, and less on generic.
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\n\nPretty much anyone who’s taken a 101-level business course has encountered this equation.\n\nIt’s not much more complicated in advertising. We often call this metric contribution, to denote that the amount here is the amount contributed by our channel to overall operating profit – but the concept remains the same. The complication begins in accurate tracking, and in tailoring this metric to your business. You need an accurate way to track both costs and revenue, and an understanding of how your advertising impacts each of those metrics.\n\nFor online-only retailers, Google Analytics’ Ecommerce tracking is a great solution. Connecting Google Analytics to Google Ads will give you sales and revenue data on the campaign and ad group level. For hybrid or brick-and-mortar retailers, it’s tricky. Many organizations use third-party software to measure the impact of their ads on phone sales, or even on store visits. Although it’s not ideal, you could also develop an informed assumption for sales lift due to advertising, and apply that to your metrics and reporting.\n\nWill profit-driven management work for items that don’t have much available margin?\n\nAbsolutely! While most retailers obviously want to preserve margin on most items, clearance or discount items are an exception. In this case, it’s sometimes better to sacrifice available margin to limit losses. We cover how to drive profit on clearance items in a blog post – check it out for more details!\n
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\n\n\nNeed help managing your Google Shopping campaigns?\n\nOur expert analysts can optimize your product feed, organize your ad groups, and track your performance. Reach out today for a free analysis of your current campaigns. Connect with an Omnitail analyst and see what profit-driven marketing can do for your business.
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