8 tips to optimize your Google shopping campaigns

Google Ads is one of the most significant platforms for retailers to grow their business. Spending the money on the products that perform well is the key element to determine whether a campaign is successful. For this concern, we have created a guideline that helps you to optimize your Shopping campaigns to have more transactions and avoid higher CPCs. 

Feed Quality is the first and most important step

Product feed is where Google will obtain the information of your products for display. The better quality product feed you provide, the better chance you will reach the right customers.

Before using Google Shopping campaigns, it is essential to have a very well designed and prepared product feed to prevent all possible mistakes that might have been made during the process. 

• The most common issues that affect the feed quality are related to the “images”, “title”, “description” and “price” fields which can easily be manipulated by a feed partner. 

Optimize your campaign structure

Your goal should be to have control over your ads, to enable this, you can bid differently for different products. 

You should not have one bid for every product because every product has its different profits and specialties that makes it popular or not. Although Google Ads provides you the ability to group your products, how you group your products is entirely up to you.

• You can divide your products or use ad groups according to their product type, Google Product Category, brand or custom labels.
• To be able to enrich the product feed with additional data sources that can provide profitability, seasonal discounts is an advantage of working with a feed partner where you can use custom labels according to those information.

The favorite might not be the favorite

It is a common action to use increasing bids for the favorite products. Hence, it might not be the best idea because you might be just spending your money unnecessarily. 

‍So to understand where to spend your money:

• Check the top vs others in segments
• Complete conversion, CPA or other metrics between favorite and others
• Remember that some products might be performing better when they're not shown at the top of search results

The shining stars vs falling stars 

Some of your products will shine since they have many transactions but the falling ones have attraction but no transactions. In that case, it is better to have interest in more shining ones. 

• Check Reports > Shopping > Select an attribute that you want to see shining ones 
• Filters can be your BFFs in this research but don’t forget if you are selling a luxury bag sometimes 150 clicks might be a shining star so decide accordingly to your market and campaign 
• Also,  products might have a higher CPC than your profit so these are fallen stars. Don't spend your money on them. 

When you see the shining stars, now it is time to adjust your bids according to them. It means bid more on shining and less on fallen ones. 

• You should exclude fallen stars if they have many visits and no transactions. 
• If you don't want to spend time on this process, CRwizard can do it for you! Just contact us and we can create a rule that automatically decides on your stars and if necessary, they can be excluded in one second. 

Negative keywords might be your positive boosters for budget

As it is known that you are unable to define keywords that will trigger your product ads to show. BUT, you have a chance to define your negative keywords which means you can choose keywords that you don’t want to show up. 

Imagine that you are selling hiking shoes, someone who is searching for daily shoes will not probably buy your products, however they can click your ads and it might be a dead-end for your budget. 

To prevent this, you can easily add “daily” as a negative keyword with that,  “daily shoes” will not trigger your ad. 

How to define the positive “negatives”: 

• Keywords > Details > search terms >  all
• This will show you all the terms that your ads triggered 
• Choose the keywords that might be negative to your budget and add them as negative keywords 

Adjust! Adjust! Adjust! 

We know that some clicks are more important than others. Using bid adjustments enables you to control when your ads are seen and who sees them. There are some categories that might be useful to use in adjusting time 

• Location: If you are selling in different areas, decide which area is performing better and has more competition. With that, you can increase your bids if those sales in that area are important. 
• Devices: Devices are important so you need to understand where the sales are coming from. If you sell more in desktops rather than mobile devices, focus on the bids for the desktops. 
• Schedule: Your products might be more attractive at certain times of the day or week, that’s why bidding the same for every time period might be stabbing your budget. So, check Reports > View > Time > Day of the week or hour of the day to have insights about the timings of your ads. 

Think twice before decide 

Google does not like tons of change at once. Google Shopping campaigns are so fragile that’s why before making a change, think twice about which adjustment will perform better. 

• Bids are also important for adjustments therefore do not increase or decrease your bids by more than 20% 
• As always A/B testing is your friend. To have the best changes possible, use A/B testing and decide which change performs better. 

Runaway from the penalty corner

It is important to check Google’s rules to not be penalized for breaking them. Luckily, if there is something wrong, Google lets you know that there is a problem with the content or image of the product. You can change the image or fix the problem but if you don’t do that, you might lose your views and in connection with this, you can lose your transactions. 

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