As the holiday season approaches, getting your ecommerce paid media campaigns audited and organized before the rush is crucial. We know this well, with multiple clients in the ecommerce space and a challenging holiday season ahead. Here’s everything you need to know about getting your ecommerce campaigns organized before the holidays hit.
Optimize your product feed
Shopping ads rely on titles and descriptions within the product feed to house the keywords that are relevant to the product. Taking the time to regularly evaluate, edit, and adjust product titles and descriptions to ensure that users can easily find what they are looking for will pay off.
You’ll also want to make sure you’re including things like the product size, color, and any other relevant information within the titles or descriptions. By doing so, you’ll ensure that Google knows when to best serve the ad.
Check your negative keyword matching
Because Shopping ads rely on machine learning to match titles and descriptions to user intent, there is substantial room for error. By combing through search term reports, you can find and negative match the terms that are irrelevant to your product, but still triggering your ads. By negative matching search terms that are irrelevant to your product, or include specifications (sizes or colors) that you don’t sell, you’ll save money, and make sure your ads are showing for the relevant terms that will benefit your company.
Using search term information can also be incredibly beneficial in optimizing the titles and descriptions within the product feed, to better match what users are searching for. By making descriptions and titles more search-friendly, you’ll increase discovery to folks who aren’t just looking for you through branded terms.
Analyze your product performance
Taking the time to look at product performance is crucial, as it will help you uncover new opportunities for refining your campaigns. It is important thing to regularly look at all the products you are running ads for. This way, you can see which products are spending money, but not producing a positive return on ad spend.
Depending on the budget of the campaign those products are in, having products spend money without returning positive revenue can make or break an account. In some cases, the title, description, and bids may need to be adjusted to make the product more relevant to the consumer. It may also make sense to remove a specific product’s ad altogether and reallocate the budget it was consuming to other products that produce a reliable return.
Find the right account structure
Like having an accurately set up shopping feed, having a solid account structure is essential in setting up your campaigns for success. There are many different ways to split out campaigns and ad groups. Some people prefer to have single product campaigns or group similar products into their own campaigns. This is all dependant on the size and breadth of your inventory. Structuring can be built around similar products, profit margin tier, branded and non-branded terms as well depending on your reporting needs and budget allocations.
When looking to build or change your account and campaign structures we find it best to break campaigns out into multiple campaigns with different products. This helps ensure that each campaign can have dedicated daily budgets and negative keyword matching (especially if similar products are grouped together) can be streamlined. This lets you have greater control over what products are using the budget. For example, it would allow you to give products that generate higher ROAS more budget than new products, or products that generate much less revenue.
Accurately set up your shopping feed
Having a good product feed that contains all of the necessary and applicable information about your products will help Google categorize your products, and best decide who to serve product ads to. It also gives users all of the necessary information about the products you are selling. This is the main building block of any Google Shopping campaign and having this set up properly is of the utmost importance.
Have questions? Learn more about our services around paid media, and check out our case study on how we made double-digit improvements for one of our clients, Schoolhouse.
