Last week we were talking about Google Shopping and today we are going to talk about a new advanced functionality of this type of advertising format for online stores; Smart Shopping campaigns. From Casals Online we explain in detail how you can create intelligent Shopping campaigns that are really effective to improve the performance of your campaigns.
The first thing we need to know is that Smart Shopping campaigns allow us to expand campaign coverage and maximize conversions. This is possible thanks to the use of bids and automatic advertising sites to advertise the products of your ecommerce.
In conclusion, this type of campaign is the union of the standard Shopping that we already know with the remarketing campaigns in the Display network to reach more and better public.
HOW IT WORKS?
Smart Google Shopping campaigns allow us to show different ads in accepted ad networks. These ads are based on the combination of the product feed and the Google Ads Machine Learning or Machine Learning resources. This system collects all the contextual information of your campaigns and it make flexible bids and thus ensure greater efficiency based on the intentionality of the user. From here, Google will show the most relevant ads to the final client in the different advertising networks of Search, Display or even Youtube and Gmail, considering data such as the type of device used by users, the system operational, time slot, location, Internet coverage and many more contextual factors that Google Ads takes into account.
BEFORE STARTING
The first thing we must consider is that if we want to use Google’s Smart Shopping, we must comply some account requirements:
- We must configure conversion tracking with conversion values, granting specific values for transactions (macro-conversions) different from micro-conversions. This part is essential because if we do not register the conversions correctly, the automation will not work correctly.
- We must have at least 20 conversions in the last 45 days in active shopping campaigns. This figure is the minimum recommended for Google but we recommend accumulating a higher volume of conversions and in a longer period, up to 3 months. The main reason is that the more contextual data has been accumulated based on a large sample of recorded conversions, the performance of the Google Ads machine learning layer will be better, as it will have had enough data to predict future conversions and generate sales in a systematic way.
- We can not convert a standard shopping campaign into a smart shopping campaign and we must create a new campaign. Do not go crazy because based on this point, we have to understand that the important thing is the conversions collected during the period that we have worked the shopping campaigns and that this information is accumulated at the account level.
- Have a minimum of 100 active users on our remarketing lists associated with our account in order to use dynamic remarketing with our ads. Again this is a number of minimums because we must understand that the more cookies we have, the better the performance.
- Link the Google Ads account with YouTube to be able to advertise on this platform.
- Update the merchant feed products at least once every 30 days. This applies to all types of shopping campaigns.
CREATING A CAMPAIGN STEP BY STEP
- Create a new Google Ads campaig.
- We must be clear about which is our campaign objective and select it according to what we need, for example: sales, traffic, etc. In addition we have to choose the type of campaign: Shopping.
- Select in campaign subtype: Smart shopping.
- Choose the Merchant Center account that has the products we want to promote. We must also select the country and geographical area where we want to sell.
- Define a name for our campaign and we assign a daily budget according to our objectives.
- We select the products that we want to advertise. It is important to know that to improve the performance of the campaign it is advisable to segment the variables that make the most sense depending on the architecture of the ecommerce. The options are the segmentation by Product Type, by Manufacturer, by Product Id and even by Custom Fields in the feed that we can use to segment in Google Ads.
- Create customizable display ads based on Google requirements: logos, descriptions, titles, images with specific and recommended sizes. These will be combined automatically and those with higher performance will be selected.
- Save. We have created the campaign. It is important to know that we can visualize some of your possible ads. We must also bear in mind that the possibilities of combinations are very large and that therefore it will be difficult to see them all.
Recommendations we must consider:
1. Smart Shopping campaigns should receive a remarketing audience automatically. In the case that these events will not recive new user in 2 consecutive days, it will be notified. In addition Google will send us a series of instructions to solve the problem. From there, we will have 28 days to solve this problem or otherwise the campaign will stop being published.
2. During the learning phase of the campaign, we should not carry out any optimization actions since the learning phase would be re-initiated, affecting the campaign’s performance. It is necessary to leave time for the campaign to complete its learning cycle and give a margin of time based on the amount of advertising investment made to evaluate the performance of the campaign and propose new actions.
Campaign performance reports
Google allows consulting segmented reports by type of product, attributes of a specific product, category or label. These reports are predetermined and serve to can evaluate campaign’s performance that we have launched from Shopping Smart. Among other data such as the share of impressions, clicks, CPCs, and Reference CTRs, allow us to evaluate the performance based on ROAS -Return of Advertising Investment. That is, the percentage of income in relation to the investment made, value of conversions and conversion costs.
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