There’s more to earning profits on Google Shopping than setting up ads. For every successful Google Ad, you can bet that at least ten optimization tactics have been put to work. In this article, I’ll be sharing ten tactics for optimizing your Google Shopping campaigns.
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11 Simple Tactics to Optimize Your Shopping Campaign
1. Optimize Your Product Feed
The most popular strategy for optimizing your product feed is search engine optimization.
You want to preempt your customers by speaking their minds. SEO means you will describe your products using keywords they are more likely to punch into the search engine when they search for your products. In addition to keyword optimization, you must add the most important details in every product description.
Try to look through the eyes of your target audience and include details that you think they would look out for in the product feed. You must also include your pictures. Not only should they be of good quality, but they should also highlight the value proposition of your products.
Following the best practices of Google Shopping campaigns, you should also describe your products accurately and ensure they’re linked to the appropriate landing pages.
2. Optimize Your Campaign Structure
A proper campaign structure is the foundation of successful Google Ads management. When you sell various products, you can’t market or sell all of them the same way. You may need to segment them in order to communicate their market value more specifically. You can market by brands, target audience, product prices, or item ID.
Google Ads settings allow you to divide your products and then break the divisions into subdivisions. Once you have completed the setting, you can set product bids for each product.
Google Ads shopping automatically creates a new ad group called “everything else”. You can add each product and set its bid as it creates the group.
3. Divide Products Into Ad Groups
Creating bids is one part. Controlling them is another. As important as it is to control your bids, you can’t do it by using keywords. This makes ad groups extra important. Think of your ad groups like departments within a supermarket.
While each ad group has a number of products, each has to be arranged and named so that Google can easily locate and pull out the relevant products when needed.
As you go through the ad group settings, you realise you can create subgroups within groups. In a more practical example, this could mean that you can divide your clothing accessories into groups of scarves, sunglasses, bags, and dresses. Then you can divide the tagged bags into subgroups by brands, such as Chanel, Dolce and Gabbana, and Gucci. This strategy can also strengthen your Google Ads listing optimisation.
4. Top vs. Other
Google Shopping Ads follow the pyramid rule. For some ad campaigns to perform at the top, some have got to be beneath. Google Shopping campaigns best practices predict that when you go against this rule, you tend to waste your ad spend. In fact, one of the most effective Google Shopping strategies is letting some campaigns stay on the average because that is where they perform best.
So how do you know which campaigns are at the top?
Simply sign into your Google Ads account and go to your segments. Click “Top vs Others” and compare the top campaigns with others based on important metrics like conversion rate, cost per action, and cost per click. It is important to note that this Google Shopping ad monitoring strategy only works for Campaign groups.
5. Find Your Winners and Losers
This is where your Google Shopping Ads monitoring narrows down to your products. Your winners are products that not only attract many visits but also many transactions. On the other hand, your losses refer to products that attract many visits and few transactions.
Among other Google Shopping strategies, product evaluation tends to draw your attention to your product performance. They can also reveal what aspects of each product ad should be fixed or optimised.
Losers are not only identified by conversions. You could be spending a lot on cost per conversion, whereas you’re making less on your profit margin. This would also count as a loss. Once you identify your losses, return to your ad groups and bid more on winners and less on losers.
6. Exclude Unprofitable Products
There’s really no point spending a lot on products that don’t rake in profits. As such, it is best to weed these products out of your campaigns and Google product listing ads optimization. The process isn’t complicated. You simply remove the products from your ad groups and spread your budget to more profitable ones.
7. Add Negative Keywords
Negative keywords not only optimize your ad spend but also maximize the relevance of your ads.
Just as you input keywords that you want your ads to show for, you should also include keywords you don’t want your ads to pop up for. Back to our clothing store example. While adding tees to your keywords, you can add customised to the excluded keywords to show that your products are irrelevant for customised tees.
8. Sub-divide Negative Keywords
You can also get specific with your negative keywords. You can add negative keywords as you create each ad group within divisions. Aside from that, you can also add them on account level by going to Account settings and adding your negatives list.
9. Bid Adjustments
As you continue monitoring your ads, you should keep adjusting your bids to reflect the changes that are best for your campaigns at a time. If you notice that most purchases come from a particular location, gender or age group, you can increase your bid based on that metric. You can also determine which devices shopping ads can appear on with your bids.
10. Use A/B testing
You want to determine which product images get more reactions, which product titles get more traffic devices shopping ads can appear on? Don’t stop testing. A/B testing helps you understand how your customers think and respond to various versions of your ads. This feedback shows you how to optimise Google Shopping campaigns effectively.
11. Don’t Make Drastic Changes
As much as you want to monitor your ad and optimise it according to your observations, it is advisable to make only a few changes simultaneously. More specifically, you must tread carefully around your bids, as adjusting by 20% or higher can do more harm than good.
Expert Bonus Tips :
Bid Higher for Selected Search Queries
You can target search engine queries that are most relevant to your brand and make ad campaigns specifically aligned with these queries.
This is an advanced way of building relevant ads, so you would need to make some research to get through the process properly.
Track the Changes You Make
It needs more than just adjusted bids, exclude keywords, and move. You have to keep tracking the performance of your ad, especially in light of the changes you make. To effectively track your changes, let the adjusted ad run for 7 to 14 days and capture the data accordingly.
