Google Shopping: optimize your end-of-year shopping campaigns

It’s time to get ready for Christmas! Did you know that 8 out of 10 consumers worldwide use Google to get inspiration and information for their end-of-year shopping? What’s more, this year 58% of them plan to buy more online than in previous years. So, if you don’t want to miss out on a great opportunity for growth, discover the essential steps for optimizing your product feed on Google Shopping. Spoiler: anticipation is key!

Google Merchant Center: how to optimize your product flow for Google Shopping campaigns?

1 - Check your product flow configuration

For the creation of your Google product feed, the golden rules are:
Categorize your products in a relevant and rigorous manner
Remember to include all product variants with the correct attributes and GTIN code
Make sure that prices and currency are the same as on your landing page
And don’t include any promotional text in your product title or images.

If this is the first time you’ve launched a Google Shopping campaign, the best advice we can give you to optimize your campaign is to make all your settings beforehand. To do this :

  1. Two weeks before launching your campaign: import a test feed
  2. Then check that everything is working properly and adjust if necessary.
  3. If you wish to modify your logo, you should also do so early, as it may take a few days to validate it.
  4. Finally, one week before the launch of your campaign: integrate the new feed

Please note: promotional campaigns are examined on the same day, but sometimes the analysis takes up to 72 hours, especially during peak periods such as the festive season. So once again, if you don’t want to leave anything to chance: an-ti-ci-pez!

2 - Optimize the content of your product flow

Writing the title: To give your ad the best possible chance of converting, here are a few essentials:

  1. propose a clear, concise title
  2. detail your product’s main attributes (name, type, color, characteristic or reference…)
  3. and put the most important ones first!

Product type presentation: We recommend that you describe the elements of your products precisely for your entire catalog.
Don’t hesitate to enrich your feed with the “Google product category” attribute: if you don’t, Google will generate it automatically.

Googlebot: Your ecommerce site also needs to be well optimized and categorized! That’s why we advise you to check the crawlability of your landing pages and images by Google robots, by consulting the robots.txt file.

Google Ads: examine the structure of your Shopping campaign

1 - Prepare your campaign in advance

We can’t stress this enough: to avoid any last-minute hazards and benefit from the full power of a well-planned campaign, we advise you to :

  1. Activate campaigns and set an appropriate start date at least one week before launch.
  2. Don’t modify your ads at the last minute: if you do, they’ll automatically be sent back for review!
2 - Optimize priority settings for standard shopping campaigns

Did you know that Smart Shopping campaigns have priority over Standard Shopping campaigns? In fact, optimization via priorities on Shopping campaigns can only be applied to Standard Shopping campaigns and not to Smart Shopping campaigns.

Common problems with accounts and items

If you are having problems setting up your Christmas campaigns on Google Shopping, they may be due to :

  1. Inconsistencies (or missing information) in prices, shipping costs or taxes
  2. The impossibility of purchasing for some or all users
  3. Image overlay (e.g. promotional text in the product photo)
  4. Failure to comply with the Google Shopping policy

If you’re having trouble setting up your end-of-year campaigns, contact Google support or your Google contact. They’ll help you solve the problem.

Need help with your Google Shopping Christmas campaigns? Save time!

You can also gain in efficiency and stop wasting time on subjects that you can leave to a team of experts: contact us, we’ll be happy to provide you with our know-how to maximize your Christmas sales thanks to perfectly optimized Google Shopping campaigns!

7 effective ways to optimize your online store’s conversion funnel

Building an effective conversion funnel for your website means optimizing it in a number of ways to improve your conversions and profits. This includes a set of best practices that focus on the design of your website, not just on one aspect or another, as you want to offer your users a complete package. The conversion funnel is made up of a succession of small steps. Each of these steps will improve your chances of increasing sales on your site.

In this article we’ll look at what a conversion funnel is, the parts that make it up and the 7 best ways to optimize the conversion funnel to increase sales.

What is the conversion funnel?

Easier said than done. It’s not enough to simply offer good services and products to get on the right track and make good sales. Often, it’s a little more complicated because customers can be unpredictable.
Developing and improving your conversion funnel is a good way to improve your sales. What exactly is it? It’s the path your customer or
user must follow before reaching the cart and finalizing their purchase.
In this process, there are 4 stages and, as you might expect, at each stage, there are losses. Optimizing your conversion funnel
therefore means minimizing the losses observed at each stage.

These 4 steps are:

  1. the Landing Page (Interest-Visit)
  2. the Product Page (Review-Discovery)
  3. the Purchase Page (Purchase Decision Summary)
  4. Purchase (Customer Loyalty-Settlement)

To get the most out of this funnel, each of these stages needs to be optimized in some way. In this article, we’ll examine conversion rate optimization best practices.

What do these stages mean? To begin with, all customers who visit your site, in one form or another, begin with the landing page. This is the most important stage of the funnel, and the one with the highest drop-off rate. This is where your customers will become aware of your products and services, and you need to hook them. You’ll need to provide engaging content, such as free blog posts, articles, guides, and even video guides and demos, to pique their interest.

The next stage of the funnel, which typically only 40-50% of landing page visitors reach, is the product pages. At this stage, users will be curious about your products because you’ve hooked them with an interesting landing page. This is a crucial stage, and this is where you need to provide healthy and interesting product pages. Talk about your products and provide some value, but don’t forget to include specific details that will interest certain customers.

Once customers decide your product page is compelling enough to buy, they enter the shopping cart phase of the funnel. This is a crucial step on the path to purchase, and poorly designed shopping carts are often the reason people abandon their purchases. They may add products to their cart, but never complete the purchase. There are a few best practices that can reduce the number of cart abandonments.

The last step is the purchase, when users decide to buy something it is important to have a good payment system.

Now let’s look at some of the best ways to improve your funnel overall.

Optimize your sales and your e-commerce funnel in 7 effective ways

Photo by Pickawood / Unsplash

Target ROAS uses artificial intelligence to automatically adjust bids, optimizing conversion values and ROI. Using advanced algorithms, Google Ads adjusts bids in real time to maximize performance based on your Target ROAS settings.

1 - Attracting customers via social networks (arousing interest)

The first stage of the funnel is marketing, which involves guiding visitors to your landing page. Social network marketing, in other words: being active on different social media platforms, has several advantages. Some 90% of marketing professionals believe that social networks offer broad exposure for their business activities.

By being active on several platforms, you can :

  • increase brand awareness
  • drive more traffic to your site
  • increase customer loyalty
  • improve your search engine rankings
  • boost your conversion rate

Facebook is a social network known to almost everyone, and has a large number of users. For this reason, it’s important to develop a high-performance tactic to attract Facebook users to your site. From 2018 to 2019, Facebook use by marketing professionals in the US rose from 86.3% to 86.8%, and could reach 87.1% in 2020.

Facebook ads are great, but they’re not enough. You need to design powerful ads to effectively promote your products and create a Landing Page that will make your visitors want to go deeper into the conversion funnel.

2 - Offer free, attractive content on your landing page (Interest phase)

The purpose of your Destination Page is to attract Internet users and make them want to buy your products, or at least to capture their interest. People choose pages and products that are of value to them, and at this stage, it’s just the right thing to do.

These could be short blog posts about your products and services, or a variety of promotional items.

3 - Use product proofs on your product page (Reflection phase)

When you present your products on your site, it’s important to display some kind of proof, a confirmation that your products are worth customers’ time, money and perhaps effort. The best way to do this is to display social proof (customer reviews, helpful messages or comments) on the product page. This will make your products seem more interesting.

According to a Minter report, 70% of Americans look for reviews on review sites before making a purchase. The good news is that BrightLocal found that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

4 - Optimizing your Product Pages (Examination/discovery phase)

The next step is crucial and indispensable (if you haven’t already done so): optimizing Product Pages.

This means giving customers all the information they need. Product descriptions don’t have to be boring, for example, describe how they would feel, but make sure they also include technical information.

Also include practical call-to-action buttons on your site, enabling customers to buy quickly and providing all the necessary information: shipping, costs and fees…

You can find great inspiration for your CTAs, but make sure they’re fun, unique and irresistible.

When it comes to optimizing a Product Page, web analysis is a must, especially qualitative analysis tools such as traffic maps and site path analysis. They’ll help you answer all those “Why?” questions during the optimization process.

5 - Using software to track discharge intentions (Basket stage)

Too many shopping baskets are abandoned along the way. Fortunately, there are many things you can do to reduce the number.
One of the best things you can do is create a pop-up message when the customer is about to give up.

You can do this with exit intent trackers, which can be very effective in this respect.
You can combine these trackers for an even more effective result. For example, Pixojet uses a pop-up linked to an intent tracker and a time spent tracker.

6 - Optimize your check-out (Shopping cart stage)

One of the most important parts of your conversion funnel is your Checkout System.

7 out of 10 visitors give up buying at this point. That’s a huge number. But there are a number of key ideas for reducing it:

  1. One study showed that around 30% of buyers gave up at this stage when asked to sign. Instead, offer order validation or automatically create a user account.
  2. Consider product prices that include shipping costs. For example, NuFace, an online beauty distributor, increased its orders by 90% by adding a simple “free shipping on orders over $75” banner.

Adapt your site to all types of media. In practice, this concerns buttons to tap (ergonomics), loading speed (reduce the number of images), ease of navigation (align / organize forms vertically).

7 - Offer and promote a loyalty program (Loyalty Stage)

The last stage is the one that never ends: building customer loyalty. This is an ongoing process aimed at creating long-term relationships. Here, you can offer a program with discounts and special offers to those who buy from you more than once. You need to promote this program so that customers are aware of what they gain by remaining loyal to you.

In one report, 84% of consumers say they prefer a brand that offers them a loyalty program, and 66% add that being able to earn rewards changes their purchasing behavior.

Conclusion

Improving your conversion funnel is the top priority in your business. If you make it so, and if you embrace this process of constant improvement, the results shouldn’t be long in coming.

Audience exclusion: How not to wear out your prospects


To guarantee the success of an e-commerce business, the first idea you have is to communicate with as many people as possible, and thus reach as many people as possible. But this isn’t exactly the right strategy.

Talking to everyone and anyone at the same time can be detrimental. To avoid tiring out your potential customers and approach qualified prospects, it’s sometimes a good idea to make a number ofaudience exclusions.

Who to exclude? How do you do it? And communicate with the right audience?

See also: Google Ads and Facebook Ads: How to ensure the success of your campaigns with Audience and Remarketing settings

Boost your ROI with audience exclusion

It may seem contradictory, but communicating with fewer people allows you to increase your sales. And audience exclusion has many advantages that you shouldn’t ignore when it comes to the success of your e-commerce business.

Firstly, by targeting fewer prospects, but with greater precision, you’ll reach the most qualified people likely to buy your products or services.

After all, your objective is to communicate with people who have an interest in your products, not to communicate with the whole of France; it’s your Return on Investment that’s at stake, whether you choose to promote your products on Google, Instagram or Facebook.

With audience exclusion, your ads are more effective. They have a real impact on prospects and motivate them to buy. Your message has more impact, and you can control your smart spending too.

See also: Fourth quarter: how to develop and exploit your audience?

Which audiences should be excluded and how?

Depending on the type of campaign and your objectives, you can exclude from your targeting various types of audience known to your site

Your customers

It’s very common to find customer exclusions in your campaigns. This is because, when you’re implementing a prospecting and new customer acquisition strategy, it’s not necessary, or even counterproductive, to target your existing customers;

Therefore, use Customer Match audiences in your campaign’s audience exclusions.
This setting is valid for both Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

Customized segments

Thanks to Google Analytics features, it’s possible to create personalized audience segments and list them for use with Google Ads audience parameters.

The segment tool allows you to filter according to a multitude of criteria (location, session on the site, conversion value, gender, age ….) and thus create user profiles that you would like to better understand and analyze for future optimization actions.

Segment creation tool in Google Analytics

For example, you could create a segment of unqualified users: who would not have taken any action on the site, who would not have stayed more than 10 seconds, who would not have converted with a very low value…

It’s a good idea to identify those segments that won’t interest you in the future, and to exclude them from your acquisition campaigns.

Good exclusion requires effective data analysis and an understanding of who is really interested in what you have to offer.

With these segments identified, apply audience exclusions within ads. These exclusions are to be implemented on Google Ads as well as on Facebook Ads.

Don’t hesitate to contact us. Our SEA Ecommerce experts will be able to analyze your campaigns and propose a customized action plan to optimize your account to the maximum and tap the most responsive audiences.
Adenlab is a Google Partner Premier and Facebook Ads certified SEA agency.

Fourth quarter: how to develop and exploit your audiences?


Businesses are growing, and visits to e-commerce sites explode in the fourth quarter. During these last three months of the year, good remarketing techniques and targeting are essential for visibility.

What to do? Why do we pay more attention in the fourth quarter ? What are the factors to take into account to make the difference?

See also: Guarantee the success of your sponsored campaigns with targeting, remarketing and your audiences

Boost your sales in the 4th quarter

Stronger shopper demand at the end of the year

The fourth quarter corresponds to the months from September to December. During this period, Internet users are doing more product research, and your audience and traffic will increase.

That’s why your targeting needs to be extremely well thought-out, and your digital communication needs to be effective.

With the arrival of the cold and bad weather, and especially the festive season, consumers are spending more time in front of their screens (computers and mobiles).

The seasons motivate us to change our wardrobe or make changes at home. Find family gifts or prepare orders for sales or Black Friday;
It’s the perfect time to be visible and present to meet demand.

November and December are the most important gift-buying months of the year, and the search for gifts begins as early as the beginning of October.

Mintel 2018

Important dates at the end of the year

From September to December, there are several major events to boost sales: Halloween, New Year’s Eve, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
This is a time when consumer spending is at its peak. It’s essential to create communication campaigns and target your audiences.

If we talk about Black Friday alone, we should remember:

  1. growing French interest in the event
  2. Black Friday didn’t slow Christmas growth in December 2018
  3. Mobile accounted for 69% of the traffic for clothing websites during Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Evolution of Black Friday and sales from 2017 to 2018

To keep up with the competition, one of our tips is also to review your keyword targeting and the themes you want to cover.

Consumers conduct new searches and are more likely to buy your products.

Why not combine your audience parameters with keywords such as “Christmas gift ideas”, “black friday promotions” or “50% cyber monday”.

See also: Guarantee the success of your sponsored campaigns with targeting, remarketing and your audiences

The power of remarketing

During these end-of-year months, you need to implement a remarketing strategy.
You need to re-engage Internet users who perform a certain number of actions on your site.

Without the act of buying, the prospects who came to your site must not forget your existence. and be visible as soon as your prospect is ready to buy.

Your online store needs to establish itself as the expert in your industry. With Facebook Ads and Google Ads, you can easily target these pre-qualified audiences, who mustn’t forget you.

Be responsive to ensure the customer experience

The biggest orders arrive during Black Friday and the month of December. As demand increases, e-tailers need to be ready. Black Friday isn’t just about sales on the day.

The effect of this event lasts over time: we’re no longer talking about a day, but rather a week of promotion. All these factors need to be taken into account if you are to have enough stock on hand for the boxes 😉

Purchases can also be extremely well thought-out. Some consumers spot before and then buy during promotions. We need to take advantage of this practice with remarketing on Google and Facebook.

They need to see the product, but also feel that it’s an exceptional offer that won’t be repeated. The fear of not taking advantage of the discount motivates them to buy.

See also: Create a Dynamic campaign with products from your catalog on Facebook.

Conclusion

During the fourth quarter, e-tailers have great sales opportunities. To be successful, it’s essential to have well-configured remarketing campaigns and target audiences.

Our team is available to discuss and support you at these strategic moments of the year. We’ll be happy to discuss your SEA strategies, and you’ll benefit from the expertise of a Google Partner Premier-certified SEA agency, specialized in e-commerce campaigns.

Remarketing campaign: How to boost your ROI with Google Ads and Facebook Ads?


Developing the growth of an e-commerce business often depends on a number of important factors: conversion rate, traffic, average basket, prices…

Attracting a qualified audience, ensuring cross-selling and optimizing pricing and promotions will help you achieve a number of objectives. However, sales don’t happen as a result of a compulsive act or an immediate purchase on your site.

Some customers take time to think before placing an order, especially if the price is high. Indecisive prospects increase the difficulty of converting on your site. What’s more, during this time of reflection, these same consumers will be exposed to other offers for the same or similar products.

How do you make sure they don’t forget you? One strategy: remarketing campaigns via Google Ads and Facebook Ads. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of remarketing, you’ve probably been confronted with it at least once without knowing it.

The principle is to present an advert to a user who has visited your website or interacted with your social pages (Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin pages).

It may seem intrusive, but this method pays off. How can you set up subtle remarketing campaigns via Google Ads or Facebook Ads without harassing your prospects and customers?

See also: Guarantee the success of your sponsored campaigns with targeting, remarketing and your audiences

When and how can I use my remarketing campaigns?

Let’s take a situation you’ve probably experienced. For example, you’ve been looking for a watch or a pair of shoes on a website, and you’ve done some simple scouting on the same site.

In the days that follow, ads for watches and shoes are everywhere: on your Facebook page, Instagram, on your favorite horoscope or weather site …

What a coincidence, you ask? Well, no, it’s not chance, but a remarketing strategy implemented for the site you’ve visited.

In fact, “tracking” the people who have taken actions on your site is commonplace for Ecommerce companies wishing to maximize the ROI of their campaigns, because very often, setting up and distributing retargeting (or remarketing) campaigns is a winning strategy.

Return on investment is almost always guaranteed, because you’re addressing a “pre-qualified” audience whose conversion potential is greater than that of a new visitor.

A subtle example of a remarketing ad: Retarget a visitor who continues to search on Google, with a personalized ad in the Google Search results (Google RLSA campaigns).

Do you find this technique too intrusive? It can be, if it’s not done in the right way. With Facebook Ads and Google Ads campaigns, you can easily retarget your site visitors with different ad formats and ad formats.

What’s more, combining the two platforms will enable you to be more effective in winning over your customers and undecided audiences.

How can Remarketing optimize your conversions?

  1. Invest in “image” and create promotional banners
    Consistent advertising that reflects the image of your site (color, logo, tone, etc.). Your e-commerce site must be recognizable and attractive.
  2. Test different ad formats! Create several ad formats to see which strategy gets the most clicks and increases your conversion rates. Don’t limit yourself to what’s working: regularly launch new campaigns.
  3. Re-launch your site visitors; as well as anyone who has taken an action on your site (downloaded a freebie, subscribed to the newsletter…).
  4. Apply several targeting strategies with Facebook.
    You can highlight your content to people who have taken an action on your page (like, comment, share), but also target people who have taken specific actions on your site, e.g. visiting the “Rates” page.
  5. Re-target with a promotional offer, for people who have left their basket without making a purchase.
  6. Reduce your mailing lists to target the most recent prospects, who are most receptive to your offers.
  7. Optimize your product and service landing pages to increase your conversion rates.
  8. Increase your bids and don’t limit the budgets of Remarketing campaigns or ad groups.
  9. Set up remarketing campaigns with Google Shopping.
  10. Leverage your Facebook Catalog and Pixel with Facebook Business Manager.
  11. Usedynamic ad formats to be as close as possible to what your prospects are looking for in Google search results.
  12. Exclude audiences you’re not interested in: it’s sometimes a good idea to exclude web users who have recently purchased and converted on your site. Their keys can be retargeted later via emailing campaigns and become potential buyers and loyal customers.

The aim of these actions is not to be intrusive or to chase after unqualified prospects. The sole aim is to be present at the right time, and for the right amount of time.
Your brand needs to present itself as the right solution.

See also: remarketing and RGPD, is there a conflict between these two concepts?

What are the advantages of remarketing strategies?

Although it’s difficult to harness the full power of targeting and remarketing strategies, usually because of limited budgets, the effort is well worth it, as these actions offer many advantages:

  1. Lower acquisition costs
  2. Build customer loyalty and propose new offers
  3. Increase complementary sales
  4. Increase online store visibility
  5. Optimizing return on investment

For example, on 2O accounts in similar sectors that we manage on Google Ads, we have seen a 3.7-fold increase in the conversion rate on remarketing audiences!

Targeting qualified audiences and running remarketing campaigns shouldn’t feel like an intrusion into your prospects’ lives. This type of advertising campaign enables every e-commerce site to become unavoidable and to face up to the competition while communicating with interested consumers.

Conclusion

To help you launch your campaigns and apply effective remarketing strategies, our team of Ecommerces experts will be happy to discuss your needs with you. We’ll work with you to optimize the structure of your accounts and campaigns, to segment and parameterize your target audiences and priority profiles.

Reviewing the architecture of your accounts on Google Ads and Facebook will be a priority to manage campaigns by Audience type.
Adenlab, our SEA agency, certified Google Partner Premier and Facebook Ads, is at your service.

Find out more about audience types in our article: “Google Ads and Facebook Ads: Guarantee the success of your sponsored campaigns with targeting, remarketing and your audiences“.

Google Ads and Facebook Ads: How to ensure the success of your campaigns with Audience Settings and Remarketing


When developing your business and e-commerce, you want to reach the widest possible audience to ensure your company’s growth and profitability. But to convert and build loyalty, you need to be able to address the right people with the right message , and not just the general public.

In the article below, we’ll review the principles of targeting and persona, essential for formulating your strategy for acquiring new customers and prospects. We’ll focus on the different audience optimization levers we can implement on your Google and Facebook campaigns.

Contents

Personas
Creativity and the seductive message
The customer journey
Exploiting audiences and retargeting
The different types of Audiences and their interests

Audience targeting levers are extremely important in managing campaigns on search engines, the Display advertising network and social networks.

Unlike physical stores, which have a conversion rate of 55%, e-merchant sites convert between 1% and 3% of visitors. So it’s essential to attract visitors with a clear interest in your products and services.

Persona: the key to understanding your customers

To optimize your approach and ensure successful communication, it’s essential to establish one or more customer profiles. These are known as personas. This has many advantages: 1 Understand their problems and present the ideal solution 2 Identify your audience to target your Google campaigns and Facebook ads 3 Identify their habits to be present in the right place at the right time The persona study allows you to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and find the right words.

How do you create a persona?

To identify the real problems and habits of your audience, you need to think deeply. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer.

List their demographic and behavioural data, consumer habits, daily problems…
One possible approach is to create a typical day: from dawn to dusk, what does your ideal customer do?

There are several sites that allow you to create personas using just a few pieces of data: SurveyMonkey, UseForge, Up Close and Persona or Personapp.

Example: Here’s my simplified persona

Example: Here’s my simplified persona

The process of setting up a persona is not necessarily a simple one, and can take time (brainstorming, teamwork, etc.).

On the other hand, once you’ve done it or redone it, it opens up new possibilities, new ideas for improving your offers and, of course, your acquisition campaigns.

It’s a very rich exercise that I recommend doing as a team.

See also: Building your audience on Facebook : foolproof techniques to implement

Creativity: Address your prospects with an attractive message

Convey the right message on the right medium, and maintain the high quality of your advertising.

Now that you know your customers better and want to guarantee a return on investment from your campaigns, you need to convey the right message on the right medium, and keep the quality of your advertising (image, video, content, text) at a high level.

In fact, targeting and persona work won’t be enough if the quality of the ads and advertising creatives isn’t up to scratch.

Nielsen Catalina Research study: 47% of ROI is attributed to the quality of advertising creative

Nielsen Catalina Research study

The quality of the images and the message is still a major factor in attracting new customers. What resonance will the ad have after it has been seen?
The Nielson study is clear: 47% of ROI is attributed to the quality of the creative.

With the right design, we can ensure optimal distribution on the various channels: search engines, Display, social networks ….

See also: how to find the right themes to captivate your audience?

The customer journey and the purchasing decision

Towards an ever more complex customer journey

Consumer behavior has evolved in recent years, and has become increasingly complex.

10 years ago, a customer’s path to purchase was still relatively straightforward, but today there are many more interaction points before a purchase or conversion on your site.

You need to be seen in the right place, at the right time, with the right message.

This means delivering your ads across multiple formats and channels, and paying particular attention to performance, budget allocation and sales/conversion attribution analysis.

**See also: Dynamic campaigns and catalog distribution on Facebook

Customer journey “Before” :

Shopping on an e-commerce site

Today’s customer journey:

Today, the purchasing process is more complex

In fact, the evolution of cell phones and the number of screens per household are multiplying the points of contact with your customers.

“With nearly 5 billion mobile users worldwide, 6 screens per household
in France, and more than half of all searches carried out on Google in France and worldwide from a smartphone, the points of contact between consumers and brands have multiplied.”
Roland Duffau, Google

To better understand this evolution, Google and Facebook, as well as agencies like Adenlab, have invested heavily in Machine Learning (AI) technologies.

These learning algorithms enable marketers to make the most of the signals of intent left by Internet users as they navigate the web.

How to leverage audiences and retargeting (or remarketing) with Google Ads campaigns?

The different types of audiences offered by Google enable you to reach individuals along their decision-making paths.

Whether for traffic prediction, virtual assistants, fraud detection… Machine Learning is at the heart of Google Ads or Facebook Ads tools.

The use of Machine Learning algorithms today makes it possible to simplify complex tasks and focus on business objectives, define qualified audiences, and then let the algorithms determine who to engage as relevant prospects.

Below, we’ll illustrate the different types of audiences offered by Google, which enable us to reach individuals along their decision-making paths.

Use an audience-based approach in your Google Ads accounts

In recent years, one of the major challenges for Google Ads has been to break down the silos between ad formats and audiences:

In the past, when we wanted to target an audience with high purchase intent, we preferred the Google Shopping format (and sometimes the text format).

Today, with the right Audience settings, when we target “buyers”, we use Google Shopping, Text Ads, but above all what’s changing is that we also use the Display Network and YouTube!

In terms of targeting, Google Ads technology has clearly evolved, making it possible to use many more formats and distribution channels to achieve your growth and ROI objectives.

What are the main types of Audiences and how can they be used in your targeting strategy?

We leave “traces” everywhere on the web (and anonymously). Every day, we emit signals that are stored (thanks to cookies), analyzed and interpreted;
This makes it possible to understand and categorize behavior and people into different audiences.

Read more: Google Analytics secrets: Integrating specialized e-commerce audience lists

These audience categories can be used to manage campaigns on Google Ads or Facebook Ads. They enable us to target and prioritize a certain type of person according to our campaign objectives.

Ex: If our goal is to gain more visibility for my brand, I’ll target a demographic audience and an affinity audience.

Illustration of audience typologies in relation to your conversion funnel

Audience demographics

Generally used to target (or exclude) a large audience, they can be used to promote your company by segmenting users according to age, gender, income, profession or family composition (married or not, children…).

Example in Google Ads of a demographic audience selection: here Parental status

Here’s an example in Google Ads of demographic audience selection, by parental status.

See also: Audience exclusion, or how not to wear out your prospects?

Affinity Audiences and Personalized Affinity Audiences

These audiences will enable us to target an audience that is close to your buyers and has been identified as having a real interest in your products and services; in fact, it’s their lifestyle, habits and interests that are analyzed.

Custom affinity audiences will allow you to combine additional parameters in Google Ads, such as keywords to target, Urls and site content, the types of places your prospects frequent, and the applications they’re likely to use.

Example of audience selection by buying behavior

Example of a center of interest

Life event

These audiences allow us to target people who are going through occasional events in their lives, such as weddings, births, but also moves…

Its audiences have multiple needs.
If we take the example of a birth, I can assure you that Google searches for “strollers”, “cribs”, “do I make a good father” will be regular searches. Definitely worth implementing!

Market audiences

With market audiences, you target people who are actively looking for your products and seriously considering buying them.

This is an audience you must activate in your campaigns, as it’s generally more ROI-intensive and even closer to the profile of your current customers and buyers.

Similar audiences

As the name suggests, similar audiences target people whose behavior is very similar to that of your existing customers;

These audience lists are updated in real time! And your ads will be shown to people who have something in common with your ideal customers and prospects.

Selection of audiences similar/similar to your regular site traffic

Retargeting (or remarketing) audiences

Re-targeting “known” audiences who have come to your site is often a winning strategy, and doesn’t require too much budgetary effort.

In fact, the people who have come to your site already have a relatively strong intention to buy, and above all, they know you.

However, not every visitor to your site has the same value: you need to segment and distinguish between visitors who have left without doing anything, and those who have abandoned their purchasing process and are therefore much more likely to convert on your site.

Audience Customer Match

To target and exclude this audience, you first need to import your e-mail database into Google Ads.

This audience will also be very useful for creating similar audiences.

Conclusion

These audience typologies are much the same for Facebook ads. As a result, a wide range of approaches can be devised to develop your sales:

  1. Target by interests
  2. Your competitor’s fans or your fans’ friends
  3. Age groups, professions, Facebook activities, geographical locations…
  4. Family status (children, couple, married): useful for advertising events such as Mother’s Day, Father’s Day or Valentine’s Day.

However, before taking the plunge, we recommend an observation phase on Google Ads and Google Analytics.

Over a relatively short period of time (depending on the traffic of your campaigns) you can identify the audiences that best meet your objectives. This observation phase will enable you to refine your segmentations and subsequently optimize your visibility and budget allocation.

Don’t hesitate to consult us for your acquisition strategies and the implementation of audience strategies on Google and Facebook.
Our SEA Agency, certified Google Partner Premier and Facebook Ads, applies different methods and uses various automation tools to develop the accounts of E-Commerce customers.

We specialize in high-volume projects and work on catalogs with a large number of references.

Youtube: An advertising channel for Ecommerces?

Google launched its Shopping ads on YouTube a few years ago. And just a few weeks ago the Shopping ads were extended:

1. In the Youtube news feed
2. To YouTube search results

This is becoming increasingly interesting for ecommerce advertisers, who will have more options and more space to promote their products via a Shopping feed!

Youtube and videos: sales vectors!

Why is YouTube, in particular, so important for Ecommerces? Well, according to Google**, “nearly two-thirds of shoppers say online video gave them ideas and inspiration for their purchase”, and of those, “90% say they discovered new products and brands via YouTube”.

** Inspire shoppers with Gift Ideas: Check list by Google

ROI strategies for e-commerce are essential, and controlling the cost of acquiring a new customer is often the key to success. This is why “Product” formats and the use of shopping feeds for acquisition campaigns are often the most suitable.

With its new options, Google offers merchants an additional lever.
Coupled with an appropriate audience strategy, and a bidding strategy consistent with the merchant’s objectives, the format is worth testing!

It’s an option for reaching consumers when and where they’re most likely to “webvitrine”;).

Please note that this is not Retargeting, as the display of Shopping ads depends on the user’s searches and interests.
In the example above, a user doing video searches on this or that shoe or on running could be exposed to ads. And it’s the Puma brand whose ads are displayed

What other advertising formats on Youtube are suitable for Ecommerces?

Bumper YouTube Ads

Bumper Ads are short, unstoppable ads lasting up to six seconds. They appear before, during or after the video selected by the user.
These ads appear on YouTube videos or on Google’s partner sites and applications.
Bumper Ads are an interesting lever for boosting brand awareness and increasing visibility among qualified audiences. It’s a good idea to use them in conjunction with Trueview and other Google campaigns.

Youtube campaign: Trueview

As the name suggests (“True” – “View” => VraieVue), these are videos that are (really;) viewed in their entirety (or almost: more than 30 seconds of viewing).
Today, this format seems to be the least “risky” for Youtube, since you only pay when videos are viewed for more than 30 seconds, or if the viewer clicks on the ad. What’s more, you’re not charged for unintentional views.

This format can be found with:
Instream ads => shown before, during or after videos on YouTube
Video Discovery ads => shown on pages where users discover content, such as the YouTube search results page.

Google offers a number of interactive features to make the most of the Trueview format, depending on your objectives: (more details about interactive video ads on the official Google page)

Trueview for Shopping

You can also showcase products from your product feed alongside TrueView ads on YouTube. It’s a great way to use video content to enhance your YouTube marketing strategy and increase sales.

These purchase ads enable YouTube advertisers to offer products directly in partner videos.

How do True View ads for shopping work?

It’s easy to set up: just connect your Google Ads account to the merchant center and choose the products you want to relay to the video.

This format is particularly effective for cosmetics brands, but also for other ecommerce players.

Objective
Maximize the profitability of media campaigns by promoting engagement with products and services

The Plus

  1. there’s no need to create individual ads for each product.

  2. click on the product to be redirected directly to the product sheet

  3. a pleasant user experience that translates into a higher interaction rate

Conclusion

If you’re not sure that your potential customers might be on Youtube, here are a few statistics that will encourage you to work on this increasingly important platform for advertisers and e-tailers:

  1. Figures for YouTube in France:June 2019 (June 2019, source Youtube Festival, newsletter): 46 million users per month in France.
  2. 3rd most visited site according to Alexa, youtube.com accounts for between 3% and 4% of global page views
  3. More than half of all views are on mobile devices
  4. Thanks to YouTube, 8 out of 10 French people know everything there is to know about the sport they love.
  5. 75% of French people say they use YouTube to learn about subjects that interest them.
  6. 37.5 million French people visit YouTube every month, representing 81% of the connected population.
  7. In France, 66% of Bumper campaigns measured generated a 14% increase in brand awareness.

Contact us

Of course, our team is always ready to discuss possible strategies for your site and e-commmerce.
Our SEA Agency is here to help you!
Don’t hesitate to give us a call at +33183819060 or send us an e-mail at contact@adenab.com.

See you soon