Contact us

Tag: Shopping

How to optimize product listing performance on Google Shopping and improve free search engine optimization?

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab


Google Shopping is one of the most effective search engines, with hundreds of millions of users searching every day. The good news is that, since the end of 2020, your products can also be displayed free of charge.

We tell you more about the performance of free product listings on Google Shopping, in particular how to benefit from better SEO on Google Shopping and boost your organic sales!

Free product listings on Google: where are your products visible?

The first piece of good news is the presence of your products free of charge in many countries and on several Google tabs:

Google Shopping
Google search (web tab)
Google Maps
Google Images
Google Lens

You’ll be able to reach your customers and prospects at different points of contact, which you can analyze in detail using your Merchant Center performance reports.

Please note that the information provided to web users on the various surfaces depends on whether your data complies with Google’s requirements.

Your product data sheets, listed free of charge, can only be distributed on these different platforms if they meet the eligibility criteria specified by the search engine.

If your products are already displayed via Google Ads and your product feed, you’ve already met the requirements to be displayed in the Google Shopping Free search results.

Are certain product sheets favored over others?

Since bidding is no longer the ranking factor for free product sheets, it’s the best referenced products that will be valued.

But what are the selection criteria?

The quality and relevance of your product sheets and Google Shopping product feeds are the only way for Google to distinguish between different brands.

Certain elements are essential for the performance of your product sheets, such as :

**1 The GTIN code ** (for “Global Trade Item Number”) most often supplied by the manufacturer. Google uses it to compare your ad with those of other retailers. This allows you to stand out from the crowd, for example, through your ratings, or to make yourself known if some of your competitors are out of stock.
Please note: Google favors sellers with the best ratings, even if they come from different sources (Trustpilot, Verifies Reviews, etc.).

2 Optimized titles (with the most sought-after keywords…).

3 Adapt your prices, for example by equipping yourself with a dynamic pricing tool, or by having your promotions appear directly in Google Shopping (to find out more, contact us).

But on a simpler level, the criteria for improving the performance of your free ads are :

4 Image quality to encourage clicks, but also uniqueness (one image per product color, for example).

5 Clarity and richness of information to satisfy web users’ need for information (from the most global to the most specific),

6 The relevance of titles to encourage categorization by the algorithm (their uniqueness is essential).

In short, the attractiveness and accuracy of your product sheet is essential. User ratings and reviews would also be taken into account in ranking on results pages.

Focus on... The title of your product page

Title optimization is a key factor in boosting the performance of free product listings on Google Shopping. Here’s a study from Search Engine Land, highlighting the importance of title optimization.

Three types of merchant campaigns are compared.

  1. The first with a classic title,
  2. The second with an optimized title,
  3. Third, with optimized titles based on terms that are particularly popular with web users.

The optimization of your titles must be based on concrete information: Google Analytics statistics, Google Trends (most popular queries according to seasonality, for example), etc.

Free performance analysis of your Google Shopping product listings

Data analysis on Google Merchant Center

Once you’ve categorized and optimized your product flow, it’s time to analyze the results of your work!

The first thing you need to know is that you don’t need a Google Ads account to do this.

You can check the performance of your product listings directly on Google Merchant Center.

  1. Click on “Performance”, then “Dashboard” in the navigation menu, and finally on the “Free product sheets” or “Free local product sheets” tab.
  2. The Dashboard allows you to segment data by category, brand or product type.


    Comparison of free product sheets VS paid Shopping ads

On Google Merchant Center, you’ll find data showing the engagement generated among your customers across all your products, or the performance of individual products. However, this data is relatively succinct.

In fact, the Merchant Center reports won’t show the sales generated by your product ads. To date, only Google Shopping’s paid campaigns allow you to analyze sales and ROI via Google Ads and Google Analytics.

Performance tracking with Google Analytics

If you’d like to use Google Analytics to track this data, you should know that by default, the statistics from your free Google Shopping ads go back into organic traffic.

In fact, if you’re looking for a more in-depth analysis of the performance of free product listings, it’s not really that easy.

Google offers 2 methods:

Option 1: Use [link]/mobile link attribute URLs [mobile_link] and Google Ads automatic tagging

Option 2: Use separate URLs in Merchant Center feeds using the [ads_redirect] ad redirect and [mobile_link] mobile link attributes, and the Google search index canonical_link attribute

Find out more about these options in the recommendations About free product listing performance reports

If you’re not used to creating rules or changing settings in your Google Shopping feed, I recommend readingInflow. The wrong settings could well distort your reading of the performance of your available products.

However, once set up, your reports will be able to distinguish several sources of traffic for your product sheets:

Organic traffic
Free product listings
Sponsored product listings

Would you like to optimize your free product page performance reports?

Refine ROI analysis when you combine free and paid ads?
Contact us!

Google Ads launches new features for Performance Max campaigns.

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab

These new features should help you during the peak periods of your business and the end-of-year season peaks.

Here are some valuable tips for improving your performance with Google Ads and Performance Max.

Reminder: What are Performance Max campaigns?

Performance Max campaigns enable you to use all Google Ads advertising inventories in a single campaign, displaying your ads on Shopping, Display, Youtube, Gmail and the Google search engine.

This campaign format is still new, and was rolled out in April 2022 to replace Smart Shopping and Local Ads campaigns.

Campaign performance and ROI are achieved through real-time optimization across channels and intelligent bidding.

Don’t hesitate to reread our article on setting up Performance Max campaigns.

What are the new features of Performance Max campaigns?

Predict the impact of Performance Max using the Performance Planner

The Performance Planner, previously only available for Search, Shopping or Display campaigns, is now supported by Performance Max campaigns.

With the Performance Planner it’s possible to forecast performance and simulate what can happen to your campaigns when budget, target, CPA and other elements are adjusted.

Asset group programming

It is now possible to create automated rules for asset groups. You can, for example, schedule your ads to run at specific times and on specific days.

Add more text resources with more titles

From now on, the number of titles for your text ads will be increased from 5 to 15. This will enable you to find more hooks for your ads and increase your click-through rate.

This feature should be operational by the end of the year.

Explanations

In Performance Max campaigns with the Online Sales objective, you can easily identify performance fluctuations, diagnose problems and receive recommendations for improving the future performance of your ads.

You will find several types of explanations on this report:

  1. Auctions explained
  2. Budget explanations
  3. Explanations on conversions
  4. Explanations for assets and asset groups

For more information on Explanations of changes in Performance Max campaigns, feel free to visit Google’s official page on the subject or simply your Google Ads account 😉

First-Party Audience Signals

You can add data segments as audience signals. This enables Google to accelerate its automation capability to find the customers most likely to convert.

In the coming weeks, these data segments will be added to the audience statistics, helping you to better understand the value of your first-party data and to see which customer lists convert best in your campaigns.

Three best practices for Performance Max holiday campaigns

🤓
Before the peak of the holiday season, adjust your Performance Max campaign budgets and ROAS or CPA targets. This will provide greater visibility when your future customers make their purchases.
🤓
Before the peak of the holiday season, adjust your Performance Max campaign budgets and ROAS or CPA targets. This will provide greater visibility when your future customers make their purchases.
🤓
If you’re running promotions or an event for which you want to improve conversion rates in a short space of time, consider using seasonal adjustments. If you’re promoting a specific product during the holiday season, create separate campaigns with their own objective and budget.

Conclusion

Since its launch almost a year ago, Performance Max campaigns have aimed to increase conversions using all Google advertising channels.

According to Google, in 2021, 54% of shoppers used more than five channels to make their purchases during the vacation season.

And that’s the great advantage of Performance Max campaigns.

Your offers and products can be displayed on the different channels where your customers are, and optimize your campaigns based on data and insights to boost your e-commerce results during the holiday season.

Ask our Google Ads experts to find out more.

See you soon!

Smart Bidding: how do Google Ads’ automatic bids work?

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab

Among the tools offered by machine learning are automatic bidding or Smart Bidding. This service, offered by Google, enables you to optimize the performance of your digital campaigns. But before embarking on an automatic bidding campaign, it’s important to understand how they work. Because while they can have a major positive impact, it can also be a negative one if you don’t control potential unforeseen events. What is Smart Bidding? What are its objectives? How can you avoid the pitfalls?

Download our white paper

What is Smart Bidding?

The question inevitably arises when you start looking at Google Ads bidding. What is Smart Bidding? According to Google itself, it’s “a subset of automated bidding strategies that maximize conversions or the value of conversions”.

Simply put, these intelligent auctions use machine learning to optimize your bids. The aim? Maximize both the number and value of conversions in your campaign. And within Smart Bidding, there are a number of different types of intelligent bids for optimizing CPC (cost per click) or maximizing conversions, among others.

Targeted strategies to meet specific expectations

Because not everyone has the same expectations when it comes to Google Ads auctions, a variety of strategies are available. They are sufficiently varied to meet every specific need:

    • Improve visibility: the “Impression rate” bidding strategy automatically sets the bids for your ad to be displayed in the absolute top position.
    • Increase the number of visits to a site: “Maximize clicks” ensures that you get the most clicks for your budget. This bidding strategy can be applied to a single campaign or to several.
    • Achieving ROAS (return on ad spend): the ROAS strategy enables you to obtain as many conversions as possible based on a defined return on ad spend target. This bidding strategy can be applied to a single campaign or to several.
    • Get more conversions with a target CPA: the Target CPA bidding strategy automatically sets your bids on the Search (or Display) Network to generate as many conversions as possible for the target CPA you specify.
    • Achieve more conversions while using the entire budget: the “Maximize conversions” bidding strategy automatically sets bids so that a campaign generates as many conversions as possible, while using the entire budget.
    • Increase conversion value while leveraging your entire budget: the “Maximize conversion value” automatic bidding strategy automatically sets bids so that a campaign achieves the highest conversion value, while leveraging your entire budget.
    • How to choose: ROAS target or CPA target?

What are the criteria for Google Ads Smart Bidding?

Google Ads intelligent bidding strategies take a wide range of criteria into account when bidding. These include :

  • The device used ;
  • Time of day ;
  • Geographical area ;
  • The remarketing list ;
  • Language ;
  • OS (operating system), etc.

What are the main advantages of Smart Bidding for Shopping campaigns?

For people who want to optimize their shopping campaignsSmart Bidding has several strong points:

  • Benefit from Google’s ” Real-time bidding“, for optimized bidding speed.
  • The ability to focus on core objectives and let intelligent bidding strategies do the rest.
  • Being able to take advantage of historical performance data: simply enter the objective to be reached, and Smart Bidding does the rest, taking into account not only previously recorded clicks, but also conversion data.

The right questions to ask before getting involved in Google's Smart campaigns

While Google Ads Smart Bidding can be a great asset to your campaigns, it does require you to ask yourself a few questions before you get started. One of the first questions to ask is whether smart bidding strategies are compatible with your campaign.

If you want to switch to Smart Bidding, you’ll probably need to reorganize your account. For example? It’s not a good idea to keep your semantic field hyper-segmented into several ad groups. In fact, the best strategy would be the opposite, with a varied volume of words for machine learning to work with.

Volume and variety

To take full advantage of the possibilities offered by automatic bidding strategies, several criteria must be met:

  • Volume: we generally recommend a minimum of 3,000 impressions per week per ad group. And don’t overlook the volume of conversions per campaign.
  • Variety: multiply tests as much as possible to “feed” machine learning. The more keywords per landing page, the more effective you’ll be.

Conversely, it’s best to avoid campaigns structured by device, location or theme if the landing page is the same. This means taking the time to restructure your account beforehand, and not when you launch your Smart Bidding campaign.

Impression rate VS clicks: which to choose?

Smart Bidding: the right reflexes to have

Before launching a campaign, there are a number of things you should know, which will undoubtedly save you a lot of disappointment:

  • Don’t neglect A/B testing, to take into account the learning curve of the algorithms and try to set a strategy that will last over time;
  • Track your conversions and set up conversion tracking according to your objectives;
  • Take the time to study your campaign history.

Smart bidding yes, but not necessarily

You should also bear in mind that some markets may not be suitable for Smart Bidding. This is particularly true of highly competitive markets. A case in point? Using a bidding strategy such as “Maximize conversions” would be totally counterproductive in markets with a high average CPC.

Therefore, the golden rule is to carefully analyze your expectations and your market before deciding whether or not to switch to automatic bidding strategies. Another important point to remember if you decide to take the plunge: take the time to learn and adapt each campaign.

To do this, it’s not uncommon to need the support of a SEA specialist who understands your objective and can develop your campaign accordingly.

Please do not hesitate to contact us for further information and/or support.

Smart Bidding: “Impression rates” versus “Maximizing clicks”: everything you need to know

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab


It’s not always easy to make the right choice when it comes to bidding strategies on Google Ads. While Smart Bidding allows you to take advantage of the power of Google’s machine learning, there’s a first time for everything: without campaign history, machine learning can do almost nothing for you. And in order to launch an effective campaign for your business, some bidding strategies make more sense than others. And often, it’s the “Target Impression Rate” and “Maximize Clicks” strategies that advertisers are most interested in. Should you start with the former or the latter? Which strategy might work best for you?

What about bidding strategies based on impressions and clicks?

Google Ads offers many different bidding strategies. These include impression-based bidding and click-maximizing bidding.

– The “Target Impression Rate” bidding strategy offered by Google Ads allows you to automatically set bids in order to show your ad in absolute first position. This can be at the top of the page or anywhere on the Google search results page.

– The “Maximize Clicks” strategy is designed to deliver as many clicks as possible within a given budget. This strategy is available in standard form, in a single campaign, or as a bid portfolio strategy for multiple campaigns.

Smart Bidding: How Google Ads automatic bidding strategies work

What are your goals? What exactly are you looking for?

If you’re looking to make a name for yourself, the “Target Impression Rate” bidding strategy will enable you to benefit from Google’s virtually infinite pool of qualified potential customers ready to take action.

However, if you’re primarily looking to convert, wouldn’t the real issue be the quality of the traffic? What’s more, it’s important to bear in mind that Google also wants to make as much money as possible. The consequence? First and foremost, it wants to get as many clicks as possible. So the better your ads perform, the more clicks you’ll get, and the better Google will tend to rank you.

Photo by Scott Graham / Unsplash

The best strategy: the right audience

In short, it’s all a question of organization: first and foremost, finding the right ads for the right people to get the best possible click-through rate. If you haven’t yet determined your personas, now’s a good time to do so. Only then will Google position those same ads strategically, which will only increase the impression rate.

As is often the case, the prerequisite for a good bidding campaign is sufficient preparation, thanks to accurate demographic data, but also a good knowledge of Google’s affinity audiences, your market’s audiences, and so on.

Smart Bidding: ROAS target or CPA target?

Posted on by Adenlab Adenlab

You’ve discovered Smart Bidding and would like to launch a Google Ads campaign?
There are a few prerequisites you need to take into account: without data, machine learning can’t do much for you. So, if you’re not sure whether to launch an automatic bidding campaign with a ROAS or CPA target, it might be a good idea to read these few lines first.

Here are the definitions of these 2 indicators:

  • CPA : “The average cost per action (CPA) is calculated by dividing the total cost of conversions by the total number of conversions.” This is very often the cost of your sale, or the cost of your new customer acquired via your Google Ads campaign.
  • ROAS : “ROAS” stands for “Return On Ad Spent” and is therefore a measure of the return on investment of an advertising spend. If your ROAS is 10 or 1000%, then this means that for every €1 spent via Google Ads, you have generated €10 in sales.Smart Bidding: How Google Ads’ automatic bidding strategies work

ROAS or CPA: how to use these indicators?

Google Ads automatic bidding offers several strategies, as different as whether you want to improve your visibility or increase the number of visits to your site. Among Smart Bidding strategies, two tend to stand out:

  • Achieve a target ROAS (return on ad spend):
    Google Smart Bidding’s ROAS strategy aims to achieve as many conversions as possible based on a predefined ROAS target. This smart bidding strategy can be applied to a single campaign or to several.
  • Get more conversions with a target CPA (cost per action) at a controlled cost:
    Smart Bidding’s target CPA strategy automatically defines your bids on the Search Network (also known as Display). The aim is to generate as many conversions as possible for the target CPA you set before launching your campaign.

Target ROAS or target CPA: what does Google have to say?

All automatic bidding strategies require a minimum number of conversions to work. In terms of ROAS and CPA, for example, Google recommends :

  • Target ROAS: as soon as a campaign has more than 100 conversions over the last 30 days;
  • Target CPA: as soon as a campaign has more than 30 conversions in the last 30 days.

The more historical conversion data you have, the more accurate Google’s algorithm will be.

Intelligent auctions at Target CPA, for whom?

The first thing you need to know is that using Smart Bidding with a target CPA strategy requires a thorough understanding of Google Ads. This implies that you’ve already launched several campaigns manually, and that you know the cost of a conversion.

What you want: to optimize the cost of your conversions.

What Google Smart Bidding will do: your campaigns will be adjusted automatically, which means that some acquisitions may cost you more, but in the end, your bids will be balanced.

The risk: not having enough historical data and not defining your target CPA correctly. The algorithm won’t help you at all.
Another “risk” is a lack of control over the products you want to sell first. This is a recurring problem we encounter with our customers and account managers. But you should know that we have solutions and methods to make the most of these “risks”.

Automatic auctions at target ROAS, in what context?

What you want: to optimize the profitability of your campaign.

What Google Smart Bidding will do: Google will automatically adjust your bids according to the target ROAS you’ve defined, in order to maximize the value of your conversions.

The risk: as we saw earlier, without sufficient data, you won’t get the results you want. In order for your campaign to be properly defined, you need to have gathered information and defined your average ROAS.

Conclusion

Target ROAS or target CPA: which to choose?

Because the ROAS target strategy remains complex to set up correctly (you need a lot of data), it’s advisable to start with a CPA target or a strategy aimed at maximizing your conversions.

Nevertheless, in the long term, especially if you have an e-commerce site, target ROAS probably remains the best solution for optimizing your campaign and above all your profits through machine learning.

Last but not least, bear in mind that while changes in the CPA ceiling may not necessarily influence Google’s algorithm, fluctuations in your market can have a very big impact on learning your target ROAS.