A Guide
reading time: 3 – 5 minutes
You can follow some best practices to monitor, evaluate, and adjust your Shopping campaigns, ensuring that they perform optimally. Let’s take a look at these best practices.
First, make sure your product data is always up to date so that prices, product descriptions, and shipping are displayed completely and accurately. If prices are not displayed accurately, you risk an account warning or the suspension of your Merchant Center account. The more accurate your data is in the Merchant Center, the better your campaign performance will be. For more information about product feed optimization, read our article about product data optimization for standard and enhanced free listings.
Once you have double-checked your product data, follow these best practices to optimize your Shopping ads:
Monitor your campaigns and products
You got your campaigns running. Amazing! Now it’s time to check their performance and make sure they are aligned with your performance goals. Google Ads has many places where you can monitor your campaigns: the Dashboard, Products page, the Product groups page, the Predefined reports, and the Auction insights report are just a few.
Check your product status on the Products page
We recommend that you regularly look at the Products page to see if all your products are eligible to show on Google Shopping. These diagnostics also appear in your Google Merchant Center. On the Products page, you can filter by highest clicks or conversions and check individual product performance.
Create product groups
Divide your inventory to create product groups that align with your best-performing products. If you are working with Smart Shopping campaigns, this is done automatically. Then optimize bids by adjusting a product group’s bid up or down depending on the current CPA. If you want more conversion volume for a product group, increase the bid. If a product group has a high CPA and you want to reserve some of your budget for other product groups that can provide more conversion at a lower cost, lower the CPC bid. You can also use the Bid Simulator to help determine the ideal bids for each product group.
Predefined reports
These tools provide useful data to help you identify campaign optimization opportunities:
Click share
Click share suggests how to capture even more clicks. If you want to know your position relative to competitors, click share is the tool to use. It compares the total number of achievable clicks you have received to the number of clicks you could have received. If you receive a low click share along with a high impression share (see below), you cannot drive valuable clicks into the top results.
To enhance your click share, modify your ads and adjust bids accordingly. We advise you to do this for all devices, especially devices with limited screen size since they drive the most traffic to the top results.
Impression share
Use impression share to make sure your ads reach as many shoppers as possible. Impression share shows the impressions your ads received compared to the total eligible impressions. If you have valuable profit-generating impressions but your impression share is low, you will benefit from increasing your bids or optimizing your data quality. You can then earn more from your valuable impressions.
Benchmark CTR and Benchmark Max CPC
Benchmark CTR and Benchmark Max CPC show when you need to improve your product data for optimal ad relevancy or adjust your bids to be in line with your competition. The tool provides insight into how your product groups stack up against competitors.
Benchmark product price difference
This metric shows the percentage difference between your product’s average product price and the associated benchmark product price.
Google Analytics
Use Google Analytics to analyze your business data. After linking Google Analytics to your Google Ads account, it will help you gain insight and see potential opportunities to optimize your campaigns. The metrics (like bounce rate, pages/session, and % new sessions) located under Google Analytics in your Google Ads account are all imported from your Google Analytics account. They are calculated based on sessions or visits that originated from Google Ads clicks. To learn more about your Google Analytics data in your Google Ads reports, visit this Google support page.
Bid Simulator
The Bid Simulator estimates what your advertising results would have been over the previous seven days with higher or lower bids. This simulation tool can clarify how different product groups’ bids influence your traffic and conversions.
Attribution
If a conversion is made, it is possible that shoppers interacted with numerous ads from the same merchant. If you want to assign how much credit each ad gets for a conversion, you can use attribution models. This can give you better insight into your ad performance and ultimately help optimize your ads. Visit this Google support page to learn about the different attribution models.
In your Google Ads account reporting columns, you can investigate your historical conversion data by adding the columns under Attribution. These columns include Conversions (current model), Cost/conv. (current model), Conv. value (current model), and others. Adding these columns will help you understand how simply changing your attribution model can affect your conversion data. For example, compare the Conversions (current model) column to your regular Conversions column to see how your historic conversion data would be affected by your current attribution model.
Optimization score
Optimization score shows how well your Google Ads account is set to perform and lets you view recommendations to help optimize your campaigns. With Optimization score, you can improve your Shopping ad’s performance by applying the given recommendations based on campaign settings, performance history, and Google search volume and trends. Find the Optimization score by clicking Recommendations in the left menu in your Google Ads account.
Auction insights
Auction insights let you compare your performance to other advertisers in the same auction. With this information, you can make strategic bidding and budgeting decisions. If opportunities exist to improve your performance, Auction insights will make you aware of them.
Use negative keywords
Search-term segmentation helps you structure your campaigns based on search terms or keywords. Adding negative keywords prevents your products to the wrong shopper. Read more about using negative keywords in our upcoming article about it.
Get your Shoppers’ Attention
Shopping campaigns are your first communication with your customers. Follow these best practices to ensure your campaigns are up to date — and be rewarded with shopper attention.
We hope this article has been helpful. If you would like to know how Shoparize can help you grow your business by improving the performance of your Google Shopping ads, email us today at css@shoparize.com.
