Are You Ready For The New Google Shopping?

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1 Are You Ready For The New Google Shopping? cpcstrategy.com/blog

2 Overview Since its inception Google Shopping has been free to participate in. All an advertiser had to do get their products listed was to submit a data feed with accurate inventory, product, and pricing information and they could sit back and watch the traffic roll in. Beginning in June, these free listings will be combined with the commercial Product Listing Ads Program, creating a New Google Shopping Experience. While the new format will certainly present challenges to all retailers, those that quickly adapt to the new commercialized environment are poised to benefit. This crash course in the New Google Shopping is intended to get you up to speed so that you can maintain and gain traffic during and after the transition. So what exactly is changing and what is taking its place? 1

3 Google Shopping Ads, those free ad units that we ve learned to love and cherish are going away this Fall. These ad units tended to be listed in the middle of search result page with direct links to merchant product pages or product comparison pages. Google Product Listing Ads will be taking their place. These ad units display specific products that will show up alongside standard Adwords listings above organic search results, but instead of just a short snippet of text, users gain the benefit of seeing specific product titles, an image, and price. Product Listing Ads are managed via Adwords and driven by the data feed submitted to the Merchant Center. Within Adwords a merchant can set bids by categories, similar to their regular Adwords Campaigns While both are driven by the same merchant center inventory/data feed Product Listing Ads are not to be confused with Product Extensions which are an extension of standard Adwords text ads, where products will be listed alongside an Adword text listing, with a drop-down option to see products that a merchant is selling that is related to the search. 2

4 During the Transition Google plans to complete the transition from free to paid listings some time in Fall. During the transition period advertisers that use the Product Listings Ads program to advertise their products will be given a 10% discount on purchased traffic. Those that sign up before August 15th will receive a $100 credit get started with the new program as well giving us an idea of the timeline Google is working to complete the transition. To sign up for this discount browse over to the following URL to get an automatic monthly credit of 10%: So What Do You Have To Do To Get Started with Product Listing Ads There are four steps you must go through to effectively setup and launch your Product Listing Ad Campaigns. They are as follows: Setting Up and Sending Your Data Feed Connecting Your Google Adwords and Google Merchant Center Accounts Setting Up your PLA Campaign within Adwords Tracking Results Using Google Analytics Setting Up and Sending Your Data Feed If you re already sending a data feed to the Google Merchant Center for the free Google Shopping program the good news is there is not much you have to do modify this data feed to prepare it for the product listing ads program. Apart from the standard Google Shopping Columns, you will need to add the following fields to the data feed to slice and differentiate your inventory for the product listing ads program. 3

5 adwords_grouping - Used to group products in an arbitrary way. It can be used for Product Filters to limit a campaign to a group of products, or Product Targets to bid differently for a group of products. This is a required field if the advertiser wants to bid differently to different subsets of products in the CPC or CPA % version. It can only hold one value. adwords_labels - Similar to adwords_grouping but used only for CPC ads. You can also use multiple values here, separated by commas. adwords_publish- Indicates whether or not you d like a particular to be used in the Product Listing Ads and Ad Extension program adwords_redirect- Used to send traffic from the free Google Shopping Source to another URL although with the depreciation of the program we can see that this field probably will no longer be used in the mid to long term. Check out our example data feed columns for a template of how the header should look once complete. 4

6 Connecting Your Google Adwords and Google Merchant Center Accounts 1. In your Merchant Center account, click Settings, then AdWords 2. Enter your AdWords Customer ID and click Add Setting Up your Product Listing Ad Campaign within Adwords While you can set up a Product Listing Ad campaign with in an existing text ad campaign, we ve found that setting up the campaign as standalone campaign gives the greatest chance for success on the platform. 5

7 To Set Up a Product Listings Ad Campaign 1. ) Log on to adwords and create a new campaign 2.) Name the Campaign Product Listing Ads, set your Geo Locations Target, Bids/Budget and enable Product Extensions 3.) Create an Adgroup that will house your Product Listing Ads by selecting Product Listing Ad under the create an ad wizard in the Adgroup menu 6

8 4.) Set your bids and you re done! You ve your created first Product Listing Ads Campaign, Adgroup, and Ad. Two things to note here: Promotion - Product Listing Ads allow you to add promotion text to your ads, so if you have free shipping or any other offer that might entice a customer to buy this is your chance to promote it. Auto-Targets - Auto-targets allow you to focus your bidding around particular groups of products as defined by the following five attributes: product_type, brand, condition, adwords_grouping, and adwords_labels. A well optimized product listings campaign would have many different segmentation buckets to help optimizing bids, but for now we can leave the auto-target as all products to get you started. Tracking Performance Using Google Analytics Tracking Performance Using Google Analytics requires some manipulation of the data feed that is sent to the Google Merchant Center, but makes sense unless you want to be flying blind on the new channel. 7

9 Step 1 To track traffic you ll have to fill out the adwords_redirect field with the full URL to your product page appending with tracking parameters differentiate Google Shopping traffic from Google Product Listing Ad traffic. For example if your product was at the follow URL You would populate the adwords_redirect field for product1 with a Google Analytics Tracking Parameter specific to product listing ads, for instancewww.mysite.com/product1.html?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords Once you complete this your data feed will look a lot like this: Now, any traffic coming from product extensions or product listing ads will be tracked under googlepepla / adwords within Google Analytics. Step 2 So now we can differentiate between free Google Shopping (soon to be depreciated) and product extensions and product listing ads traffic now we must figure out a way to differentiate between product extensions and product listing traffic. All this requires is another column, called adwords_queryparam. Curiously Google has taken this part off their help pages for whatever reason, but it still seems be active and working for our clients. In the example below we fill this column with utm_content={adtype}. 8

10 What this column does is allow you to have Google automatically append your URLs with what s in the column, and replace {adtype} with pe or pla depending how a user got to your site. To backtrack a step a user going to your site via product extensions or product listing without this column will end up at: [yourdomain.com]/page1?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords With this new column, a user coming from product extensions specifically will end up at: [yourdomain.com]/page1?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords&utm_ content=pe And similarly a user coming from product listing ads will end up at: [yourdomain.com]/page1?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords&utm_ content=pla Which then allows you to further break down your traffic source between product extension and product listing ad users in Analytics. Conclusion We know that this transition might be a bit bumpy for a lot of retailers, but at time the change provides an opportunity for those who rise to the occasion. CPC Strategy is the leader in product level bidding setup and management. Give us a call at or shoot as an at contact@cpcstrategy.com and we ll make sure you take full advantage of this exciting new opportunity! 9

11 About CPC Strategy CPC Strategy manages the data feeds and Google Merchant Center accounts for more than 130 ecommerce merchants, and we ve been working with Google Product Listing Ads since it s inception in November It s a product-based program that we re used to: it uses data feeds to source ads to shoppers and requires a manager to optimize that feed and optimize CPC bids by product. That s what we ve been doing for our clients for over five years now. Data feeds and product level bidding is tricky, and it requires a large amount of resources to be dedicated to such an endeavor and if done incorrectly could severely damage your marketing program. That s why so many ecommerce retailers trust us to keep their data feed in tip top shape and for us to show the right products to the right customers at the right time. Long story short: CPC Strategy is the leader in the CSE industry. You can trust that our knowledge, expertise and management systems will help you outsmart your competition on the CSEs. Interested in partnering with us? Contact us today to improve your CSE revenue. 9

12 About CPC Strategy To date CPC Strategy has covered more news, published more reports, and written more articles on Comparison Shopping Engine optimization and management than any other agency. CPC Strategy leads the industry in CSE best practice implementation, data feed optimization, and product bidding tactics. Our comparison shopping studies and articles have appeared on blogs and industry publications such as Internet Retailer, Website Magazine, GetElastic, Amazon Seller Support, and Auction Bytes. Long story short: CPC Strategy is the leader in the CSE industry. You can trust that our knowledge, expertise and management systems will help you outsmart your competition on the CSEs. Interested in partnering with us? Contact us today to improve your CSE revenue.