GOOGLE SHOPPING

Product Feed

First, it is important that your product feed is in order. We start with evaluating your product feed. Here we mainly look at the structure and adjust the feed where necessary. The best part of it is that we can work efficiently with a feed management system. We are happy to partner with parties such as Channable or ESS in this regard. These platforms offer useful tools with which we can quickly make adjustments to your product feed. Moreover, they also offer ways to display your products on other platforms, such as Amazon, Bol.com, Marktplaats, Beslist.nl, and many more.

We will also enrich your product feed as much as possible with additional data. Think of product reviews on your website or enhancing their visibility when a product is on sale.

Website

A good user experience on the website is highly crucial. Google will look at general things that are also important for your organic performance. Also, it is vital to keep your stocks full. In many web stores, things still go wrong despite the constant replenishing of stocks. In principle, products that are not in stock are excluded from the product feed, but if the data of the product feed is not ‘refreshed’ often enough, it is possible that people click on an ad and then immediately leave (bounced) because the product is not in stock.

Bids

The fact that Google Shopping in Google Ads does not use keywords does not mean that it is also easy to maintain. In fact, excluding keywords is even more important to Google Shopping than with regular text ads. After all, your ad for Nike shoes is also triggered when someone searches for “Latest release Nike Air Max shoes”. The terms “Nike Air Max” will appear in your product feed under the brand, category, and description. But you do not want to pay the highest cost per click for such a search term, since there is little chance that someone will order immediately. Due to the high comparison rate of these products, a potential customer will probably first want to understand the product further. It is therefore good to exclude the orienting keywords in a campaign that focuses only on people who are closer to a purchase intention. In this way, the campaign will mainly be triggered when people search with a search term with a higher intention to purchase, such as “Buy Nike Air Max 96′ blue”. Excluding these search terms must be done on a daily basis, we can do this with custom scripts or, if necessary, in collaboration with one of our data science partners such as Adchieve.

Our strategy is therefore to adjust the CPC to the purchasing phase in which the consumer is at that moment. We then get two to four campaigns with the same products, but these are only triggered on one of the shopping funnels Orientation, Interest, Consideration, and Conversion. This way, you never pay too much for your ads. This also means that we can work on the basis of a Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) agreement.

CSS

Finally, with Google Shopping, we often work together with the Comparison Shopping Service (CSS) partner Bigshopper. In Google Shopping, there are several comparison sites like Google. As a web store, you can therefore choose to have your shopping ads run directly via the Google comparator or via one of the other providers in the comparison site domain.

However, working with such a CSS partner has become even more important since September 2018. Since 2017, Google has received a series of fines for abuse of power. Google previously made the shopping ads only accessible to webshops, thus depriving comparison sites of the opportunity to compete fairly. Google took steps in this direction by decoupling its own shopping service from Google and establishing it as a separate company. That way, the comparison site Google can compete with other comparison sites in Google Shopping. In order to accommodate these so-called CSS partners even more, and probably also to show goodwill to the government bodies that imposed the fines on them, CSS partners have received all kinds of benefits, such as a 20% discount on the CPC and a refund of 30% of the expenses themselves. Some of these benefits have now been scaled back. But you will still receive a 20% discount on your click costs with a CSS partner. Bigshopper is one of the first comparison sites and has been active since 2007 and is also active in almost all countries in Europe.