Hey everyone,
In this blog post today, I’m going to show you the 5 Google Shopping Ads optimization tactics that no one else is telling you.
When it comes to Shopping Ads optimization, everyone else seems to be recommending the same advice. Things like: writing good titles, using good images, adding negative keywords…
You’ve probably heard them all, rinse and repeat.
However, there are some tactics that I’ve been using — which are turning huge profits for our clients — that pretty much no-one else out there is recommending!
1. Optimise Your Pricing
Of all the variables in your product feed, your price has by far the biggest impact in determining how high you will show up in the Google Shopping results.
This fact is often missed by other marketers! In fact, if you go and do a quick search right now for “Google Shopping optimisation tips” — you’ll find a bunch of articles and not one of them will say “try tweaking your prices”.
And that’s totally crazy. Studies have shown that all other things being equal, the product with the lowest price gets the 1st place in Google Shopping most of the time.
Google is biased enough towards the lowest-priced option that in some cases, a 5% drop in price can lead to a 60% increase in impressions and clicks if that price drop took you towards being the lowest price on the market.
Of course dropping your price might erode your margin. But dropping your price might also lead to significantly more sales.
However, no one can tell you whether a lower or a higher price might result in more profit. The only way to tell is to try a different price and see what happens.
I recommend that you try either a price increase OR a price decrease of between 5% to 10% and observe the outcome.
Did you make more or less profit after that change? If you did, great! If you didn’t, well, maybe you could now reverse the price change and try moving it a little bit in the opposite direction as your next test instead.
2. DON’T Exclude Unprofitable Products
The standard advice goes: check your return on ad spend for each of your products. When you find something that is not profitable, turn it off — you’ll make more profit than if you left it on.
While that last bit is true, there’s also another thing that’s equally accurate, which is this:
Instead of turning it off, make that product more profitable. You will then make even more profit.
Turning off unprofitable products is basically the easy, short-term solution. In the short term you might stop burning money on those products.
However, you probably just switched off a product which given the proper treatment, could actually generate profit for you.
What is the “proper treatment”?
It is to reduce its cost-per-click bids so that it costs less to show ads on, thus driving up your ROAS.
These days we mostly use the automated Smart Bidding that controls the CPC bids for us — and rightly so. Smart Bidding is AWESOME when it’s in the right hands and is fed good data.
You might be wondering how to make the CPC bids go lower when you are not even manually controlling them.
Further down I’ll go over how automated bid strategies work. Once you understand that, you’ll know exactly what to do in situations like this where you need the CPC bid to be lower.
But before we get to that, these are the 2 main options for getting the CPCs down on unprofitable products:
Option 1: Increase the Target ROAS
Let’s imagine your Target ROAS is currently set to 300%, but you are seeing your unprofitable products doing a ROAS of 150%.
What you might see is that your average ROAS is the 300% you asked for, but you have some super profitable products at 500 or 600% ROAS, and some unprofitable ones at 150%.
Google doesn’t really care about what are the top ROAS’s and bottom ROAS’s in your campaign. It only cares about the average.
So it will let high-performing products balance out the low-performing ones, and thus it will be happy to bid some products unprofitably if the average ROAS meets your target.
So the simplest solution here is to raise your overall Target ROAS high enough so that even the least-profitable products in the campaign are running at a profitable ROAS.
Option 2: Move Poor Performers To Their Own Campaign
I actually prefer option 2 to option 1. I’ll explain why in a minute.
For now, what you need to know is how to create a new campaign specifically for the low-performers.
First, exclude the low-performers from your main Shopping campaign, then create a new Shopping campaign just for them.
In this new Shopping campaign, run the low-performing products with their own bid strategy set to your target ROAS.
As you have now set them up with their own campaign and bid strategy, the high-performers will no longer balance out the low-performers, and Google will be forced to bid these to a profitable ROAS.
Sometimes when you use one of these two options to lower the CPC bids of your products, what you’ll find is that Google has to lower the CPC bid so much that the product stops getting impressions and clicks.
Don’t worry, in these cases, that’s fine.
Why so? Because running no ads is better than running unprofitable ads, and at least you made a good attempt to get the bids dialled in and the product generating a profit.
Some of the other products you changed will probably end up generating a profit so overall, you’re gonna be winning much harder if you take one of these two options instead of just pausing unprofitable products.
3. DON’T Optimise Your Descriptions
Here’s another unexpected one: do NOT waste time optimising and tweaking your product descriptions.
It might come as a surprise but it makes absolutely zero difference to the performance of your Shopping campaign.
A study was done a few years ago done by Crealytics, who have their own product feed management app used by tonnes of huge multinational brands.
This study involved running a test across thousands of products. For half the products, the description text was changed to a lorem ipsum style nonsense text. The other half of the products in the test group were maintained as the control and received no change at all.
The outcome? The performance for the products with the description fields changed to nonsense text showed no perceptible or significant change at all!
You might see many resources out there recommending optimising your product description to include many keyboards. Don’t bother — you’re better off spending your time on something more productive.
4. Learn How Automated Bid Strategies Work
Some people think that the automated bid strategies from Google are a magic pill. All you need to do is set them up on all your campaigns, then never look at your campaigns again… right?
Wrong.
Automated bid strategies are useful BUT they work in a specific way and within specific confines.
While they are NOT a set-and-forget type of strategy, they ARE nonetheless an important tool that you need to know how to use.
The better you understand how automated bid strategies and machine learning actually works, the better you will be able to use that tool to generate profit.
To begin with, there are plenty of resources on the Internet for this topic. Google up the phrase “about automated bidding” and find the Google Ads help page that describes how it works. Read every single word on that page.
Then on that page you will see some sub pages telling you how Target ROAS and Maximise Conversion Value actually work. Click through there and read each of those.
This will take only about 15 minutes of your time, after which you’re going to have a better understanding of these things than 99% of other advertisers out there.
For an extra knowledge upgrade, Google the phrase “how does machine learning work”. You’ll probably just spend another 15 minutes reading a few articles. If you prefer, watch a YouTube video on machine learning instead.
Boom, 30 minutes is all that takes — and you are now equipped with the knowledge to be much, much better at knowing how and when to use the main auto bid strategies.
5. Learn How Impression Shares Work
You’re probably thinking at this point that it’s really boring that I’m asking you to learn a bunch of stuff. Why not just tell you exactly what to do so that you make more profit in Shopping, right?
But trust me on this. If you learn how impression shares work in addition to a good understanding of auto bid strategies, you’re going to add a bunch of extra zeros on the revenue figures in your Google Shopping campaign.
When it comes to impression shares, there are three important columns in Google Ads that you want to fully learn the meaning of. Those are:
Search Impression Share
Lost IS (Budget)
Lost IS (Rank)
Your Search Impression Share tells you what percentage of the available market you showed ads to. If you have anything less than 100% here — it means you could have gotten more clicks and sales if you did one of two things.
The next two columns tell you which of the two things you need to do.
Lost IS (budget) tells you if you need to raise your budgets. When you see a number here, it means that if you increase your daily budget, you will get more clicks and sales at exactly the same ROAS you were already achieving.
In most cases, if you see a number here, it’s a no-brainer to raise your daily budget.
Lost IS (rank) will basically tell you when you are losing share of the market due to your bids being too low. If you see a number here then you want to increase your CPC bids in order to capture more market share and a higher sales volume.
Of course, in order to increase your CPC bids you need your ROAS to be well above your profit threshold, so look at that before making any adjustments.
Here is where your newfound knowledge of how bid strategies work will be of good use! You will have a better idea here on how to make the machine increase your CPC bids.
Very simply, if you are on the Target ROAS bid strategy, then decreasing your Target ROAS will increase the CPC bids.
And if you are on Maximise Conversion Value bid strategy, then increasing your daily budget will increase your CPC bids.
Summing It Up
If you search around for Google Shopping Ads Optimisation advice these days, you’ll often find the same advice that has been recycled over and over again, ever since Google Shopping Ads first launched.
Today, I’ve introduced to you the 5 things that really work — and aren’t just the stuff you’ve already heard many times over.
To recap, those 5 things were:
Optimise Your Prices
DON’T Exclude Unprofitable Products
DON’T Optimise Your Description
Learn How Automated Bid Strategies Work
Learn How Impression Shares Work
Let’s make this super easy for you — why not pick just one of those things to try today? Which one would you pick first? Let me know in the comments below!
And if you’d like to find out more about my agency, Big Flare, or to have a chat with me about potentially working together, head on over here to schedule a call.