This document outlines an agenda for a 3-day Google Shopping virtual summit hosted by CPC Strategy. Day 1 focuses on crafting a Google Shopping strategy to drive direct ROI growth. Sessions will cover optimizing product data quality, improving product titles, and leveraging custom labels. Day 2 covers using competitor data to improve performance. Day 3 focuses on boosting performance through customer reviews in paid channels. The summit provides resources and allows participants to ask questions.
2. 2016 Summit Layout
Day 1
Crafting Your Google Shopping Strategy to Drive
Direct ROI Growth
Day 2
Using Your Competitors’ Data to Drive Performance
on Google Shopping
Day 3
Leveraging Customer Reviews to Boost Performance
& Efficiency in PPC Channels
3. Logistics
Session Recording Will Be Sent out Tomorrow Morning
Q&A Throughout the Presentation
Submit Questions In the Chat Box to the Right
Resources In the Handouts Section to the Right
Today’s Resources
4. OVERVIEW
• Founded in 2007
• Recognized as an Official Google Shopping Partner
• 300+ Active Retail Clients
• Top 50 fastest growing company in San Diego 3 years
CLIENTS
About CPC Strategy
SOLUTIONS
• Retail-focused Paid Search (PPC)
• Google Shopping Management
• Shopping Channel Management
• Amazon Sales Acceleration
5.
6. The CAPx Shopping Platform
P r o g r a m m a t i c B i d d i n g & M a n a g e m e n t S o f t w a r e
f o r G o o g l e S h o p p i n g A d v e r t i s e r s
What is The CAPx Shopping Platform?
• A Programmatic Approach to Google Shopping Management
• Product Feed Optimizer – Product Title Changes
• Efficient Custom Label Management
• Granular Programmatic Bidding Rules
cpcstrategy.com/CAPx-Shopping-Platform/
7. Crafting Your Google Shopping Strategy
to Drive Direct ROI Growth
Day 1 | Innovative & Lucrative Google Shopping Strategies
8. Jason Bell
Senior Retail Search Manager
✓ Experience managing accounts for Riddell, Deluxe, ABT, & Sears
✓ Over 6 years of SEM experience
✓ Flag football superstar
9. Course Overview
• Basic Product Data Quality – “The Easy Stuff”
• Improving your product titles for search intent
• Manipulating Custom Labels to Strengthen Bidding Efficiency
• Exact & Phrase Match Targeting for Google Shopping Campaigns
•Q&A
10. Poll For The Audience…
Are you making optimizations to your product feed?
A. Yes, consistently making optimizations
B. Yes, but only periodically
C. Not as much as I would like to
D. Not making any optimizations
12. Google Merchant Center Diagnostics Tab
Before We Get Started
If you already have a Google Merchant Center account and Shopping Campaign rolling, I suggest we start
here.
Diagnostics Tab
Found within ‘Diagnostics’ on the left side
navigation bar within your Google Merchant
Center
• Shows most of your current warnings and
disapproved product issues
Feed Report
Found within ‘Feeds’ button on the left side nav
bar
• Shows issues the system picks up during
import of the product feed
13. Designated GTINs (Global Trade Item Number)
May 16th Deadline For GTIN Inclusion on Select Products/Brands
• Google is now requiring GTIN values for Brands/Manufacturers who are known to
register this for their products
• Officially enforced Thursday 5/19
GTINs include the following
• UPCs (North America), EAN (Europe), JAN (Japan), ISBN (Books), & ITF-14
(multipacks)
Importance?
• Products are disapproved and eventually a suspension could be applied to your
account if not taken care of
Best Practice
• Gather GTINs from all Manufacturers and request them moving forward (if
available)
• Easier said than done but will ensure quality data in the long term
• Manufacturers are (or should be) aware of this recent enforcement and
willing to assist
Basic Product Data Quality – “The Easy Stuff”
14. Basic Product Data Quality – “The Easy Stuff”
Fully Populated Columns
Typically focus on required columns first, then move onto optional columns.
• A list of required columns can be found here
Pro Tip:
• Ctrl + Down in desired columns
• Filter for Blanks (recommended)
15. Basic Product Data Quality – “The Easy Stuff”
Links (Product Page & URLs)
Do They Work?
Test 5+ links. I recommend testing at least a couple of higher AOV items & best sellers with and without
tracking attached.
• Tracking could include Google Analytics UTM tracking or other variations such as Omniture SIDs
• Ensure your expected unit drivers & sale items are correct and working. These are your bread & butter
during Black Friday & Cyber Monday sales.
Do You Have Variations Of Your Products? If So, Does The Landing Page Show The
Corresponding Variation When Loaded?
How Are Your Landing Pages Set Up?
1. Single parent page with a drop down to select size/color or other variable options
• Is the variation option pre-selected when URL is loaded?
2. Multiple pages per variation product
• In this case, ensure the correct variations are showing up
f you have variations but are only sending a parent product in the feed, potentially building the variations
out and sending them will help visibility of your business during the holiday shopping season.
16. Basic Product Data Quality – “The Easy Stuff”
Images
Check Sizes
Google recommends 800 x 800, what size do we receive?
• Is it possible to change the dimensions within the URL itself?
• Do you have access to multiple image columns?
• You are eligible to send additional image URLs to Google within the feed
• Recommended to send the highest quality image as the main image
Watermarks / Promotional Text
These can be hard to spot if they are on select products out of a multi-thousand
product feed. --- Spot check for these and be on the look out for Google Warnings
(or history of them)
*Note: Any text within an image could be flagged by Google as “Promotional Text”
be careful.
17. Basic Product Data Quality – “The Easy Stuff”
IDs
Are They Unique?
Typically you will want to check all Unique IDs to find any duplicates. This includes SKU, MPN, UPC, ISBN, GTIN.
Ideally all values are unique even if they are variants however MPNs aren't penalized if they are duplicated.
• The item_group ID column is a great way to signal to Google that there are several variants that relate to 1
parent item_group ID
• This helps Google tell if there are variants of a product and helps to unlock the ‘Show all’ feature below:
Feed Example - Important: A Parent SKU should be present for variants of a product
SKU MPN Item_Group_ID Title
A4-N6152-0001 N6152 A4-N6152 A4 Adult 2 Snap Zip Up Baseball Pants - Black - Small
A4-N6152-0002 N6152 A4-N6152 A4 Adult 2 Snap Zip Up Baseball Pants - Black - Medium
A4-N6152-0003 N6152 A4-N6152 A4 Adult 2 Snap Zip Up Baseball Pants - Black - Large
A4-N6152-0006 N6152 A4-N6152 A4 Adult 2 Snap Zip Up Baseball Pants - Grey - Small
A4-N6152-0007 N6152 A4-N6152 A4 Adult 2 Snap Zip Up Baseball Pants - Grey - Medium
A4-N6152-0008 N6152 A4-N6152 A4 Adult 2 Snap Zip Up Baseball Pants - Grey - Large
18. Basic Product Data Quality – “The Easy Stuff”
Do The SKUs Match What You Previously Sent?
This is important because relevancy is attached to the product SKU and not the MPN or UPC
(unless those were being sent as the merchant SKUs previously)
• It is not recommended to change your product IDs once they are set and have gathered data.
Pro Tip:
• SKUs are typically unique to each merchant
• MPNs should be unique to each product, similar across all merchants (can contain variance)
• UPCs will be unique to each product bottom line (shouldn’t contain any variance)
19. MPNs / SKUs
Are The MPNs Modified?
Some retailers will add Brand or Vendor Part Number Prefixes while some add or remove dashes or other characters.
Do MPNs Match What Other Retailers Have?
Google searches should help us figure this out.
Do Our Skus Match Up Between The Feed And Google Analytics?
•If not, I recommend adding a new column into the feed with those values or keeping a legend handy in case you want
to match GA data.
•The benefit of the above is the allowance for historical GA data to be used at the SKU level to pull top sellers site-wide
or through specific channels.
•The “utm_term=“ tracking parameter will help us collect matching IDs after they are installed but will not help us with
historical data.
• Much of this can be ignored if using ‘Auto Tagging’ but I find it useful to pass the values just in case
Basic Product Data Quality – “The Easy Stuff”
20. Prices
Are Prices Accurate? Are Prices > $0?
These are easy checks that we should run after the exported are created.
• Check a few large AOV prices & some best sellers (if you have them on hand)
• Use the filtering option to search for $0 items
• The quickest way to a bounced user is to show a price higher on your landing page
than what is in your ad
Product Variations
Are We Missing / Not Sending Product Variations? Why or why not?
• During Black Friday & Cyber Monday (if your budget allows) I recommend including
variations and dominating the search impression share
• Optional to only do this on top performers or unit drivers
• We don’t have to send them, but it is helpful to have them available should we need
them in the future.
Basic Product Data Quality – “The Easy Stuff”
21. Shipping & Tax Data
Are we accurately providing Shipping & Tax data?
• Depending on how complicated your Shipping or Tax rules are will decide if it is more accurate to use the
Google Login or Feed
Easy Shipping & Tax Rules?
• Using the Google login will like be your best bet to quickly set up your rules as well as adjust them on the fly.
Complicated Rules or Special Considerations?
• Depending on what this entails, it may be best to send these within your feed directly
• This can be tricky and more information can be found here
Basic Product Data Quality – “The Easy Stuff”
23. Title / Description Enhancements
Brand
These should almost always be added to the front of the titles however we can also test adding
them to the end of the titles if we want to push more weight to other parts of the title. (e.g. ‘J.W.
Hulme’ is not searched often or included in most of our search terms)
Example:
Attributes: Color / Size / Gender
The addition of attributes in the title is very important as attributes are often keywords used by
customers who are looking for something specific.
Example:
J.W. Hulme Leather Brief Bag J.W. Hulme Mens Brown Leather Brief Bag
Other Options:
• J.W. Hulme Mens Heritage Leather Brief Bag in Brown
• J.W. Hulme Heritage Leather Brief Bag for Men - Brown
• Mens Leather Brief Bag by J.W. Hulme – Brown
vs.
J.W. Hulme Leather Brief Bag Leather Brief Bag by J.W. Hulmevs.
Improving Your Product Titles for Search Intent
24. Improving Your Product Titles for Search Intent
Title / Description Enhancements
MPN / Style Number
Typically these are more useful for Electronics or Appliance merchants where customers are looking for a
specific model or style number.
• Research into Google Analytics or Search Query Reports to see if MPN or Style Numbers are being used to
search for products. Feed:
Search Query Report:
Google Results:
Product Type
Does the title actually say what the product is?
Example: “J.W. Hulme Mens Heritage Leather Brief In Brown” works but it doesn’t have the key
word “bag” or “case”
25. Title / Description Enhancements
Excessive Capitalization
This is something that can easily slip passed even the most cunning eyes.
Pro Tip: Excessive Capitalization
• SB can use the =PROPER() function to change the 1st letter in each word of a cell to uppercase, leaving the rest lower case.
• Be careful with this function if you are dealing with MPNs in the titles which look much better with full capitalization.
HTLM & Other Encoding Artifacts
This is also very common and can easily be missed. I typically find these during my search for larger issues. The
encoding artifacts are common when apostrophes, commas, ampersands, etc. are used in the text but not
decoded properly.
Pro Tip:
• Usually a quick FIND (CTRL + F) within Excel for the following characters will help me spot theses earlier. < , Â , € , { , %
Does The Title Make Sense?
Does it read well? Does it look out of the ordinary? Make sure its not just keyword soup.
Improving Your Product Titles for Search Intent
26. Electronics & Appliances
Title / Description Additions or Manipulations
MPNs
• Targets users who know the specific model #
Specifications
• Size, Features, Additions, Color, etc..
Brand Name (typically to the front)
• Let your data decide if brand should be closer to the front (recommended)
Product Type / Google Product Categories
• Granularity helps create more levers within your product groups
• Ability to target and bid on specific products types easily
Custom Labels
• Product Types
• Price Ranges
• ROI Margins
• Product Group IDs (variations)
Category Specific Data Enhancements
27. Category Specific Data Enhancements
Apparel
Title / Description Additions or Manipulations
• Brand Name (typically to the front)
• Product Descriptors
• Gender, Size, Color, Material, etc..
• Including ‘Style Names’
• Product Types (e.g. Boots or Leather Briefcase)
Product Type / Google Product Categories
• Granularity helps create more levers within your product groups
• Product Type e.g. Apparel > Womens > Boots vs Apparel
Custom Labels
• Price Floor
• ‘Style Names’
• Product Types e.g. ‘boots’ or ‘briefcases’
• Colors
• Size
• Material
28. Poll For The Audience…
Are you currently utilizing Custom Labels?
A. Yes, consistently
B. Yes, but only periodically
C. Not as much as I would like to
D. What are custom labels?
30. How to Manipulate Custom Labels
Custom Labels
Fill Your Labels
Even if you don’t plan to actually build out the campaign and pull these levers at launch, it is always a good idea to
collect data along as many points as possible. What data would be useful for you to collect?
Pro Tip:
• Product attributes work great to fill up empty custom label columns. Collecting data on “color”,
“material”, “style”, “size”, etc may not have any immediate benefits but it does allow you to run some interesting reports.
31. How to Manipulate Custom Labels
Custom Labels
Custom Groupings
Labeling specific groupings of products easily allows you to adjust bids up or down
• Best Sellers
• Promotional SKUs
• Seasonal Items (ie: Winter Jackets / Sandals / Air Conditioners / etc.)
• Price Buckets or Price Floor (ie: Under $30)
• Parent Groupings (When dealing with Child Variants)
• Performance Based
• Margin Based
Several different options, adjust based upon your needs and what makes it easiest to manage and improve
the performance of your campaigns.
33. Implementing Keyword Insertions
Questions to Explore
• Do PLAs show up for these keywords when running a manual search?
• Does at least one of your products show up when running this search?
• How much does your Shopping campaigns currently spend on these keywords?
• Do your product titles or descriptions include this keyword?
Leveraging Current PPC Campaigns/Keywords
Great place to start when trying to ensure you dominate the PLAs within your top performing SERPs
• Shopping typically has a higher conversion rate, having your text ads and PLA ads visible on the same
search result can help strengthen the credibility to potential customers.
34. Finding Search Term Reports
You can run this on all your campaigns as well if you want to know your account wide top performing search
queries
*Note: These are typically not the keywords you are bidding on (PPC). Instead this shows you metrics on
the auctions you are winning based upon what the user is actually typing in the search bar.
Implementing Keyword Insertions
Finding Your Site Search Data
This is where you pull the data through Google Analytics
36. Improving & Leveraging Categorization
Product Types / GPCs
Product Types are very Important
These have been confirmed by Google to be indexed for search. No longer are they only used for manipulating
your campaign builds.
• These should be more accurate and granular than the GPCs which can make them useful for grouping
products aside from the GPCs or Custom Labels.
ProTip:
• Product Type is the retailers categorization
• GPCs / Google Product Categories are
the closest Google equivalent
37. Improving & Leveraging Categorization
Does The Retailer Have Multiple Delimited Categories?
These could be separate by commas, dashes, backslashes, or carrots (ideal) for example.
ProTip:
• Create granular Product Types using carrots ( > ) as delimiters. It is recommended that this goes down
to 3 – 5 levels.
• Bad Product Type
Apparel > Shoes
• Good Product Types
Apparel > Mens > Dress Shoes
• Ideal Product Type
Apparel > Mens > Dress Shoes > Salvatore Ferragamo > 'Regal' Pebbled Leather Loafer
Product Names in Product Types?
This is something we have been experimenting with and it comes especially in handy when dealing with
apparel items however with Google now indexing product_types, we recommend adding product names to
the ends of all your product_types.
38. Overall Data Quality
Important Considerations When Dealing w/ Data Quality
Important Features Or Data Points Of The Products You Sell
• These should be highlighted within the titles & descriptions and readily available within the feed
• Different depending on product types – e.g. Electronics vs Apparel
Audience & Typical Searches Done By Your Customers
• Are MPNs or Part Numbers used often? e.g. Electronics & Appliances
• Are there several sizes to distinguish? e.g. Apparel & Hardware
Your Current Data Quality
• Are you receiving this data from the manufacturers?
• Are you supplying this data to Google / on your site / within your feed?
What Your Data Points Tells You
• Running the reports previously outlined, where are your highest conversion rates or orders coming from?
• What opportunities do you have to grow or improve ROI based upon these reports?
39. Exact & Phrase Match Targeting for
Google Shopping Campaigns
40. Google Shopping ISO Strategy
ISO Strategy – [Exact] or “Phrase” match targeting
What is it?
• Ability to target an exact keyword or phrase within Google Shopping w/o the need of a
daily negative keyword addition (ie: SQO Strategy)
• Shifting focus away from only product level performance to search query performance
How is it accomplished?
• Through the use of both the campaign priority settings and negative keyword sculpting
Pros?
• Target high or low value queries
• Better control the product mix for these queries on the SERP
• Control spend/bids on the search query level and not only the product level
Cons?
• Potential overexposure of specific products which can lead to lower overall CTR for a
given search query
• Limiting of traffic on Shopping tab if not careful
41. Google Shopping ISO Strategy
Example Initial Uses
Impression Share Targeting / SERP Ownership
• Targeting very high impression share (90%+) on specific key terms
Improve ROI on poor performing queries
• Grouping of poor performing keywords into a single campaign where the average bid
will be lower
Search Intent Sculpting
• Ability to separate search query traffic based upon user intent.
• Top vs Middle vs Bottom of the funnel traffic
Brand vs Non-Brand + Desktop vs Mobile
• Splitting up traffic between branded & non-branded searches with the goal of owning
more of the SERP on branded searches
• Addition of splitting up Desktop & Mobile traffic as well using these settings
42. Google Shopping ISO Strategy
The Setup
In a nutshell…
• You want your more targeted traffic to actually be housed in your lower priority
campaigns
• Use negatives in your higher priority campaigns to funnel either the [exact] match or
“phrase” match queries into your lower priority campaigns
• If multiple ISO campaigns are created, be sure to exclude their [exact] or “phrase”
queries from each other as well
Pro-Tip: typically I use negatives lists for each ISO campaign I create to make it easy to wrap
my head around where these lists should be applied
Catch All – High Priority: This will act as our main campaign to catch all traffic outside
of our ISO targeted traffic and any extra added negative keyword traffic
Low Bids – Medium Priority: This is used to only capture our negative keyword traffic
if we decide not to create an ISO campaign around these specifically
ISO Brand – Low Priority: Our actual ISO campaign, in this example used to target
queries which include our brand name
43. Google Shopping ISO Strategy
The Setup cont.
Further Explanation
• Think of it instead from the most targeted campaigns to the least targeted campaigns
instead of highest priority to lowest priority – its backwards
• Our most targeted campaign (Bottom of the funnel) is the lowest priority
• Followed by our Middle of the funnel campaign
• Lastly by our Top of the funnel campaign which receives the highest priority
Why?
• It comes down to how the priority settings are used
• Google’s Priority Settings information page can be found here
• The key is, that the highest priority campaign will bid unless there is something holding
the higher priority campaigns from bidding. We force negatives to remove the higher
priority campaigns from the ability to bid on these specific search queries.
• If you were to structure the priority settings opposite of what I have laid out, you will
need to constantly monitor negative keywords in your highest priority campaigns.
44. Google Shopping ISO Strategy
Example Breakouts
Brand vs Non-Brand + Desktop vs Mobile
• It is easy enough to create a Brand vs Non-Brand breakout without using ISO/priority
settings.
• This is used for the ability to break out Brand vs Non-Branded while simultaneously
splitting out your Desktop vs Mobile traffic
• Note: I am using a negative list which includes a phrase match term for the brand of this
client. This is added to all [NB] campaigns which stands for non-branded
45. Google Shopping ISO Strategy
Poor Performing Search Query Strategy
AKA Red ISO Strategy
• Test this out on some of your poorest performing keywords. Include some of the
keywords that you have previously added as negatives (unless they are totally irrelevant)
• Idea is to re-introduce these search queries into a separate campaign with lower bids
than the queries had previously. I recommend keeping bid levels around half of what
your current average Max CPC bids are (not avg. cpc)
To Get Started
• Create a new shopping campaign, set to lowest priority.
• I typically leave all other settings similar to my other campaigns (ie: device, location, ad
scheduling, etc.)
• Create an [exact] match negative list that you can share with all of your non-red ISO
campaigns.
• Either build out your product groups into your normal structure (recommended) or leave
as an All Products list if you would like. Our main goal is to keep an eye on search queries
& their performance.
• Turn this on and monitor – take a look at the search queries that come in to ensure the
structure is correct.
46. Google Shopping ISO Strategy
Results From Red ISO Strategy Test
Subjects of the test
• 115 Search Queries in Total
• 30 Days prior – We had a 2.87 ROAS on these keywords
• Spent $562.62 with only $1,614.84 in return
• Results may not be typical, seasonality & sale pricing on certain items also likely to cause even
further improved performance (from a conv. rate standpoint)
Campaign Structure
• Created a new low priority campaign
• Added [exact] match negative keywords into a list and applied to all of my other
campaigns
• Pushed a blanket bid of $0.30 on all products. I still built these out into my normal
structure including brands & product types.
• Main goal was to lower CPC on these queries and improve ROAS.
47. Google Shopping ISO Strategy
Results From Red ISO Strategy Test
30 Days Before & After Results
• Cost down 66%
• Avg. CPC down 73%
• ROAS up 370%
• I am only concerned with my main metrics of testing during this test due to the
introduction of previous negative keywords which could skew click and overall order
totals
• One main difference is that I also allowed ALL products to be available for this
campaigns where as in other campaigns I may have bid down or suppressed specific
products. Here, I am focused on the query level and not necessarily the product level.
• These numbers can still be a bit misleading but performance improvement is clearly
visible and we will be continuing to add search queries which are not profitable but still
relevant to this campaign to further testing.
50. Are you interested in test driving the CAPx Platform and/or talking
about your current Google Shopping Strategy?
A. Yes, please
B. No, thank you
51. Questions for Jason?
Submit your questions in the chat box on the right
cpcstrategy.com/retail-search-audit/
www.CPCStrategy.com | 619.501.6138 | contact@cpcstrategy.com
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