Tips to Boost Your Shopping Campaigns for Holidays

Festive seasons and holidays are a great opportunity for online retailers to seize the shopping frenzy of customers. As Black Friday and biggest retail quarters approach, digital marketing experts are coming up with specially curated paid campaigns to entice the audience and rightly so. According to a report, paid search has been one of the fastest-growing digital channels amongst the retailers.  Now before the next season knocks the door, its high time to prepare for the roller coaster ride. Your favorite Google Adwords Agency in San Francisco is here to narrate 5 decisive tips that will rule the game for you. Stay on top of the game and close as much as sales as possible before the online frenzy culminates.

Google Automation

In a major advent, Google has introduced Smart Shopping last year. The concept has enabled smart bidding, where Google facilitates machine learning to optimize the campaigns. This automation saves significant hours in analyzing historical data, implementing new strategies and manually updating the bids. As a result, several interesting findings have been revealed to augment the automation trend is here to rule.

In the US alone, the ad spend has reached a whopping $13.12 billion this year so far – a significant 22.5% increase year on year, reports eMarketer. Amazon’s exponential expansion of its advertising services has been attributed as the major reason behind the surge. Adthena reports that over 75% of the retail spend is poured into the shopping campaigns, which affirms that Google shopping cannot be underestimated any longer.

Shopping Structure

While running Smart Shopping, the algorithms will optimize towards generating maximum conversion values. Which means, the structure is a key aspect to consider only while reporting. Shopping structure will largely impact your campaigns if optimized manually. In this case, it is ideal to segment the campaigns, split them and run.

In a typical example, you can try splitting the structure based on brands you sell or categories of products. This enables you to generate more precise and meaningful reports, however, the task might need automation to roll out successfully. Grouping products with similar attributes or historical performance makes sense in getting better traction of campaigns.

Google Shopping lacks a keyword system to match the queries. Hence it is difficult to funnel searches to appropriate bid. It is ideal to mitigate this issue by creating different copies of the campaign for identical products and assign them different priority settings. In this scenario, the basic iteration goes like the following;

• Low-performing search terms get a low bid and sit in your high priority campaign.

• Medium-performing terms are given a moderate bid and medium priority.

• High-performing terms are a low priority, high bid

Iteration works only if we add negative keywords to high and medium priority campaigns. Negative keywords will funnel more valuable searches towards low priority campaigns where we are spending more for high intent searches. Low-value searches get low bids as priority gains more importance than bidding. Get a quote from the Best Digital Marketing Agency in San Francisco and streamline your digital marketing process now.

Feed Optimization

Instead of positive keyword targeting, query matching is done against the feed – your list of products along with the attributes. The feed should be accurate, updated and optimized perfectly to maximize the performance. The most important information in the feed should be aligned left to right and curated in the title and descriptions.

The images and color tone can be tested to find out the most interactive ones. There should be no gaps in the feed. It should be filled with minimal yet accurate information. This will increase your campaign impressions and Click Through Rate (CTR). The sale price, dates, or anything that pertains to the sales should be accurately displayed in the campaign feed.

Key Performing Indicators (KPI)

While running campaigns, we frequently track engagement metrics. We are always concerned about how our campaigns are faring to achieve the objectives. While evaluating at the KPI’s, it is important to not get confused over the Click Through Rate (CTR), which is determined by dividing click volume by impression volume.

While running shopping ads during holidays, we might be bidding aggressively and show more than one ad for a search query. In this scenario, we receive multiple impressions. As a result, the clicks per search query will go up, but along with the rise of impressions, the CTR appears to drop. In this situation, keep an eye on the conversion rates.

Budget Allocation

In the midst of strong competition, you are about to spend more on campaigns – remember to account for that. Brands will be parking a lot of money into the holiday campaigns, maybe a 2x times what they do normal. So make sure you conduct proper research and due diligence before curating and running the campaign. The time and budget both matters while running campaigns.

The budget should rightly be allocated from the very beginning of the awareness period, or else people will not get information at the right time and pursue decision making. As the sales period ends, it is ideal to bring down the spends and bids as the target audience might be already forgotten about your sale or might have parked their sale with your competitor.

Last, not least, the decision makings depend on your campaign response. Comb through the performance in real-time and see how things proceed. Leveraging the previous campaign experience and data can also play a vital role in campaign success. Always do the research and strategize the campaigns accordingly.