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Your first 12 Google Ads Optimization Opportunities

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In this post, we are reviewing the key opportunities of optimization you should consider after exporting your data to Google BigQuery with the following services:

1. Optimize your Google Shopping Product Data

There are many aspects of your product data that will affect their performance in Google Shopping:

  1. Title

    1. Add brand, color, size, or gender but also remove unwanted parts of the title. if the title is too long you can define a rule for the priority of the attributes to appear.

  2. Description

    1. Ensure no Description is empty. We can check different fields and append them together if necessary. At the very least we can use the title as a description.

  3. Link

    1. Add a URL parameter indicating the specific SKU (so the product is pre-selected with the proper size or color)

  4. Main Image Link

    1. Define a rule to select what is to be used as the main image (the rule can be optimized based on Clicks)

  5. Additional Image Links

    1. Make sure as up to 10 additional image links are provided

  6. Availability

    1. Go beyond in-stock/out-of-stock: add products to the feed which are available for pre-/backorder

  7. Unit pricing measure

    1. Define what should be the standard base measure. so instead of 10Sfr/kg it could be 1Sfr/100g

  8. Category

    1. Add it where missing based on the shop categories (if at least one item in that category has the google product category)

  9. Product Type

    1. The naming of shop categories is not always accepted by google. If it is desired to send more than one product category the setup can be very complex. Fix the product type so it will be accepted by Google. Additionally, define custom rules to use up to three product types in the feed

  10. Identifier

    1. Make sure the proper identifier is always provided for all cases based on Brand/GTIN/MPN

  11. Age Group

    1. Infer it from other attributes with a mapping to another attribute like eg. target_group. "Frauen/Männer" will change to "adult" and "Mädchen/Jungs" to "kids"

A full review of your Google Shopping data is a good place to start to identify optimization opportunities.

2. Manufacturer and custom product Bundles

Having bundles in Google Shopping offers several benefits and adds to the overall appeal of the platform. Firstly, manufacturer bundles with their standard GTIN provide convenience to shoppers by offering a curated package of products that are commonly purchased together. This simplifies the shopping experience, saves time, and encourages customers to make larger purchases. Moreover, these bundles can attract potential buyers who may not have considered purchasing all the individual items separately, thereby increasing sales opportunities for manufacturers. On the other hand, custom bundles allow retailers to showcase their creativity and unique offerings. They enable businesses to create tailored packages that meet specific customer needs or target niche markets. Custom bundles provide flexibility and differentiation, helping businesses stand out from competitors and capture the attention of shoppers seeking personalized solutions. Overall, having both manufacturer bundles and custom bundles in Google Shopping diversifies the product selection, enhances the shopping experience, and boosts sales for manufacturers and retailers alike.

Merchant-defined Bundles can be rejected by Google due to difficulties with filling the other values properly (eg. GTIN of main product should be used). We apply the is_bundle logic on all necessary fields and monotor continuously if your bundles are all approved according to their importance in terms of sales results.

3. Optimize the link from Google Shopping to your PDP

If your e-shop offers products in different variants (size, color, …) it might be that you are losing customers when they land on your Product Detail Page if they come to be unsure they are arriving on the right product.

For example, if a customer searched for a specific color or motif of cloth and clicked on a specific picture in Google Shopping, it might be a good idea to pres-select this variant on the landing page, without the customer having to select the right variant again.

4. Create Google Shopping Performance Campaigns

Typically your Google Shopping campaigns will be optimized based on target ROAS.

While this is a good start, the ROAS typically only considers the generated revenue.

In addition, other aspects could be used to influence the ROAS optimization:

  • Achieved Margin: not only the margin of the advertised products but the real margin generated

  • Customer Acquisition: the expected lifetime value of acquired customers (to which degree are products good at bringing acquiring new customers versus getting existing customers again through a repetitively paid channel? And how much does the first product(s) this new customer buy indicates their future purchase potential?)

  • Promotion: strategic products which you want to promote

  • Zombie: products (products that have had no clicks recently in Google Shopping are likely to be demoted and simply circling them through another campaign can have a positive effect on their promotions) (as recommended by Google Best Practice: Targeting Low Volume SKUs)

  • %Sales Availability: Current variants availability according to their sales contribution (a product like a running shoe might be in stock only in sizes 10% of your customer's order, while this makes the product out-of-stock for most customers it would still be considered as active and in-stock by your systems and bring paid traffic)

  • Out: while Google Shopping avoids to some extent bidding on non-performing products, it is relevant to explicitly exclude segments of your products that are not possible to promote in a profitable way

Segmenting your products in different campaigns based on these performance factors allows you to set different target ROAS for each campaign and then go beyond the limitation of the simple ROAS optimization which only considers your revenue and nothing else.

Concrete steps:

  1. Validate the standard attribution of the products to the Margin, Customer, Zombie, Normal and Out Performance groups (tuning is possible if needed)

  2. Add a custom field in your Google Shopping feed with this new performance campaign groups

  3. Configure several Google Ads Campaign (one for each group) and associate different target ROAS with the following guideline

    1. 20%-30% lower target ROAS for the Margin and Customer Campaigns

    2. base-line target ROAS for the Normal and Zombie Campaigns

    3. filter out or at least put higher ROAS for the out campaign

5-6. Correct and Extend your Conversion Value

While segmenting your products in several performance campaigns (see point 2) is a good start, it is also interesting to modify the Conversion Value which is used by Google Ads to define your ROAS.

Indeed, while the definition of the cost is quite clear, the definition of the conversion value is not that simple and cost and conversion value are the only two components of the ROAS (e.g.: selling a product for 500.- for which you get only 1% margin is not the same value for your business as selling a product for 300.- on which you get 10%).

Therefore, returns and cancellations are often not considered, but they should be.

We can correct the conversion value with offline conversion tracking if the order was canceled, or returned, or if another event reduced the revenue value for you.

We can use another metric than the revenue, like for example the margin, as the definition of the conversion value.

We can add additional values when a new customer is acquired and an even higher value when the new customer is expected to have a high future customer lifetime value based on the first product(s) bought.

Concrete steps:

  1. Define at least one of the followings:

    1. Corrected value for a conversion based on the effective ERP margin or revenue (canceled value should be 0.-, returned article should lower the value accordingly, etc.)

    2. An additional conversion value for new customers (e.g.: +20% of AOV) and an even higher value for customers predicted to have a high customer lifetime value (e.g.: +50% of AOV)

  2. Integrate the updated conversion value in GAds with one of the following methods :

    1. Adjusted Conversions (per transaction or google click id) (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7686280?hl=en )

    2. New Conversions (per google click id) (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7014069?hl=en )

  3. (optionally) implement an API real-time call to Boxalino in your Tracking Data Layer to send the adjusted conversion value right away when available to the Google Ads tracker

7. Target your Google Ads with Audiences

Boxalino offers 3 out of the box Google Ads Audiences which you can use for your campaign and we can add many others upon request:

  • Customers who bought during the last year but not during the last month

  • 25% percentile (top quartile) of customers with the best customer lifetime value (CLV) to promote

  • 25% percentile (bottom quartile) of customers with the worst customer lifetime value to demote

8. Extend your Search Ads Keywords

Boxalino can do an analysis of all the Keywords in your Google Search Ads on the basis of:

  • Google Ads Keywords

  • Google Analytics Searches (searches in your web-site)

  • Semrush SEO and SEA of your e-shop and of your competitors

  • External AI (ChatGPT & Deepl) to expand your keywords with relations and synonyms

These additional Keywords can be automatically added to your existing campaign to increase their reach.

Boxalino can also connect these new Keywords with dedicated Destination URLs to matching Topic Landing Pages to avoid any “loss of context” when the user clicks on them.

9. Switch Search Ads Destination URLs to Topic Landing Pages

Boxalino can create many different types of automated Semantic Topic Landing Pages.

These pages are related to one or several keywords and show the most relevant products (and content) related to these keywords.

For cases you don’t have a clear destination URL on a category or a brand page, you might want to try to use a Topic Landing Page instead.

Even if you already have a category page, you can still add the topic landing page in rotate mode to see in which case it performs better than your normal category pages and let google keep these ones automatically.

Finally, you can use Topic Landing Pages with a combination of topics to have a more precise destination URL and avoid any “loss of context”.

10. Generate Search Ads Sitelink & Product Extensions

You might want to use more Sitelinks but don’t have the time to set them up all manually.

Boxalino Winning Interaction Platform can extend your existing Search Ads with site links automatically based on what is most often searched together with the advertised keyword and with destination URLs going directly to optimized Topic Landing Pages.

The title and short text of the Sitelinks can be generated based on rules and the value of the combined semantic topic, but can also be generated or enriched by external AI like ChatGPT.

Product Extensions

Another way to extend a search ad is to position specific products in it.

This is something you can optimize and automate with Boxalino which can directly set the most performance Product extensions for each ad and update it when needed (out of stock, price drop or increase, seasonality, etc.).

11. Generate New Responsive Search Ads automatically

While as indicated in point 6, Boxalino can help you automatically extend your Search Ads Keywords, it will happen that none of your existing Search Ads is well suited for these automatically generated keywords (or only vaguely related).

In such case, you can generate new RSA completely automatically with Boxalino (and with the help behind of external AI like ChatGPT) and have them added to your Search ads, including:

  • Headline

  • Description

  • Destination URLs

  • SiteLinks (with Headline, Description and Destination URLs)

You can put these new Search Ads in specific AdGroup and/or Campaign and track their performance compare to your other ads.

12. GPT-enriched dashboards

Interested, ask more to Boxalino about it (smile)

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