Google Shopping Guide 2.0: Bidding, Advanced Segment Tracking, and CPA Campaigns

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OverviewSince its inception Google Shopping has been free to participate in. All an advertiser

had to do get their products listed was to submit a data feed with accurate inventory,

product, and pricing information and they could sit back and watch the traffic roll in.

Beginning in June, these free listings will be combined with the commercial Product

Listing Ads Program, creating a New Google Shopping Experience.

While the new format will certainly present challenges to all retailers, those that

quickly adapt to the new commercialized environment are poised to benefit. This

crash course in the New Google Shopping is intended to get you up to speed so that

you can maintain and gain traffic during and after the transition.

So what exactly is changing and what is taking its place?

The New Google ShoppingNote: If you read our first Google Shopping ebook and already have your campaigns

set up, jump to page 11 of this guide.

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Google Product Search Ads, those free ad units that weve learned to love as free traf-

fic drivers will now become paid for merchants. These ad units tended to be listed in

the middle of search result page with direct links to merchant product pages.

In addition to those, Google Prod-

uct Listing Ads will take on a more

prominent role as well. These ad

units display specific products that

will show up alongside standard Ad-

words listings above organic search

results, but instead of just a short

snippet of text, users gain the ben-

efit of seeing specific product titles,

an image, and price.

The new Google Shopping will be

managed via Adwords and driven

by the data feed submitted to the

Merchant Center. Within Adwords

a merchant can set bids by various

criteria such as product type, brand,

or anything you can include in your

product feed, similar to their regular

Adwords Campaigns.

While both are driven by the same merchant center inventory/data feed Product

Listing Ads are not to be confused with Product Extensions which are an extension

of standard Adwords text ads, where products will be listed alongside an Adword

text listing, with a drop-down option to see products that a merchant is selling that is

related to the search.

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During the TransitionGoogle plans to complete the transition from free to paid listings some time in Fall.

During the transition period advertisers that use the Product Listings Ads program

to advertise their products will be given a 10% discount on purchased traffic . Those

that sign up before August 15th will receive a $100 credit get started with the new

program as well giving us an idea of the timeline Google is working to complete the

transition.

To sign up for this discount browse over to the following URL to get an automatic

monthly credit of 10%: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/shoppingcoupon/

New Product Type Shopping Ads

We have seen a major change in the Google shopping experience and its being rolled

out to the tents query. If you head to Google and search tents in the web results

youll see a brand new shopping snippet that Google hasnt displayed before.

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Instead of returning individual product results that matched the tent query, Google

recognized that tent is a broad, overarching term that encompasses multiple prod-

uct types, each with a very specific use, and returned categories of tents that you

can click to continue shopping. Nobody is charged for this particular click from the

organic SERPs even though its listed within a Sponsored cell.

This is the first time that were seeing Google link to its shopping platform via picto-

grams and they kind of resemble something you would see on a street sign.

Clicking any one of the links takes you directly to a Google Shopping with a new UX,

updated faceted nav and many other neat nuances that give it a whole new look

and feel. Google now gives shoppers the ability to filter by brand, price, and other

incredibly specific attributes as well as giving users the option to Read On about any

given attribute or filter.

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Google Shopping Buying GuidesClicking Read On for an expanded attribute filter, such as Seasonality, will bring up a

Buying Guide that goes into more detail about why that particular attribute is relevant

and/or important to the purchase decision. The Buying Guide gives you the ability

to do some preliminary product research without having to leave the Google Shop-

ping interface. If you scroll through some of the information in the Tent Buying Guide

youll see that its pretty comprehensive!

Theres also a link to the Buying Guide in the left navigation as well.

What To Do To Get Started with Prod-uct Listing Ads

There are four steps you must go through to effectively setup and launch your Prod-

uct Listing Ad Campaigns. They are as follows-

SettingUpandSendingYourDataFeed

ConnectingYourGoogleAdwordsandGoogleMerchantCenterAccounts

SettingUpyourPLACampaignwithinAdwords

TrackingResultsUsingGoogleAnalytics

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adwords_grouping - Used to group products in an arbitrary way. It can be used for

Product Filters to limit a campaign to a group of products, or Product Targets to bid

differently for a group of products. This is a required field if the advertiser wants to

bid differently to different subsets of products in the CPC or CPA % version. It can only

hold one value.

adwords_labels -Similartoadwords_groupingbutusedonlyforCPCads.Youcan

also use multiple values here, separated by commas.

adwords_publish- Indicates whether or not youd like a particular to be used in the

Product Listing Ads and Ad Extension program

adwords_redirect- Used to send traffic from the free Google Shopping Source to

another URL although with the depreciation of the program we can see that this field

probably will no longer be used in the mid to long term.

Check out our example data feed columns for a template of how the header should

look once complete.

SettingUpandSendingYourDataFeed

If youre already sending a data feed to the Google Merchant Center for the free

Google Shopping program the good news is there is not much you have to do modify

this data feed to prepare it for the product listing ads program.

Apart from the standard Google Shopping Columns, you will need to add the follow-

ing fields to the data feed to slice and differentiate your inventory for the product

listing ads program.

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ConnectingYourGoogleAdwordsandGoogle Merchant Center Accounts

1. In your Merchant Center account, click Settings, then AdWords

2. Enter your AdWords Customer ID and click Add

Setting Up your Product Listing Ad Cam-paign within AdwordsWhile you can set up a Product Listing Ad campaign with in an existing text ad cam-

paign, weve found that setting up the campaign as standalone campaign gives the

greatest chance for success on the platform.

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To Set Up a Product Listings Ad Campaign1. ) Log on to adwords and create a new campaign

2.) Name the Campaign Product Listing Ads, set your Geo Locations Target, Bids/Bud-

get and enable Product Extensions

3.) Create an Adgroup that will house your Product Listing Ads by selecting Product

Listing Ad under the create an ad wizard in the Adgroup menu

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4.)Setyourbidsandyouredone!YouveyourcreatedfirstProductListingAdsCam-

paign, Adgroup, and Ad.

Two things to note here:

Promotion - Product Listing Ads allow you to add promotion text to your ads, so if

you have free shipping or any other offer that might entice a customer to buy this is

your chance to promote it.

Auto-Targets - Auto-targets allow you to focus your bidding around particular

groups of products as defined by the following five attributes: product_type, brand,

condition, adwords_grouping, and adwords_labels. A well optimized product list-

ings campaign would have many different segmentation buckets to help optimizing

bids, but for now we can leave the auto-target as all products to get you started.

Tracking Performance Using Google Analytics

Tracking Performance Using Google Analytics requires some manipulation of the data

feed that is sent to the Google Merchant Center, but makes sense unless you want to

be flying blind on the new channel.

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Step 1

To track traffic youll have to fill out the adwords_redirect field with the full URL to your product

page appending with tracking parameters differentiate Google Shopping traffic from Google

Product Listing Ad traffic.

For example if your product was at the follow URL

www.mysite.com/product1.html

Youwouldpopulatetheadwords_redirectfieldforproduct1withaGoogleAnalyticsTracking

Parameter specific to product listing ads, for instance-

www.mysite.com/product1.html?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords

Once you complete this your data feed will look a lot like this:

Now, any traffic coming from product extensions or product listing ads will be tracked under

googlepepla / adwords within Google Analytics.

Step 2

So now we can differentiate between free Google Shopping (soon to be depreciated) and

product extensions and product listing ads trafficnow we must figure out a way to differentiate

between product extensions and product listing traffic.

All this requires is another column, called adwords_queryparam. Curiously Google has taken

this part off their help pages for whatever reason, but it still seems be active and working for our

clients.

In the example below we fill this column with utm_content={adtype}.

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What this column does is allow you to have Google automatically append your URLs with whats

in the column, and replace {adtype} with pe or pla depending how a user got to your site.

To backtrack a stepa user going to your site via product extensions or product listing without

this column will end up at:

[yourdomain.com]/page1?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords

With this new column, a user coming from product extensions specifically will end up at:

[yourdomain.com]/page1?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords&utm_

content=pe

And similarly a user coming from product listing ads will end up at:

[yourdomain.com]/page1?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords&utm_

content=pla

Which then allows you to further break down your traffic source between product extension

and product listing ad users in Analytics.

Bidding[note:BEFOREYOUBID,makesureyoucheckoutthesectiononDownBiddingProductsonthe

next page]

Take advantage of Google Shoppings transition bidding by securing the top spots for cheap. Be-

ing able to set the market rate for products in your inventory will give you the advantage to look

at larger data sets than your competitors when diving in to optimize bids at the product level.

A $1 to $1.50 cent bid is good place to start to make sure that your campaign has taken off.

Weve seen sellers bid around 40 50 cents to not get any traffic, but when they bid $1 their av-

erageCPCfallstoaround4050cents.Youllmostlikelybepayingaroundthatrangefortraffic.

Based on a report we recently did with our partners over at EliteSEM, weve seen that if you do

have a strong adwords campaign already built out, you can expect to increase ad spend by

around 20%, some more, some less, for this Google Shopping change.

Product segmentation and quick data feed optimization is going to be really important to a

profitable Google Shopping campaign, so if that is difficult for you to do youll want to start

looking for resources to help you fill those gaps. CPC Strategy handles all the data feed manage-

ment for its clients.

Based on how profitable your campaign is, youll want to dive in at the brand, category and

product level. Tagging these with Google Analytics identifiers is a good place to start.

Some good groups to segment include:

TopMarginBrands

TopMarginCategories

TopMarginProducts

TopPerformingProducts

WorstPerformingProducts(youcansetuparuletopennybidthese)

Instead of having a high all products bid, you should set the all products bid at a penny and

then up bid everything in the feed using some sort of live adwords label at 50 cents or 1 dollar.

Then if we wanted to penny-bid a product wed simply remove that live label so itd be forced

into the All Products target which is set at $0.01.

The same goes for other ad groups as well.

Down Bidding Products: One Trick to Re-member

Segmenting

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Theres an easier way to set up brand-level bidding using multiple values in the same product

target. Using this method you wont have to set up new labels for every brand or category.

1. Create Brand Adgroup targeting Nike (brand=Nike) from within the AdWords login

2. Set default Max CPC to $0.01

3. Within the same adgroup create another target with the following attributes

1. adwords_labels=live

2. brand=Nike

4. Set that bid to $0.50 or whatever

Since Google will look for products where both rules apply, if you simply remove the live label

from the product then that product will no longer apply to the product target with the $0.50

bid.

In the next section well look at advanced analaytics techniques to track and dive into these seg-

ments.

Tracking Product Targets in Google Analytics

YoucanalreadyaccessmacroperformancereportsforproducttargetsbygoingtoAdvertising

> Adwords > Keywords tab in Google Analytics.

If you have traditional text ad campaigns also running it may be difficult to find the product tar-

gets among all the other keyword-level data in this report so heres a handy regular expressions

filter that you can use to filter out only the product targets. All you have to do is copy/paste the

following code into the advanced filter, and filter on Keyword:

[\=\*]

Advanced Product-Level Google Shopping Analytics:

How to set up brand-level bidding using multiple values in the same product target:

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*Remember to select Matching RegExp instead of the default Contains otherwise it wont

work.

This will give you essentially what youre already able to see in the Adwords account but with

actual revenue per target. This is slightly better but you still dont have a whole lot to work with.

But what if we were able to see exactly which products were getting clicks/conversions within

each product target? We can do this but it requires a small tweak to the data feed.

The {adwords_producttargetid} Parameter

In your Google Shopping data feed theres an adwords_redirect column where you can set up

custom tracking parameters for your Google Shopping ads. We can actually track product tar-

get performance on the item-level by adding the {adwords_producttargetid} parameter to the

end of the urls in this column.

If you already have tracking parameters appended to your adwords_redirect url (anything after

the ? in the url) then all you need to do is add &id={adwords_producttargetid} to the end.

If this is completely new to you and/or you dont have any tracking parameters youre going to

have to add ?id={adwords_producttargetid} to the end of the url.

*The difference between the two above is the leading & vs the leading ?.

By adding the {adwords_producttargetid} parameter, youll be able to see the Google-generated

ID for the specific product target that triggered your ad.

YoucanaccessthisreportinGoogleAnalyticsbygoingto:

1. Content > Site Content > Landing Pages

2. Choose your Secondary Dimension for Traffic Sources > Campaign.

3. Once you do that, edit the Advanced Filter to include only.

o Campaign containing [your campaign name]

o Landing Page containing &id=

*Remember to select Matching RegExp instead of the default Contains otherwise it wont

work.

This will give you essentially what youre already able to see in the Adwords account but with

actual revenue per target. This is slightly better but you still dont have a whole lot to work with.

But what if we were able to see exactly which products were getting clicks/conversions within

each product target? We can do this but it requires a small tweak to the data feed.

The {adwords_producttargetid} Parameter

In your Google Shopping data feed theres an adwords_redirect column where you can set up

custom tracking parameters for your Google Shopping ads. We can actually track product tar-

get performance on the item-level by adding the {adwords_producttargetid} parameter to the

end of the urls in this column.

If you already have tracking parameters appended to your adwords_redirect url (anything after

the ? in the url) then all you need to do is add &id={adwords_producttargetid} to the end.

If this is completely new to you and/or you dont have any tracking parameters youre going to

have to add ?id={adwords_producttargetid} to the end of the url.

*The difference between the two above is the leading & vs the leading ?.

By adding the {adwords_producttargetid} parameter, youll be able to see the Google-generated

ID for the specific product target that triggered your ad.

YoucanaccessthisreportinGoogleAnalyticsbygoingto:

1. Content > Site Content > Landing Pages

2. Choose your Secondary Dimension for Traffic Sources > Campaign.

3. Once you do that, edit the Advanced Filter to include only.

o Campaign containing [your campaign name]

o Landing Page containing &id=

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Now you have a list of all the landing page urls (aka the Google Shopping ads that are being

clicked) within a Google Shopping campaign. Each ID parameter will tell us exactly which prod-

uct target is rendering our ads.

Segmenting The Analytics Report in Excel

Now lets head over to Excel and work some magic.

First, download the report by going to the Export tab and selecting your desired file type for

Excel. CSV is usually most compatible with Excel.

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Which will give you a report that should look something like whats below.

*Its possible that youre appending other valueTrack parameters that might be showing up in

this report (like adType=pla) so if you are, just do a Find/Replace to eliminate them, leaving us

only with the landing page url and the ?id= parameter.

Now we can figure out exactly which products are getting clicks/conversions by:

1. Remove all instances of id= in column A.

Find/Replace (CTRL+H) Find id= and Replace with

2. Select column A and Text to Columns in Excel.

3. Choose the delimited option.

4. Choose ? as your delimiter

5. Hit Finish.

NowyouregoingtohaveareportthatgivesyouclicksBYPRODUCTandisalsofilterablebased

on PRODUCT TARGET.

These IDs correspond to specific targets in our Adwords campaign.

Unfortunately, right now theres not a way for us to exactly find the corresponding IDs in the

Adwords login but we should be able to figure it out by:

1. Comparing aggregate clicks/product target in Adwords to the aggregate visits/id pa-

rameter in Google Analytics (or Excel). Depending on the nature of your targets this can be

either easy or rather tedious.

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2. Compare the urls that are getting visits with a specific product target id to their associ-

ated values in the feed. Product targets are based on values in the feed so there should be

some insight here if youre familiar with navigating your data feed.

If we go back to this specific report in Excel, there are only two possible IDs in our new product

target column and its easy to see which one is All Products. (Hint: its the one with the most

clicks) So, in this case our product_target IDs are

All Products = 21619610058

adwords_labels=Top Sellers = 39787593978

We can make a note of what these IDs are for future reference because they will not change.

Save it in Evernote or whatever you like to use, just as long as its in a safe place so you dont

have to go through this again and again for the same account.

Using {adwords_producttargetid} To Improve Google Shopping Performance

Macro-level performance for adgroups and campaigns can be extremely valuable, especially

when youre doing a quick audit on the health of a campaign, but its more useful to see actual

product-level data since thats where youre going to see the biggest gains in ROI.

Take the following birds-eye view of a Google Shopping campaign thats the default in Google

Analytics. The Ad Group for Top Sellers is converting at above 5% with a per visiti value of

$4.19! The only problem here is how little traffic were getting.. so the obvious solution is to

increase our bid for the entire adgroup right?

Before we do anything rash, lets head back to our product target report in Excel and and take a

look at exactly whats going on at the product level.

The Top Sellers adgroup seems to be converting well so far, so we filter on that ID and find that

only one item has been converting in this group. 3 clicks, 2 conversions for $146.60 in revenue.

WHOA. So, I thought that this adgroup was already doing well with the limited # of clicks we

had, but now I just learned that its actually all due to one product! Equipped with that knowl-

edge, maybe I should raise the bid for that one product rather than doing it for the entire Top

Sellers adgroup.

This also shows you that /ganocafe-classic.html has made up for about half of the total clicks

for this adgroup without even converting once yet. If I raised the bid for this entire adgroup its

likely that that one poor performing item would continue to get the majority of traffic and our

once stellar performance would go waning into the night.

Now thats some sexy analyzing!

Leveraging Search Queries For More Product-Level Analysis

Another approach that can be coupled with the above analysis is to look at which search que-

ries are triggering your ads to make sure the right products are being included in the right

targets, labels, groupings, etc.

YoucanseethequeriesthataretriggeringspecificproducttargetsbygoingtotheMatched

Search Queries tab and selecting Keyword as your Secondary Dimension. Once again, use the

[\=\*] regex filter to isolate the Google Shopping targets.

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For example, this merchant sells a few gano cafe items but his titles/urls can differ based on

whether or not that term is written as one word or separately as two words. As a result, these

search terms are triggering two different sets of ads that perform differently from one another.

Assuming that the url contains either gano or ganocafe we can go back to the target ID report

we made in Excel earlier and figure out which items are being served in each adgroup. Filtering

on Landing Page, we see the top ads that have gano in the url and its fairly obvious which ad is

being rendered for each of those two searches above.

This makes me wonder why Ive got the /ganocafe-classic.html listed in the Top Sellers adgroup

when its actually getting less clicks AND converting less than the one in the All Products ad-

group. Even though we know that one is a site-wide best-seller, that may not be the case when

the traffic is coming from the paid Google Shopping real estate.

This level of analysis helps of identify search terms that are better qualified as well as product

ads that convert the best.

Caveat: This analysis was actually performed on a very small data set since this particular cam-

paign hasnt been active for very long. As our campaigns grow and we collect more data there

should be clearer call to actions from the data and we can make better informed decisions.

But just for the sake of discussion, here are a few actions that we might consider for our example

data set:

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1. Changing the title for our Top Seller ad to gano cafe rather than the single merged

term ganocafe. This small detail is obviously triggering different ads for their corresponding

searches and the search volumes will differ between the slight variations.

2. Removing /ganocafe-classic.html from the Top Sellers adgroup. If conversions dont

improve for this item (in this target), then we can assume that this ad isnt going to send us very

qualified traffic and we no longer want to include it in our highest bid adgroup. In our case, this

will require some adjustments to the adwords_labels value.

3. Increasing the bid for /gano-cafe-3-in-1.html. We dont have enough data on this item just

yet, but if it continues to convert at a high rate and profitable ROI then we may want to increase

our bid here.

How to Make Google Shopping Work Like Ebay

So you have to pay to play now if you want to list on Google Shopping. Its rough. If youre in the

guns & ammunition category its rougher. But you can still make Google Shopping work for you

like Ebay or Amazon by setting up a CPA campaign in the Google Shopping login.

Thats right, you can set a percentage of sale to give Google giving you a fixed cost per sale.

In this ebook we share how Googles CPA program works (in language written for ecommerce

business owners) and how you can set it up.

1: Set up conversion tracking

Go into your Google Adwords account.

Click on the Tools and Analysis section of your Google Adwords top toolbar and click on Conver-

sions from the drop down menu.

Google Shopping CPA

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Under the Conversions tab, click the +New conversion button.

Follow the steps through setting up the conversion tracker.

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ForthepagesecuritylevelyoullwanttouseHTTPSifyoureusingaThankYoupageforthe

conversion tracker.

Note that selecting Add a Google Site stats notification to the code generates for my page will

putalittleimageonthatpagewhereyourconversiontrackerisactivated.Youprobablydont

want to select it so no image shows up when your conversion tracker is activated.

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Since youre not running a display network campaign, after you click save and continue on this

page you can skip the next page and go grab your code. Select whatever use case applies (I

make the changes to the code or someone else makes changes to the code) and there you go.

The code will look something like this [NOTE - this is an example and will not work with your

webstore]:

/* */

var google_conversion_id = VARIABLE;

var google_conversion_language = en;

var google_conversion_format = 1;

var google_conversion_color = ffffff;

var google_conversion_label = VARIABLE;

var google_conversion_value = PLACEHOLDERHERE;

/* */

services.com/pagead/conversion/VARIABLE/?value=PLACEHOLDERHERE&label=VA

RIABLEX_Aw&guid=ON&script=0/>

Paste this code in the body section of your order confirmation page and save the changes. Thats

it!

If youre using a dynamic web page, Google lists more ways to insert the code into your web

page, but most of you wont have to worry about this. If you know you have a dynamic order

confirmation page or script you run, see this page and scroll pretty much down to the bottom to

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Second: Wait

Wait a day or so for the tracking pixel to sync with Google Adwords. It should only take a few hours at

the most but you never know.

Third: Activate Your First Google Shopping CPA Campaign

Set the % of each sale that you want Google to receive and begin your campaign. Watch it closely for

the next few days, gaining traction in terms of impressions and clicks will be crucial. Adjust your % of

sale accordingly, the more you give up the better chance youll get higher sales volume as Google

will want your products sourced above sellers in your category that give up less.

Check out the link below for more info:

http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2456107

We know that this transition might be a bit bumpy for a lot of retailers, but at time the change pro-

vides an opportunity for those who rise to the occasion. CPC Strategy is the leader in data feed and

Google Shopping setup and management. Give us a call at 619-677-2453 or shoot as an e-mail at

contact@cpcstrategy.com and well make sure you take full advantage of this new opportunity.

Conclusion

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About CPC Strategy

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