The PPC industry is ever-evolving and we are already in an A-I learning era. The advancement in Google’s Smart Bidding has meant us as a specialist PPC agency have had to learn and adapt ourselves in the way we manage accounts moving forward.
I’ll be honest in saying that I was previously reluctant to turn campaigns onto Smart Bidding strategies, I had a handful of clients asking “if the campaigns are automated, what’s the point in having you?” and to be honest, I started asking myself the same question. I started feeling like poor Mr Bucket when the toothpaste factory decided to modernise the company.
Fast forward 18 months and now I think Smart Bidding is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But now I’m not asking myself what’s the point, I’m asking myself what can I do with this extra time I’m not changing bids. With Search campaigns there is still plenty to do, we have total control over ad copy, what keywords we want to be bidding on and what search terms we don’t want to show for. Shopping, on the other hand, is a different beast, we can still block irrelevant search terms but what if the campaign is fully Smart?
Our answer is…….. Google Shopping Feed Enhancement.
Now as almighty as Google is, it still needs the most relevant information to ensure we show for the most relevant search terms. Product titles and descriptions carry the most weight in what Google looks at for, essentially, keywords. I’ve worked on my fair share of feeds that don’t include very basic terms that are vital to the business. A prime example is a client I worked with specialised in homebrew kits. Not one of the products in the shopping feed included the word home, brew or kit. As a result, they didn’t pick up any traffic through Shopping.
Another common case of feeds that could be better are generic feeds. These are feeds that have the core data but nothing really specific to any product. With generic feeds, we gain generic traffic which is always less likely to convert. We are always at the beginning of a conversion journey but the feed attributes mean we don’t appear further in the journey when the user has done their research and has more intent to buy. This results in us losing out on sales and spending money to gain nothing in return.
Although time-consuming, investing some time into enhancing your Google Shopping feed will help your reach levels of R.O.I. that just PPC Management could not achieve. Our team are on hand to help advise you on this, do not hesitate to get in touch if you do have any questions or queries about enhancing your Google Shopping Feed.