Finding the right customers on Google Shopping starts with your Merchant Center product feed: it contains all the information about the products you sell to help online shoppers find just what they’re looking for. But we know that creating and maintaining a complete and compliant data feed can be challenging. To make feed management easier, we’re excited to introduce Feed Rules, a self-service tool to help you transform your existing data from your inventory management systems into the format accepted by Google Shopping. Feed Rules helps you streamline your data feed uploads, whether you’re already running Shopping campaigns or you’re just getting started.
Use Feed Rules to set up and maintain your feed in Google Shopping format Feed Rules allows you to perform basic transformations of your existing product data — making it easier than ever to get your data feed up and running. You can export and submit your product data in your own format, and use different rules to transform it into product attributes and values that follow the Google Shopping feed specification, directly in Merchant Center:
Map your column headers to the attribute names supported by Google Shopping. For example, if you have an existing feed with the unsupported column header “main title”, you can set up a rule in Merchant Center to have it recognized as the supported attribute name, “title”.
Transform the values in your feed to values supported by Google Shopping. For example, to submit gender specifications for your products, you can transform the unsupported value “for women” in your existing feed to the supported value “female”.
Populate missing attribute values with a fixed value, or with different values based on conditional criteria. For example, if the “condition” attribute is missing and you’re only selling new products, you can set up a rule to have this attribute automatically set to “new”.
Once you specify new rules for a feed, all future uploads of this feed will be processed according to those rules.
Use Feed Rules to organize your data for campaign optimization You can also use conditional rules to better organize your data:
Implement rules for custom labels to structure your campaigns in new ways. For example, you can group products by price ranges or margins, then later bid differently on these groups.
Tag your products with a shipping label. For example, you can derive “heavy” from the category, label those products, and define a particular shipping cost for those items.
As we introduce the first version of Feed Rules, we’re eager to learn about even more use cases from you. Feedback and suggestions for this feature can be entered directly from your Merchant Center account by clicking the gear icon in the top-right corner of the page and selecting “Send Feedback” to let us know what you think.
Measuring the impact of online video is something of a passion for us at Google. It’s been three years since we unveiled Brand Lift for YouTube and brands have seen great success. But the last piece of the puzzle has been how does online video drive offline sales? This is particularly true for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, for which the vast majority of sales – over 90% – happen offline. Thanks to our new integration with Oracle Data Cloud – a leader in the emerging Data as a Service (DaaS) industry that measures the sales impact of digital media – we now have a solution to answer that question. Today we’re announcing the availability of sales lift studies in the US, for CPG advertisers using TrueView video ads.
The value of video
We’ve been testing this capability for a while, and have seen promising early results: 78% of TrueView campaigns we studied on YouTube showed an increase in offline sales, with 61% driving a statistically significant lift in sales of the advertised brand.1
To build this solution we worked with Oracle Data Cloud to develop the first in-depth application of their DLX ROI product on video formats, and we studied a range of CPG video campaigns running TrueView ads across food, health and beauty, beverage and homecare. We built this with privacy at the center, and no personal data is exchanged between the companies.
Early client successes
One campaign we measured, Gatorade’s “We Love Sweat,” earned $13.50 sales in return for every dollar spent on TrueView (return on ad spend, or ROAS). This stunning success was due in part to persistent branding and strong creative geared specifically for driving sales. Gatorade’s campaign was also interesting because it delivered a remarkable 16% lift in sales among new buyers that had seen the video vs. new buyers that had not – according to Oracle Data Cloud a typical lift in this metric hovers around 2.5%.
Similar to Gatorade, parent company PepsiCo also saw sales lift success with their campaign for Doritos. Not only did our DLX ROI solution show that their 30-second creative drove higher lift in sales among exposed households than a 15-second version, but they saw particular targeting techniques – namely topic targeting and remarketing – drove greater sales lift compared to a demographic target.
Mars also participated in our DLX ROI test for their Pedigree pet food brand, and the sales lift studies helped them make key creative decisions. They tested a video that opened with strong branding against one that saved their branding for the end, and learned that the video with strong upfront branding drove nearly 7x greater sales lift. As Laurent Larguinat, Global Director of Mars Consumer and Market Insights said, “With this new offering, YouTube is rounding out a full funnel measurement solution for video. We’re excited to continue to see these results for all of our campaigns.” This new sales lift offering drops the last piece into place for full funnel measurement of CPG campaigns on YouTube, and we’re excited to bring you new creative and media strategy insights that drive incremental sales as we scale these studies.
Pay-Per-Click or PPC is one of the most effective online advertising and marketing strategies to drive customers to your business. Among the providers of PPC advertising, Google’s AdWords is the most widely used platform. If used properly, PPC could bring in a significant number of highly targeted leads that convert into paying customers.
What is Pay-Per-Click?
Essentially, pay-per-click or PPC, is a way of buying traffic or visits to a website. One of the most popular forms of PPC is search advertising provided by Google AdWords in which the advertiser pays a fee whenever an ad is clicked.
In search advertising, PPC ads appear above the organic search results. The ads appear on relevant search results. So if a PPC ad is for “baby clothing”, for example, it would show in search results for the same or related keywords.
A PPC ad copy includes a short title, a description, and a link to a landing page. Some PPC ads may also have extensions. These are especially useful features that make your ad more relevant to the searcher.
According to Search Engine Watch, businesses make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on Adwords. This is likely due to the fact that more and more people are using mobile devices, and mobile search now accounts for 52 percent of paid search clicks.
Organic Search vs. Pay-Per-Click
Optimizing your business for organic search is key to long-term success online. But trying to dominate a keyword in a competitive industry isn’t exactly a walk in the park, and it could take a few months to see significant results. But with PPC, you have a better chance of getting more clicks by leapfrogging ahead of the competition attempting to rank high in organic search.
Organic SEO campaigns take time. They require the help of a savvy digital marketing agency in order optimize your site so that you’ll start showing up in the organic listings. PPC is a quicker way to get awareness online. Think of organic SEO campaigns as a marathon, and a PPC campaign like a sprint. With PPC you need to pay every time someone clicks your ad. Google asks each advertiser to set a maximum cost per click they are willing to spend on each keyword (for each click).
If you have the budget and you need to get in front of as many customers as fast as possible, PPC can do that for you. Organic SEO, on the other hand, sets you up for long-term success online.
Now, let’s get right down to business. If you’re looking to explore PPC, the following are the five must-haves of a successful pay per click campaign:
The right set of keywords
Like organic SEO, PPC requires that you research and select a certain set of keywords. Keywords are the primary key to driving success to your PPC campaign. Be sure to use the proper set of keywords that exactly describe your business. Avoid using keywords with a high competition (high numbers of other advertisers targeting the same keyword). You need to use those with high search volume, but with low competition. Such keywords usually cost low.
The best free tool to use for your keyword research is Google’s very own AdWords Keyword Planner. It provides you with insights on keywords, competition, cost, and location targeting.
Ask us today about how we can help you dig deeper for keywords using our proprietary keyword software.
Emphasis on clicks
When running a PPC ad, you should focus mainly on the number of clicks (your CTR or click through rate), not on the number of impressions (the number of times your ad appears). This is because your PPC campaign’s costs are based on the number of times your ads have been clicked. Which is why you need to be sure that your ads have the most relevant or targeted keywords for maximum clicks and conversion. It is crucial to keep your ad on the first page with a strong bid, because 62% of search engine users click on a search result within the first results page (28% click on 2nd or 3rd page).
Intelligence: keeping an eye on the competition
If the competition seems to be outperforming your PPC ads, there’s probably a good reason. The best way to find out what they might be doing right is to use keyword software that ‘spys’ on them (this is totally legal, ethical and part of a comprehensive PPC strategy). Study your competition’s ad copy and make a shortlist of the highest peforming ads.
Ad Extensions
PPC ad extensions are excellent tools that compel customers to click on an ad. Extensions provide more information that potential customers may be looking for, such as your business’ phone number, customer rating, links to your webpages, and mailing address.
Below are some of the ad extensions in Google AdWords:
Sitelink Extensions – It displays additional links in your standard text ad
Call Extensions – It lets you add a phone number in your standard text ad
Callout Extensions – It shows additional descriptive text in your standard text ad
Location Extensions – It allows you to display location information in your standard text ads
Review Extensions – A review extension that displays an accurate, current, credible, non-duplicative third-party review of your business. Like the rest of your ad text, your review extensions must comply with all AdWords policies.
Use these extensions to give more reason for customers to click on your ads. They are great tools to increase your click-through rate and improve your conversion.
Performance tracking
Unfortunately, this is one area that many advertisers tend to take for granted. Performance tracking is essential for understanding how well your PPC ads and campaign are working. By taking a look at the performance of your ads, you would be able to make the necessary adjustments for improved performance. You’ll discover which set of keywords are driving more traffic and resulting in conversions, as well as which are performing poorly and should be eliminated.
The online marketing space is getting more and more crowded everyday. But with the right strategy in search advertising, you’ll be able to corner a portion of your market that your competition might not have tapped into yet. With the right PPC strategy, you would be able to pull in more visits and see improved revenue.
