Well, over the years, MozCon has evolved its schedule to include social, content and much more, just as the industry has. The speakers are hand picked by a committee at Moz each year and the 2014 line up included topics on:

• SEO
• Analytics
• Psychology
• Branding
• Social Media
• CRO
• Mobile
• Local SEO
• PR

That’s a heck of a list.

Why is PPC Here?

Short answer: because you can’t ignore all this red:
my presentation for MozCon, with the guidance of the MozCon queen, Erica McGillivray, we very intentionally chose Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads as the subject, because of its past close ties with SEO. In fact, when it first launched as Google Base, it was technically SEO. SEOs would go into Base, upload product feeds and see if they could get traffic from Froogle or Product Search, as it was called before it went to an entirely paid platform in October of 2012.

Nowadays, it’s called Google Shopping and it’s all paid – but the advancements and optimizations that are made through paid have serious SEO and content benefits. In fact a recent post on the YouMoz section on leveraging panda to get out of product feed jail, while geared towards SEO and content, could make a powerful argument for a site or navigation restructure using data or content from paid product feeds. So, yeah, PPC belongs. (Even if just a little bit.)

Disclosure: I did test the outline and the presentation itself on a few SEOs at Portent first. They seemed unharmed by it.

In fact, after I gave my presentation at MozCon, I had several SEOs come up and tell me they learned something or realized something about PPC that they didn’t know and that it was relevant to their own work. Heck, in the future they threatened to go to more sessions on paid search tracks, instead of always just going to SEO.

To me, that was a win.

Cross-Geeking Out

It also occurred to me that sometimes, we continually send people to the same conferences or they go and they stick only to the track that is their everyday specialty. I think we need to break that pattern. We should be challenging ourselves to cross-conference and learn more about the specialties we aren’t in everyday. I would rather have a session be over my head (like a super technical SEO session) and I have to stop and think about how all the pieces fit together rather than complain that the last session I was in wasn’t advanced enough.

Considering the rise of paid social and content promotion as well, we’re all blending into “marketers” more and more, away from that “specialists” label whether you like it or not.

So, I challenge you to go cross-geek out. Go to a social media session where they talk about their tools. Go to an SEO session where they talk about the changing SERP. Go to a content session where they talk about how they decide what to write. You’ll be glad you did. You might even make a friend.

I know I enjoyed MozCon as a PPC person. I cross-geeked out on social communities, web psychology, international SEO, semantic search and mobile SEO. What’s not to like about that?

How Did YOU Get In?

Yes, that was a real question and by more than one person. The only answer I have to give on that is “because I’m awesome.” And I can prove it:

Thanks, LinkedIn and my students at the University of Washington.
(The serious answer can be found on the Moz blog.)

Now What?

Feel free to check out the line up for MozCon 2015. (I’m not on there again, but that’s OK, I’ve started therapy.) Next time you go to a conference, be sure to read all of the sessions, not just your usual track. Sign up for webinars on different subjects, there are tons out there everyday and for every level. I went to one on email marketing the other day, something I’ve never really done! Ask someone you know or trust either in your field or at your company that is in another field to make a recommendation. And if you like to deal in volume, ask on Twitter, you’ll get a ton of responses.

And last, but not least, after 8 years and 8 months at Portent, I have to say that this is my last blog post on the Portent blog. This post is my 107th post in total. A distant 2nd to Ian’s 1500+ posts, but it’s a second place I’m proud of.

It has been an honor and a privilege to be a part of Portent. I will miss the culture, the work and most of all the staff, immensely.

Most of all, thank you for the opportunity to learn how to be a “pay per clip” marketer! It’s been a great ride.

To stalk me on future adventures, you can find me on Twitter @ebkendo

Live long and prosper!

The post PPC at mozCon – Challenge Yourself to Cross Geek Out appeared first on Portent.

Before I proceed, I’d like to emphasize the following example involves product listing ads which had been managed manually, not using any sort of 3rd party tool. Likewise, the shopping campaign in this example has also been managed manually without the assistance of a 3rd party tool. If you currently manage your product listing ads with the assistance of automated tools or programs, please consider shopping campaigns carefully before going all gung-ho for change.

Background

This particular account is the online retail industry and sells less than 5,000 products total. Prior to being admitted to the shopping campaigns beta, the Product Listing Ads campaign had been set up with a basic structure of one ad group for each manufacturer. We made the switch to the new shopping campaign format and were immediately impressed with the new functions in the user interface, allowing us to separate out product sub-categories (as determined by Google’s product taxonomy) and bidding on them differently within the same ad group:

*Note – Product categories and labels have been altered for privacy reasons.

Furthermore, we were able to add custom labels to the data feed to segment products further, thus allowing us to utilize another level of granularity. In this example, we assigned a label to each product based on price range.

In the end, we were able to set up this new shopping campaign in a relatively short amount of time, using several levels of sub-categories to organize and bid on products. Previously, we would have had to create one ad group per product ID to get this same type of granular organization and bidding flexibility – a highly time-consuming and arduous process. Now, instead of a few hundred ad groups to keep track of, we have one. And of course, we have the option to break things down further, creating multiple campaigns and/or ad groups if need be.

Results

The results were definitive – the shopping campaign format and robust functionality resulted in immediate progress which has been sustained since. For product listing ads, our average CPC has decreased 44%, our average CPA has decreased 57%, and our conversion rate has increased 29%.

If you currently manage your PLAs manually and are interested in a more robust format without having to resort to a 3rd party tool, you can sign up to be part of Google’s beta program.

The post Google Shopping Campaigns Get Results appeared first on Portent.

I was poking around in Google Shopping results the other day and found that there are some merchants who have partnered with major brands that are essentially “piggy backing” off their name through the Google Shopping Feed.

At first, I thought NewEgg was being just really clever/sneaky by changing their store name in Merchant Center to “New Egg – The Unbeatable Sale.” But what I discovered is that Unbeatable Sale is actually a merchant of NewEgg’s that sells through the NewEgg site (and as a result is covered under a number of their policies).

At the same time, Unbeatable Sale gets to use the NewEgg brand name as their store name in Google Shopping results:

So I started digging more. Turns out Unbeatable Sale is a lot of places:

So who else is doing this?

Well, Sears and Walmart:

And in this case, they get double listings – as they are technically two different “stores” on Google Shopping.

I rooted around a bit more on Sears side, particularly in the Pricefalls.com merchant service as it kept cropping up in the places I was looking. I found that it’s not hard to get into:

Heck, Pricefalls does the Google Shopping feed for you.

Same products?

One thing I looked at was whether or not Sears.com and the Sears.com-Pricefalls store were selling the same items or not. The answer to that is no (or at least not for the few products I tested) – there are different products being offered.

I’m still not crazy about the overall concept though. The big name retailers get to take up multiple results with partnering merchants, but technically – not really. I don’t consider it to be the same as eBay or Etsy, which are straight up marketplaces. I consider Sears to be Sears, so it seems weird and unbalanced to me.

Maybe you already knew about the duplications, but lately I’ve been noticing how much more they’re appearing in the results. Everyone else out there cool with this? Or no?

The post So You Think You’re Buying from Sears appeared first on Portent.

Well OK, I’m being a tiny bit dramatic. But Google Shopping could totally and utterly screw you over if:

• You’re not a major brand with an AdWords rep to spoon feed you
• You’re not familiar with how shopping feeds, shopping engines & AdWords works
• You haven’t started thinking about this and you’re an ecommerce retailer currently using Google Shopping feeds

There are some big changes to Google Shopping rolling out in October. After interviewing CPC Strategy’s CEO and interrogating multiple companies (engines, carts and CSEs), I’m finding out just how unprepared many people are for this massive change.

As our CEO, Ian Lurie, said to me after my rant, “Think about it. This is their (Google’s) biggest revenue generation possibility since AdWords. They just added a billion dollars to their bottom line.”

He’s right. There are some folks out there that are going to have to start paying for tons upon tons of what was previously deemed “organic” traffic. Granted, it’s Google’s engine. They’re one of the last of the major players to offer this kind of online shopping market for free. It was really only a matter of time. And now it’s time to pay the piper.

So where do you need to focus your attention now that these Google Shopping changes are right around the corner?

Within Google AdWords

When it comes to how unique AdWords attributes are going to play with feeds that may have been created for other platforms – it’s still unclear.

If you have 3,000 products and not a lot of time or revenue to be spending on product feed creation with 3rd party developers, you’re either going to blow a three day weekend on this or try and muster without. It’s those that muster without that concern me.

My internal monologue: This whole situation has shades of an early Content network where advertisers were opted in automatically on new campaigns and left to run wild on MySpace and YouTube. Right now, an advertiser throws up a feed from a cart without any AdWords attributes filtering and it looks eerily similar. Granted, not that bad, but history does like to repeat itself.

I totally GET that this is supposed to eliminate the “riff-raff.” But it is totally eliminating the smaller guys as well. And for a company that touts how friendly AdWords is, and created a small business center and that awful AdWords Express program and sends out countless $100 coupons to get started, this sure puts the bar in an unfriendly place.

Pay Attention to Your Shopping Cart Provider

When I interviewed CPC Strategy’s Rick Backus, I asked what the two hardest carts are to use when breaking into product listing ads (PLAs) – Magento and Volusion won (read: lost).

So I asked the reps of both at the Shop.org tradeshow in Denver earlier this month and found that Magento uses 3rd party “extensions” for pretty much everything. If you want an extension it could cost you anywhere from free to $500 to get that feed going. If you don’t understand how to navigate an API or don’t have any development help, this is where the price tag gets steeper. If you have a more advanced version of the cart (not community), you get more bells and whistles and this might not even be an issue.

Volusion has the info for setting up the basic feed, but you have to pull multiple reports to “cobble” them together to create a full feed. For example, you’ll need to pull one set of attributes from the product info table and another set from the shipping table. Mix together, sort and add columns for AdWords (manually), and populate at will.

Again, you could find a 3rd party person to help you out for a fee. A gold level or higher cart merchant could get some internal Volusion staff help, but if you’re at a lower level, you’re going to need to do some heavy lifting yourself.

If you’re API savvy (or have someone that is), and if you happen to have a higher level of cart access/functionality (like Yahoo stores), you can leverage feed creation and submission much more easily than trying to pull together reports for less cost.

What do other carts do? You should really find out if you don’t know already. Maybe you did and you could have skipped this whole section… but if not, you might think about the cost of extensions and add-on support when calculating how much that ecommerce platform really is going to cost you.

Look to the Google Merchant Center

OK, you know your client has a feed (or should), but you haven’t seen it yet. Nor do you have access to their Merchant Center account. Or maybe you have access, but in order to see categories, brands or anything at all, you have to drill down to each individual product or pull some annoying report.

You know that bidding by “all products” in AdWords is like opting into the display network, automatic placements and then doing nothing else. Not a great idea. Just like you know that bidding the same for all categories, brands or any AdWords attribute, isn’t right.

If you have not been granted access to their Merchant Center – get in (all they have to do is add a user, though you’ll need a new email or to set up a multi-user account first). Get a copy of the feed. Find out what you can and can’t use. Don’t procrastinate on this. Multi-user accounts have been a bit glitchy though, I’ve gone through the whole process a couple of times with different clients/accounts and still not gotten the “access” part of a multi-user account to work, so be prepared to call the 1-866 line and have them tell you that the feature doesn’t exist. (This has happened twice now, with two different reps.)

Get familiar with the Merchant Center reporting as well. Go into the Performance area and run some reports by brand and product type to see what’s going on. You can’t export these reports and sometimes it’s like watching paint dry for them to generate, but it still helps you understand what you’re working with.

And if you want to see individual products, dig in and you’ll be able to see a lot more:

You Must Get Ahead of the Game

Yeah, I’m talking to you. Need a crash course in Google Shopping? Go read CPC Strategy’s free ebook.

Do not diddle around on this. Be prepared. There’s no definitive date in October for when Google is flipping the switch, but assume it’ll be at the most annoying time for you. Get ahead of the game and start talking to clients about this. Hound them for that feed. HOUND THEM I SAY!

You don’t have to listen to me, but don’t get all indignant when November comes around and your feed disappears or your budget is wasted on the mysterious category of “all products.”

My Free Google Shopping and PLA Webinar

If you really want to avoid being totally and utterly screwed by these massive changes to Google Shopping, you can join me for a free webinar on Google Shopping & PLAs. Thursday, September 27th at 11am PST.

Sign up here. Even if you can’t make it, I’ll still send you the recording and you can watch it later.

The post Google Shopping: How We’re All Totally & Utterly Screwed appeared first on Portent.

Rick is the CEO and Co-Founder of CPC Strategy, a comparison shopping engine management company started in 2007. They take client feeds across multiple platforms (Amazon, Nextag, PriceGrabber, etc;) and optimize them for ROI through strategy, attention to detail and expertise in CSEs (comparison shopping engines.)

Rick was kind enough to let me ask a LOT of questions that required anywhere from a sentence to a small novella to answer. I’ve tried to capture that interview here for all those paid search marketers out there who are either about to get themselves dropped into the middle of a PLA world and for those that might know some already but could really use some direction on how to get to PLAs perform. And probably most importantly, what you’re going to need to know to make that happen.

(Now this isn’t word for word. Otherwise we’d be here all day. It was an hour long interview, there are a couple of answers I put in verbatim because they were THAT important.)

Part I: CSEs and Tips in General

1. In your personal opinion, is this move for Google Shopping a good thing? Do you really think we’re going to get “better” results now as searchers?A: “Better” is relative…it will get some of the affiliates and less relevant advertisers out of the Google Shopping results as we are moving to the “pay to play” model. Larger advertisers with larger budgets will benefit as bidding is going to be playing a large role in the future and will likely be dominating on the google.com results pages.
2. What is it that makes Amazon, Shopzilla and Nextag such good CSEs?A: Volume, ROI and the amount of qualified traffic that they are bringing to sites. The challenge for CSEs is generating quality traffic at a scalable rate (profitable for them and for the retailers), which these three (and Pricegrabber as well) do.
3. What are the top three things you optimize on a feed and why?
   (This was one of my favorite answers)A: “The term data feed optimization got really popular a few years ago. And it’s something that kind of resonates with retailers who don’t work with feeds a lot. So they think that data feed optimization is some sort of magical formula where you take their feed and you’re doing all this crazy stuff to send out their feed and that’s going to magically get you better results. In reality the most difficult part of feed optimization is the categorization. And so, depending on how many categories the retailer has, in some instances they have 500, 600, 700 categories and the shopping engines don’t do the best job of categorizing the feeds unless you’re dictating to them what the proper category is. And so, you can usually get the product live if you just send your own internal categories. Their systems have to be automated and so they’re essentially trying to match up categories based on keywords and that is really really difficult to automate so in most instances they’re going to get 90% of the way there, in terms of putting the products in the right categories. But they’re still needs to be some sort of manual process on the side of the retailer or the side of the agency to look at all of the individual categories and find the corresponding category for each CSE.”

   Takeaways:
   Tweaking product titles, descriptions, adding keywords- it doesn’t always have benefits. The feed needs to match the product pages. So- don’t go adding a bunch of general terms to specific products. This used to work decently on those free engines, like Google Shopping, but now you are paying for the traffic, so make it relevant! Volume doesn’t equal ROI.

   All these different CSEs have different category structures. You can’t treat them all exactly the same. Categorize it smart, pay attention.

   

1. What shopping cart obstacles to you come into most often?A: Magento & Volusion. Magento is challenge in getting an export. CPCStrategy had to develop a plugin just for Magento, there are API limits or in some cases retailers are paying for a one time feed export. Volusion has obstacles that often require manual work, for example, like having to pull two versions of the product lists where one has no product URL and another has no image URL and the feed have to be combined in order to make one that can be submitted.
2. Which shopping carts are the easiest to do CSEs with?A: Most are easier than Magento/Volusion. For example, Yahoo Stores have a specific file/URL that they can plugin and pull a feed from.
3. How does CPC Strategy increase ROI on data feeds?A: Each account manager has 10-15 accounts that they manually review, right down to an individual SKU. Poorer performing SKUs are pulled from the feed submittal and are determined by several thresholds set on a per client basis. For example, a particular SKU on a low cost/low margin item might be “taking up” a lot of the clicks/budget from a certain category but with no or low resulting sales. Removing this SKU from the feed makes it so other products display instead. You don’t want to be paying the CPC for a low value item as you are a high. Additionally, you can bid more for SKUs with higher value over low. It’s also recommended that you don’t throw every product you sell into your feed and instead set a “floor” of which products must meet in order to compete.

   For example, a profit margin of X or a price of X. (Sound familiar? Like keyword list management, perhaps?) For the long term trends of month over month, they looks at category level bidding as well as brand and sub-categories, placing them in different “price buckets” to get a bigger picture look.

   Another takeaway: Use average order value to determine which products long term- on whether or not you can scale out that traffic at a profitable rate or whether or not you should take away a product from the feed.

   Note: there is such a thing as a “runaway product.” Products that are really popular, show a lot, fast and start showing up for general searches, generating lots of un-fun unqualified traffic.
   
   Just like a rogue keyword.

4. How do you see what’s working and what’s not? Is there 3rd party tracking? GA? The feed itself?A: In order to really “drill in” to Google Product Listing Ads, they use GA. (And you should really check out the resources section at the end of this post for their ebook on this.) This often includes appended parameters on the ends of destination URLs to able to filter and track. There are some 3rd party trackers out there, but not the reliability and cost effectiveness of GA. Amazon, for example, is working on a revenue/ROI tracker, but the takeaway here: use GA.

   Takeaway: append URLs at the product level. Amazon, NexTag, whatever so that the analytics system of your choice picks up activity on a per product basis.

Part 2: AdWords and Google Shopping

1. Do you use the AdWords attributes in optimizing feeds?A: Yes! AdWords Labels are awesome.
   The entire management of Google Shopping is really based around this column. It’s unique to other CSEs, in that you can send them an extra column that allows you to segment and organize your products in any way you want to.

   The trick is figuring out the proper strategy for each client. For example, segmenting by highest margin, best sellers, average order value.

2. My clients don’t give me feed access or are unable/unwilling to edit their feed for these attributes. As a result, I get stuck with “brand” and “product type” for filters. How bad is this?(Another answer you must read word for word.)

   “You have to control the feed. That’s the hard part. So that’s where AdWords agencies are kind of getting screwed to a certain extent. If you don’t control the feed it’s going to really limit your ability to manage the campaign. And so you can still use the brand and product type columns but if you control the feed you can you can use that AdWords labels to segment however you want. And so if you’re already managing their AdWords then you know about a lot of ways that you could segment the feed, if you’re managing their SEO you know a lot about ways that you could segment the feed. And to not have control over the feed, from an agency perspective it creates a lot of challenges.”

   

1. Do you filter between PLAs and PEs?A: We currently do, but come October, it won’t be necessary. It doesn’t make a lot of sense right now either to try if it’s an issue – once October hits, everything will be under the Google Shopping umbrella and there will no longer be a difference of segmenting paid traffic from unpaid traffic.
2. Best practice when structuring for PLAs? Mimic site structure or categorization of your website?A: Categories don’t matter. If the categories in the feed are done properly than you shouldn’t need to use the AdWords label and brand to double up on that. One thing that you should be taking into consideration is the average order value. For example, lower bids on products that have a lower average price point and raising bids on products that have a higher average price point. Use AdWords labels to do this.
3. How granular do you get on Google product categories? As far down as you can- or do you stay more top level to increase potential volume?A: You want to go down as far as you can go within Google’s guidelines. Use their category suggestions, to help improve your relevancy. The closer you can match your categories to Google’s, the more likely you are to be seen as “relevant” and data quality is becoming even more important as a factor involved in calculating your placement.

   Follow up question: So for the product type category- what do you do with that?

   A: Don’t duplicate Google’s category, mimic it. Get close to Google’s taxonomy suggestions, it’s OK to get a bit closer to your own internal site categories/sub categories than theirs.

   Another follow up question: So why that column even exist? In my experience, clients are befuddled by it and often mix them up as to which is which and rarely understand that one is dictated by Google through their taxonomy and one is not, it just has to follow the > carrot > structure.

   Speculation Answer: Other CSEs don’t require that. Perhaps originally Google wanted to have as much information from the site as possible. (We agreed that this could/should be retired in the future, in order to avoid duplication and “lower barriers to entry” from a technical standpoint.)

4. Does AdWords currently provide enough performance information and flexibility in the UI to make the optimization efforts really needed?A: No. You need to use GA and combine the data between the two. Not always perfect, so revenue tracking in AdWords would be nice. You could then see down to the product level as often times the GA revenue doesn’t always match up with AdWords in order to get product level revenue. (The average retailer isn’t going to be able to pull in the level and amount of data needed from both sources.)

   This is why AdWords labels is so important to segment traffic. The product type and brand attributes don’t give you enough flexibility for bids and it isn’t beneficial to do that. You don’t need a ton of ad groups within a PLA campaign if you’re using that label.

   “One thing that I will say that’s really important that I don’t think most people realize right now is that the default bids at the ad group level will not override the higher bid on all products.”

   For example you have a .50max CPC on all products and you have ad groups for brands and those brands have .20CPC and .30CPC. Google is going to default to the 0.50CPC for all products.

   You want to start with a low bid on all products and up the bids through auto targets. It’s not intuitive.

1. When Google Shopping is deciding/auctioning off which PLAs to show, what are they using to determine product relevancy other than bid, title, description? Do they even look at product type?A: They say that they are using the entire feed, there’s a really complicated system that assigns a score to each retailer’s data feed and there is supposedly a threshold that your data feed needs to meet in quality.

   For major hypothetical example: Google says “we’re not going to show any PLAs for a retailer with a data feed quality score below 75.” And your retailer has a 72. Which would mean then they are not eligible for PLAs as the quality of the feeds isn’t high enough to show to their users independent of bids.

   So supposedly, the higher they are rating your feed, the lower you have to bid to compete for that real estate. (Sound familiar, anyone?)

   There’s a feed rating (data quality score), the advertiser level rating and the bid and all three are playing a role. The data quality score takes into account your product pages as well. Google is matching up the content from your feed to your product pages and assigning it some sort of score with a goal of showing the most relevant advertisers for user experience.

   And no, you can’t see what that score is.

   Google just started publicly saying that your data feed quality can have an impact on your relevancy. Don’t be surprised if long term there was some sort of metric that was released either in AdWords or Merchant Center that shows you what your data quality score is. Right now it’s just something they use internally and is not public. (We have seen where our clients have improved the amount of content on their landing pages and replicated those improvements in their data feed and their traffic did go up.)

Part 3: How CPC Strategy Works and Resources

1. At what point do you want to turn it over to a company like CPC strategy? Volume of products, spend?A: We charge about $1-3k per month in fees, flat fee. Advertisers need to be spending at least $5k in comparison shopping engines. (Most retailers also have over 1,000 products. However, retailers with very popular/high price point products/categories will have less in volume. Think like iPods.)

   We are not an AdWords agency, but this is going to become a bigger branch of AdWords revenue and in some cases we’re working closely with agencies and managing PLAs for clients that already have a PPC vendor. We’re in a good position to manage PLAs for clients but the PPC vendor knows way more about how to manage AdWords campaigns.

   We take the feed from the clients (mostly via automated FTP) once every 24hours. Most of clients are changing their pricing and inventory every day, clients that do monthly changes- we don’t need a new feed every day. However, we do still submit every day for that “freshness factor” that CSEs take into account, you really should submit your feed everyday even if you’re not making changing it. We also use the CSEs tracking pixels in conjunction with GA for Shopzilla, Nextag, Shopping.com and PriceGrabber to track ROI.

2. If you could ask Google to make one feature or tool to help make PLAs more successful for advertisers this October, what would it be?A: Separate bids for Google Shopping and for the PLAs. Essentially right now, your one bid is going to determine where you show up on shopping.google.com and whether or not you can show up on google.com searches. And those are really two different goals. Google Shopping there are retailers listed on that page and Google.com only has 3-6 spots. What we’re seeing right now for PLAs is that the traffic on the google.com results page has a much lower conversion rate than the clicks from shopping.google.com

   Assuming that the traffic quality is different- one is someone that is searching on Google and one is someone who deliberately went to Google Shopping, looked at different retailers, compared prices, read reviews and then clicked through- the quality of the traffic is going to be different. As an advertiser, I don’t want my one bid to determine where I show up on both of those pages. I want to have the option of bidding separately.

   (Sound familiar? Search vs. Search Partners vs. Display?)

3. If you could impart one pearl of wisdom to PPC marketers what would it be?A: Get control of the feed. If you can’t control the feed, then it’s going to make managing PLAs a lot more difficult. To manage PLAs successfully you really need to be able to have use of that AdWords Label column.

Want more? Your head spinning a little? No problem. Stay on top and get in charge of your Google Shopping with some killer FREE resources:

CPC Strategy’s FREE ebook: Google Shopping Guide 2.0: Bidding, Advanced Segment Tracking and CPA Campaigns

CPC Strategy also hosted a free webinar with Jon Venverloh, Google Shopping’s Senior Product Manager on August 9th. Check out the audio recording.

Portent’s blog: What a Paid Search Marketer Needs to Know About Google Shopping

The post Google Shopping: Interview with Rick Backus of CPC Strategy appeared first on Portent.

This just got a bit more competitive is all. Oh yeah, and less free. If you’ve been following along with the recent announcement that Google AdWords will be discontinuing the free product listings through Google Product Search, then you’re with me already. If you haven’t- then breaking news for you!

In a nutshell- Google is making product feed submissions and displaying products a paid thing. So if you upload a product feed through Google Merchant Center (or Google Base as it’s sometimes called), then you care about this. You also care about this if you use Product Listing Ads (or PLAs) in Google AdWords in conjunction with a product feed in Google Merchant Center. You really care about this if you have only been using Google Merchant Center and NOT AdWords.

Let’s break it down, because in the end we’re talking about FIVE different Google products that could come into play for you.

Google Product Search– the section of Google.com where displays results come from product feeds and through Google web crawls. This was free to show your product feed in.

Google Merchant Center/Base– the interface where you upload your product feeds, view statistics of the same and get all your info on what’s accepted, what’s not and where you can “optimize” your product feeds using attributes provided by Google. Still technically free- but no one will see anything unless you pay.

Google AdWords– I think you know what this is. What you care about here is the auto targets tab in the AdWords user interface. More on that later. Also, never free.

Product Listing Ads (PLAs)– these are ads that are shown through linking Google AdWords with Google Merchant Center. Using attributes for AdWords like adwords_labels or adwords_groups, you can filter and control which products show with which queries or groups of products. These show one image only, show the price, display URL and an option line of promotional text you enter in through the AdWords interface. Performance is viewed on the Auto Targets tab.

Product Extensions Ads- these ads also show products from your Google Merchant Center feed, but instead require a click of a “plus box” to expand and show up to 4 products with your AdWords ad text. You can also use Google Merchant Center attributes in your product feed to group products by product type, brand, condition, adwords_labels and adwords_groups. Performance is viewed on the Ad Extensions tab. (Well, what you can see of it anyway.)

Google Shopping- The product formerly known as Google Product Search. The results in this search result area will all be paid inclusions, drawn from product feeds submitted through Merchant Center, as well as organic listings.

Google Trusted Stores- a Google Trusted Store is a merchant that has applied to be in the program and passed a shipping and customer service check by Google. It requires a piece of javascript code and an additional order code on shipping/receipt pages as well as a tab-delimited data feed that is submitted daily.

Google collects shipping data (length of time to ship, speed of shipping) over the course of 28 days and 1,000 orders. During this “monitoring mode” an error free month will get you into the program, after which you get a nifty Google Trusted Stores badge to show alongside your AdWords text and product listing ads. Be sure to check out the implementation requirements and integration before signing up. The program just got opened up more from the “submit and hope for an email” – see how you can get started here. You care about this in connection with Google Shopping because of the badge it’s going to “bling” your ad out with.

Google Analytics- When uploading feeds to Google Merchant Center, you used to tag the back end of destination URLs (I hope you did at least) with the designation of utm_souce=google+products or something similar so that when you looked in your GA stats you could separate Google organic from Google Product Search. You really should do this if you haven’t been.

What this means for you and managing PPC

• Get to work now, so you have extra time to get ready for holiday. If you’re not already taking advantage of product feeds, you should. The absolute best way to manage this going forward? Create a new campaign and ad groups just for product listing ads.
• The new system isn’t keyword based, so don’t mix it with your keyword based ad texts. (If you add keywords to the campaign or ad group with your PLAs and no text ads, they won’t do anything but sit there.)
• Review and possibly use all the available attributes in AdWords now: product type, brand, condition, adwords labels, adwords groups.
• Figure out a taxonomy before you upload on how you’re going to group products- use your existing AdWords account structure to make life easier on yourself. (If that’s a mess, fix that first.) For example: say you have a housewares campaign that houses ad groups for utensils and blenders. You’re going to want to create a grouping or group for utensils (spatulas, whisks, spoons) and another for blenders. Auto Targets are set at the ad group level, so you’ve got a lot of flexibility here.
• The difference between groups and labels? Groups can be arbitrary. Name the group and assign products that same group name – they are now a “group.” But- it can only be one value. So “blenders” or “utensils” not “blending utensils” or “down comforters.” Labels can have multiple values like “kitchenware, blender.” See the Google Merchant Center Help article for more on this.
• Review the required attributes for product feeds and get them in there.
• Name your products descriptively. Stick to 70 characters or less. Put a keyword in there and put it up front. For example: “King Down Pillow Feather Core” not “Down Pillow” or “240 Thread Count Reversible Hypoallergenic Siberian Goose Down Pillow Set”.
• Watch out for special characters like & % or < to avoid encoding errors, especially when using XML format.
• Fill in the product description uniquely and descriptively, 500 to 1000 characters. Writing the same thing for 80 products isn’t going to help you on relevancy to Google or searchers. Remember- you’re paying for these clicks now.
• Don’t use the first 100 characters for instructions, shipping info or overly descriptive “fluff” – you might get 500 characters, but not all 500 are going to show. Get the important sales info in up front.
• Find a way to automate an upload if possible through your cart. Get out-of-stock items out, new stuff in, don’t let your feed expire.
• Get familiar with the auto targets tab, it’s about to become very useful to you. You’re going to use it to filter, group and see what is going on.
• Advertisers that start using PLAs now get a 10% discount from AdWords. More details here.
  
• The Google Merchant Center Help Area with sample product feeds, lists of attributes and troubleshooting fun is sticking around and staying right where it is.
• If you can’t edit the feed for AdWords attributes or don’t have access to the product feed, your best filters are going to be product type and brand, which are hopefully at least provided to you. Otherwise, PLAs aren’t going to do much for you as you’ll be at the mercy of what Google finds “relevant.”

The most important thing? Just get your house in order now. Don’t wait till October. Sign up for updates from the AdWords or Merchant blogs to see when the official release will be – late summer is the current target.

Does this mean that you’ll now start seeing questions about the product feed program on the AdWords Advanced or Fundamentals exams? Probably.

Perhaps we’ll even see a new track of advanced to choose from: search, display, analytics and shopping!

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