Smart Shopping leverages the power of Google’s machine learning algorithms, greatly reducing the time you need to spend optimising Shopping campaigns, while also doing more with that time. In short, it offers more bang for your buck over traditional Shopping campaigns.
We’ve already written extensively about Google Smart Shopping, including tips and best practices, as well as some specific advice ahead of Black Friday.
Smarter Smart Shopping: Control vs. Automation
Historically, the general advice surrounding Smart Shopping has been to combine all of your products into one campaign and let the Google machine work out the highest ROI product selection. And there’s still nothing wrong with that.
However, as with automation generally, that approach provides you with fewer levers to adjust and align traction depending on your business objectives. And this is an objection we receive from our clients from time to time, particularly in cases where they would like:
- hero products served first with maximum impression share
- to shift their overstocks
- to set different budgets in different areas
- to serve products that have lower ROI but provide greater margin or search volume.
Before looking more closely at how to implement smarter Smart Shopping it’s important to note that performance isn’t adversely affected by having all of your products in a single Smart Shopping campaign. Google will actively optimise to provide the highest return.
Smarter Smart Shopping simply gives you - or your account manager - greater control and the ability to adjust traction for a given area and optimise more effectively towards your business objectives.
How to Implement Smarter Smart Shopping
Getting Smart Shopping up and running is a relatively simple case of getting your shopping feed going, and structuring your data in the form of attributes (title, description, price, image, URL, etc…) for each and every product.
Smarter Shopping takes that one step further. By adding up to five custom labels to your products you can easily optimise for a never-ending range of objectives; stock, margin, season, etc…
You can populate these attributes with whichever values you like, then set up a value-dependent shopping campaign structure with a differing budget and ROAS targets.
Custom Label Ideas
Custom Label Idea #1 | Stock | Sample Values: [Low Stock, Medium Stock, High Stock]
Useful for having differing ROAS targets depending on how much stock you have left.
Custom Label Idea #2 | Margin | Sample Values: [10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%+]
Useful to support reporting and align shopping traction with an increased focus into end profitability.
Custom Label Idea #3 | Season of Traction | Sample Values: [Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter]
Useful for highly seasonal businesses.
Custom Label Idea #4 | Very Important Product | Sample Values: [Yes, No]
Useful to ensure all VIP hero items are pushed to have the highest impression share, with ROI being the secondary consideration for such items.
Custom Label Idea #5 | Sale | Sample Values: [A Sale, B Sale, C Sale]
Useful to know which items are in which sale.
Custom Label Idea #6 | Perishable | Sample Values: [Yes, No]
Useful for clients that sell products internationally, of course you may only want to push non-perishable items further afield.
Custom Label Idea #7 | Collection | Sample Values: [A Collection, B Collection, C Collection]
Useful for clients who want to push specific product collections harder than others.
Custom Label Idea #8 | Pause Advertising | Sample Values: [Yes, No]
Useful for clients who would like to temporarily pause advertising on particular products.
Final Thoughts
If you’re still running traditional Google Shopping campaigns, then a simple switch over to Smart Shopping is well worth consideration (and something we’d recommend).
And if you’re already running Smart Shopping, but would prefer a greater degree of control over budgets and specific objectives then this is a simple and effective way of achieving that. If you need any further guidance to achieve the level of control you would like just get in touch...
