A solid PPC shopping strategy can take your sales to the next level, but it’s all too easy to make rookie mistakes regarding all the new shopping feeds, extensions, labels, and features. The last thing you want to do is create a campaign that wastes your marketing budget and fails to be profitable. As an inbound marketing company in Brooklyn, we want to help create the perfect shopping campaign! In an effort to help you avoid this problem, we’ve created a list of mistakes to avoid in a shopping campaign. Be sure to check out our list on 5 mistakes to avoid in your PPC campaign as well as a few misconceptions of PPC advertising from your local marketing agency.
Mistake #1: Lumping All Products into One Campaign
When you don’t have much time to spend on marketing, it’s tempting to lump all of your products into a single ad campaign. While it’s definitely faster to do this, you probably won’t be happy with the results.
It’s best to split up your campaigns by product groups (by brand, features, condition, types, etc.). This allows you to easily see which products are performing well and which are experiencing performance shifts.
Some sellers create separate campaigns for products with higher profit margins. Since these products bring in more revenue, they can bid higher to maximize their Impression Shares. It can be well worth it to spend a little more to promote this specific set of products. It’s usually counterproductive to bid higher on products with low-profit margins.
Mistake #2: Failing to Use Priority Settings
When you’re running multiple shopping campaigns with overlapping products, it’s very important to use priority settings. Here’s why.If all of your product campaigns are set to Medium priority, you’ll lose control over which campaign will get the most resources. If there’s one campaign that you want to push over all the others, designate that campaign as High priority, and set all the others to Medium or Low. You can also use priority settings to set your Top Sellers as High priority, making sure you get the most bang for your PPC buck.
Mistake #3: Forgetting to Backup Your Shopping Campaign
You can manually back up your AdWords shopping campaigns by downloading the product group reports. Why is this helpful? With all the details you have to manage each day, it can be nearly impossible to remember how you set up your last ad campaign. With access to your backed up shopping campaigns, you’ll have a snapshot of what you did last time. If it was successful, you may want to repeat the settings. If it wasn’t helpful, this snapshot will help you to analyze why.
Mistake #4: Competing Against Yourself
You’ve got plenty of competition out there without adding yourself into the mix, but when you create duplicate keywords in Shopping ads, that’s essentially what you’re doing.
Here’s an example. When you create overlapping keywords, lowering the bid for one of these keywords could shift traffic to another of your keywords. This can undermine your bid management strategy and set you up for competing against yourself.
To avoid this mistake, divide your keywords strategically. For example, if you’re selling Brother printers, create a Product Group in which the “product type” is “printers.” Create another Product Group in which the “brand” is “Brother.” Since you’re using different categories (“product type” and “brand”) you won’t compete against yourself.
For more information about shopping campaigns, or to discuss any other content marketing topic, give us a call at Park Slope Softworks. We’re here to help you succeed. Check out our Free SEO analysis to see how your website’s SEO ranks.
