Question 1

What are some high-level recommended campaign bidding strategies?

Accepted Answer

Bid Strategies

Step 1:
**Non-Shopping Campaigns**: Start with manual CPC with eCPC enabled (because eCPC is the option that uses a bit of Google’s automation, but is mostly manual). This is nice because you can control the bids, but it’s not very scalable because it’s high maintenance, and because a machine will do it better than a human ever could. After you have around 100 conversions with high frequency (like a sale every other day, for example), at this point we’ve given the algorithm enough data for it to pick up where we left off and make it better. Now you can switch from eCPC to a smart bidding strategy like Target CPC. It leverages the data that you’ve already provided.

**Shopping Campaigns**s: Start with a regular Shopping campaign before switching to a Smart Shopping campaign, because regular Shopping campaigns are inbound (meaning people are searching for the product when the ad appears) whereas Smart Shopping is outbound (meaning Google will try to show it to the type of people who might be interested), so the Smart algorithm can’t do outbound well, and therefore will never prove ROAS, without plenty of data. So, start with Shopping campaign using Manual CPC (usually w/enhanced enabled unless you have super low profit margin and you're trying to prove concept)

After 35 - 45 days of gathering consistent conversion data (aka converting at a normal cadence with a reliable pattern), then pause all shopping campaigns & replace it with a new Smart Shopping campaign using Maximize Conversions (which is the only bidding option). After 35 - 45 more days if the campaign isn’t hitting an acceptable ROAS, you can turn on the optional ROAS goal within the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy.

You don’t want to start off with a ROAS goal because it won’t get any conversions because it doesn’t have enough outbound data yet. Once you've given it that data, turning on the ROAS goal will restrict it to only spend when it thinks it can hit that goal, so spend starts to decrease, the campaign gets less activity, you get less clicks per day, but you should get a higher quality click and conversions that are making your ROAS.

One additional strategy is to spend more $/budget to force Smart Shopping campaigns to go find new markets by removing the Target ROAS goal.

Step 2: 
Now you can begin to step the ROAS goal higher. For example, if the campaign was at 300% when you first turned on Target ROAS, then try for 325%. If the campaign hits that or surpasses it, then try for 350%. At some point, you will hit a ceiling. Once you know how high the automation can go, get it back to the top and keep it there steady.

Step 3: Now that your ROAS is high, you can begin to give it more daily ad spend to see if you can increase the amount of conversions. So now, instead of spending $100/day and getting $300, you can try spending $500/day and getting $1500. Just make sure the ROAS doesn’t dip.

**Display Pay Per Conversion** - This is a new type of campaign/bid strategy in which you only pay for a conversion, and it’s only when the conversion doesn’t go above what you said you would pay. Begin with a super high CPA and then decrease it slowly. The idea is to get the CPA as low as possible (at which point you'll just turn off any regular Proactive Display campaign and just use this one). These types of campaigns can get lots of fake conversions generated by bots. Captcha prevents the bots from submitting forms and wasting ad spend.

Question 2

What to Expect With Competitor Campaigns

Accepted Answer

Competitor Campaigns:
* These campaigns tend to have a shorter sales cycle.
* They are also known to drive more branded search (because someone shopping a competitor’s site, might come back to Google after not finding what they were looking for, remember your name, and type that in).
* Don’t expect to have a high quality score on campaigns like this because the content on the site will never have the keyword (the competitor brand) in it.
* It is almost always a trademark violation to put your competitor’s business name into your ad copy.
* If you do not have a direct/obvious competitor, some nuance needs to be taken into consideration: 
	* For example, you might want to target a big brand who steals most of your business, but since the big brand sells more than just the products that you sell, you will need to target keywords that include both the competitor’s name and the product. 
	* Sometimes this is the case with smaller competitors, as well, in which case try both strategies (target just the competitor’s name and also the competitor + product as keywords).

Question 3

Can we spend more money on a specific product or in a specific location?

Accepted Answer

Begin with $50 per day (or an amount that makes sense to you). Try to split the Smart Shopping campaigns to two different geographical locations, then allocate the ad spend to each campaign based on performance.

So two identical smart shopping campaigns.

1: All of (ex: Country), excluding (ex: State)
2: (State) while excluding the rest of (Country)

Whatever ends up being limited by budget, or having the best ROAS, gets the most ad spend.

Since they both will have their own dedicated daily budget, you will want to balance that on how each of the campaigns performs.

Question 4

When do you update the ad copy?

Accepted Answer

Every month.

Here’s how it works:

After 100 clicks, we compare the performances of two ads.

We keep the ad copy with the highest click-through and conversion rate, pause the ad that didn’t perform as well, and build a new ad to compete against the winning one for another 100 clicks.

This cycle continues on a monthly basis.

Question 5

Is it possible to run an e-commerce campaign but built as lead generation?

Accepted Answer

It doesn’t always make sense to setup e-commerce tracking in Google Ads.

Instead, we can just assign a static conversion value for the order form submission (average order price) and use that for tracking ROAS.

Question 6

What are Cart Abandonment Campaigns and Cart Abandonment Audiences?

Accepted Answer

If you see significantly more product value being added to the cart than what is being purchased, consider adding a Cart Abandonment Audience to a Remarketing Campaign to try to get those hot leads back.

Use Display Ads so that any other websites they visit, like competitor sites, they will see your ad saying, “Finish your checkout and you’ll get 10% off with coupon code x”.

(***Make sure to only add new audiences to the Remarketing Campaign after the campaign has proven that the ROAS is there or else you will simply be putting budget & effort into something that converts at a negative net profit.)

Question 7

When can I submit information about special offers we have?

Accepted Answer

It's best to let us know about 72 hours in advance.

For lead generation, it's very simple to update ad copy; but, for eCommerce, any special offers have to be approved by Google Merchant Center before they can be used. And approval typically takes about 2-3 days.

Question 8

Can I have multiple smart shopping campaigns in order to sell in different countries or one smart campaign with all countries selected. Please whats best practice in your experience?

Accepted Answer

Yes! Best practice for multiple countries is to actually create a new feed in GMC for that target country, then, use a new Smart Shopping campaign to target that country, or, a specific geographical area in that country

Question 9

I Googled a keyphrase for my campaign but I don’t see my ad—why?

Accepted Answer

A: Ultimately, the answer depends on your unique campaign—but there could be a few potential reasons for this:

**You are in a competitive industry and/or have a limited budget**:
In this scenario, there are two options for bidding:

1. You can bid to be at the top of the page (in which case you may spend your entire budget on one click per day)
2. You can opt for more selective bidding, resulting in more leads

Setting a lower budget allows only the right people to find you, instead of paying a lot of money to claw to the top of the page.

**You have other keyphrases that have proven to convert**
After running a campaign for some time, data shows us which keywords perform the best. If an ad doesn’t appear for a specific keyphrase, chances are it hasn’t converted as well as others—and more money is spent on those proven successful keyphrases instead.

**Low search volume**
Sometimes, a keyword has low search volume altogether. In this case, ads are ineligible to be shown until search traffic increases.

**Where did you Google from (physically)**?
It could also be a regional issue. If you’re out of town—where your ads are turned off—they won’t appear from a Google search.

**From here, you have a couple options to get to the bottom of why you aren’t seeing your ads:**

1. Check out the “Ad Preview Diagnosis” tool in Google Ads. If an ad isn’t showing, this should tell you why—or, it may tell you that your ad is, in fact, showing up in Google search results, but you just haven’t seen it yet. 
2. Still feeling uneasy? [Just reach out](https://sol8.com/contact/). We can give you the reason why you aren’t seeing your ad; but chances are, there is a strategy behind it—and we’re happy to go over it with you.

Question 10

How often do we meet to review the campaigns?

Accepted Answer

This report is not proprietary and is easily reconcilable within your Google Ads account (which you retain full ownership of).

After you receive the report, we offer a meeting to review all activities in your campaigns, what happened over the last month, what is happening now, and what our plans are for future growth.

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