Question 1

Can I add a logo or text to my product images to show in the shopping remarketing ads?

Accepted Answer

Google doesn't allow any logos or text on a product image. They call it a "promotional overlay." Most of the time when a logo is added to a shopping image, we get disapproved for "promotional overlay." Even though that is not the case, Google will still flag it as such. We add the logo to the responsive ad for shopping, but sometimes there is not enough room to display it depending on what digital property your seeing the ad.

If a promotional overlay is detected on a main image, that product will be disapproved because it doesn’t meet the image requirements. [Here is their article all about this.](https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/9242973?hl=en). Google automatically detects any logos or words and automatically disapproves it.

The Smart Shopping campaign has a remarketing aspect to it. This means it will follow recent website visitors around the web and show the product that they looked at. These ads can often appear simple with very little text, however Google's algorithms have determined that this is the best way to remind interested leads to come back and complete their purchase. These are dynamic (which means that Google's algorithms decide whether to show a logo, what text to include, etc. based on the person they are showing the ad to and the space they have available).

Question 2

What Are Display Campaigns?

Accepted Answer

Display Campaigns - Retail type advertising for brand image or product marketing; Images - Use stock or custom images if you have a designer and have something in mind that you want to try in the Display ads.

Reactive Display (aka Display Remarketing) - Ideal way to use Display campaigns, as Remarketing Audiences (previous visitors to your website) are more likely to convert and therefore make a more effective campaign.

Proactive Display - We often name them “Proactive Display” because they are outbound and they use Custom Intent Audiences instead of Remarketing Audiences. This Campaign is used instead of or in addition to the Reactive Display when there is an exception (like if your business has a long sales cycle (10+ days) or if you can’t use Remarketing Audiences because they’re in the medical industry.).

It can also sometimes work if you can use “Managed Placements” (which means you find 10-20 websites that use Google Adsense and show ads ONLY on those sites, which is a hard list of websites to come up with).

Display Ads are good for brand recognition & gathering data to feed the other campaigns (esp. Smart shopping, if it’s eCommerce or brand) but the *leads often won’t click directly (so you won’t be able to prove profitable conversions on the Display Ad alone*) -- instead they’ll type in the brand name into Google when they’re ready to go to the site. This means you will have to *pay close attention to the conversions in the Branded Campaign before and after the Display ads begin to determine whether you think it’s working*.

Do not allocate too much budget towards this campaign because you don’t want to throw your ROAS out the window, but about $450/month would work great.

Question 3

When is the best time to run Facebook Ads?

Accepted Answer

Start with a Remarketing campaign only for this first month until the pixel has picked up enough matched users and conversion data in the performance history. As a side note for e-commerce you can do Dynamic Product Remarketing which pulls products from the feed much like a Google Shopping campaign.

Keep in mind that Remarketing campaigns will not be able to spend much ad budget because the audience is made up of a percentage of people that visit your site (Facebook isn't able to match 100% of site visitors back to Facebook users). Start off with $5-$10/day for this campaign and adjust from there based on the frequency of the ads being displayed.

Once you have a good audience size and historical data then you can create a lookalike audience form your existing converters and show proactive ads to that cold list in order to build awareness.

People tend to view FB ads and then convert without clicking in FB. This can happen with Google to but it is more common with FB so it's hard to directly attribute sales and judge the performance of FB campiagns. Some of the people who convert on FB might be the sample people who are converting from an ad on another platofrm like Google. Without an attributuion tracking model it is impossible to know the exact path of conversion.

Question 4

Should I be running video ads and what can I expect?

Accepted Answer

Video Ads - Video ads are best used with Remarketed Audiences. This is because those audiences have already expressed good intent (meaning they’ve already gone to the site and completed a conversion), which is important since video ads are outbound (meaning people who see them aren’t necessarily searching for a solution at that moment.

You can run YouTube video ads, like the 15 second ones that are non-skippable, or you can run video Display, which means the video can show on sites other than YouTube, much like a banner ad.) and so they are primarily for promoting brand awareness.

Videos are often not clicked on directly; rather, leads will watch the video ad a few times and then go to Google later and search for the brand. This makes tracking a bit difficult, so you can expect to see a rise in the conversion rate of your Branded Campaign, as well as a rise in the View-Through Conversions report.

Videos will need to be hosted in YouTube and the Google Ads account will need to have the YouTube account connected under “Linked Accounts.”

### Here are some general recommendations for creating videos:

* Since they are skippable, you will want to mention the offer within the first 6 seconds.
* Mention the brand within the first 6 seconds.
* If you choose to put your brand logo in the video, put it on the bottom left side of the video.

[Here is our helpful 1-minute script template](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iZ703xaRWwGjjb-HyD0j8is7dVizEq-4_PwwkZwlUFw/edit?usp=sharing) that could come in handy if you plan on making a video soon.

Steps to making a video:
* Go to Videohive.net and search for “Explainer” to find explainer video templates.
* Find the one you like and write the script.
* Then send the script to someone who makes videos on Fiverr. (We use Demitri. He makes videos for about $50. His email is: blog.dbl@gmail.com.)
* Then find someone else on Fiverr to do the voiceover (Nicholescott369 is great). You can also get a famous person to do a cameo on this [[site]](https://www.cameo.com/c/voice-actors).

Question 5

How do I determine my ad spend budget?

Accepted Answer

**Brand New Campaigns** *Should Be Free to Spend* - When launching a new campaign, we often set the budget extra high so there is no risk for a limitation in reach in the first few days when the matching algorithms start their learning process. Overspending in the first few days can be compensated down the road.
What To Do About The Ever-So-Present **“Limited By Budget”** Message - When Google gives this message in the status column, you might choose to  act upon it or wait. This decision depends on the timing and the ROAS of both the campaign and the overall account.

**Why It Matters** - When a campaign doesn’t have enough ad budget to show the ad enough, it can have a compounding negative effect on campaigns. For example, when someone first clicks on your ad but doesn’t convert, the campaign might not have enough budget remaining to show the ad to them the next time they search, which is often the time that they’re ready to buy. Limited by budget can also be detrimental to your conversions per cost ratio, because how much you are able to spend per click affects how far up on the page you’ll be. For example, a smart shopping ad might be hidden by the “view more” button, or the search ad is showing at the very bottom under all the organic results. So, raising the budget slightly can often act as a catalyst for raising ROAS.

Increasing the budget almost always has a compounding effect on the ad performance: As the ad begins to appear more frequently, it "snowballs" into a handful of other phenomena, like leads viewing the ad more than once, the machine algorithms honing in on the number of impressions needed before a conversion, etc. So expect the cost per lead to decrease after adding more budget."

**When To Act** -  While limited by budget can be harmful, *raising the budget can also be harmful if it doesn’t manage to raise the ROAS*; This is because a campaign that doesn’t have a proven ROAS is essentially losing money with every dollar that it spends and so, in that case, more budget will just mean more money lost.

*If the ROAS is already proven* and you can see an accelerated conversion rate in Google’s recommendation (click on the “limited by budget” error message), then this is a no brainer: more budget means more profit.

*If the ROAS isn’t proven*, you may want to see if an increased budget can help it get there by removing the compounding negative effects that a limited by budget campaign is struggling with. You can still consider increasing the budget as long as the account’s overall ROAS across all campaigns is proven. Optimize everything else first, because throwing more money at a problem as an experiment to see if it will make the problem go away is a risk, so it’s best to get the account to a good place first to avoid jeopardizing the whole account too much.

Question 6

What if a campaign is not spending all of the budget?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes businesses would rather gain more impression share than hit a super high goal because the goal might be more profit than they really need and they want volume/scale.

For example, if you are targeting ROAS, then the campaign prioritizes that ROAS over spending all the budget, which means you’ve reached audience capacity and your options are either:

* Find a new/wider audience with different keywords
* Lower the bid strategy goal

Question 7

Should I use search with my e-commerce business?

Accepted Answer

Shopping campaigns are way more effective than Search campaigns when you’re targeting a wide audience. This is because search campaigns require search terms to run whereas shopping campaigns use Google’s 70 million signals to determine whether to show the product to someone. The former is inbound and the latter is outbound.

However, always build both Search and Shopping campaigns for your eComm companies, because:

* Shopping Ads and Text Ads (from Search) have different formats and they do appear in different placements/properties throughout Google network

* Being different, there are instances when both shopping and text ads can appear at the same time. This increased exposure is beneficial.

* In most cases, shopping ads do perform better but this is no guarantee so you also need to, at least, test search ads.

* There are accounts where the reach for the shopping ads is not sufficient to spend the monthly budget. Thus, you need to supplement shopping with search.

* Aside the above reasons, presenting a setup with search and shopping ads (and explaining the differences and the performance projections for each ad format) is better than the alternative (not having Search ads and wondering "why not").

Question 8

What is a Good Conversion Rate?

Accepted Answer

Across industries, the average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%, yet the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher. Ideally, you want to break into the top 10%.

Source: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/03/17/what-is-a-good-conversion-rate#:~:text=Conventional%20wisdom%20says%20that%20a,in%20the%20average%20performance%20bucket

Question 9

How long will it take to build my campaigns?

Accepted Answer

10-12 business days.

Question 10

What is the difference between Google Smart Shopping and Google Shopping Ads?

Accepted Answer

Traditional [Google Shopping campaigns](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2454022?hl=en) are only directed at users searching Google for a product to buy. This user sees the ads on a search engine results page.

[Google Smart Shopping](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7674739?hl=en), on the other hand, is a step up. This outbound-heavy campaign uses algorithmic targeting to show ads to a very specific user. This user has shown serious interest in a specific product through their past search activity.

How can we help?

Onboarding

Strategies

General FAQs

Tutorials