Question 1

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 2

When should I consider using Remarketing?

Accepted Answer

Hold off on remarketing in the beginning to test the quality of the traffic in the campaigns, and if a campaign isn’t performing well then you don’t want to limit the ad spend by pushing customers back.

Question 3

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

Accepted Answer

If you want to remind recent website visitors about your offer, running video ads will help. Some videos show on YouTube while others show on the Display network (meaning, your videos can appear on other sites.)

When budget is limited, video ads are best used with Remarketed Audiences––those who have already gone to your site and completed a conversion. People who watch your video aren’t necessarily searching for a solution at that moment. So, using video ads to remind the right audience (remarketed) about your offer can help increase their desire to buy.

Later as the budget grows, adding in some video ads to Outbound Audiences can be a good idea. Especially with impulse-buy products or products/services that don't have a pre-existing market of users who are already looking for it.

What should my videos be like?

This varies wildly depending on the industry, the product/service, the target market, the business branding, etc.

Here are a few ideas to choose from. Our recommendation is to make as many as possible because it's tough to know what will be the most effective until you test it with your audience:

Customer/client testimonial videos
"How to" style videos that address common hesitations or questions prospects have
Business owner "mission statement" videos where the company founder introduces themselves & their "why"
Professional commercial-style videos showcasing a product/service or a category of products/services
Affiliate amateur-style videos where a partner figure recommends the product/service

Here is our helpful 1-minute script template that could come in handy if you plan on making a video soon.

Here is a succinct article that Google created to offer tips and guidance on video ads.

Here are 5 video ad sequence ideas to provide ideas for different video ads:

Tease, Amplify, Echo (3 videos).
The Direct Shot (3 or more 6-second videos).
The Mini Series.
The Follow Up (2 videos).
The Lead-In (2 videos).

Pro Tips:

Since videos are often skippable, it’s critical that you mention your brand or company name and your offer within the first 6 seconds.
For a bigger impact (but not mandatory) show your company logo within those first 6 seconds, and place it anywhere except the bottom right.
Start with a question or shocking statement in the first 10 seconds.
Tell the viewer "what's in it for them" (make them the hero of the story).
Video length and aspect ratio aren't important.
Don't mention time-specific details. Keep the content evergreen, because Google has to re-optimize every time the video is replaced.
Make a handful of videos & let Google rotate between them to find the winner. Don't limit yourself to one video.
Google will create sequences from your videos automatically (i.e. it will show video A to a user and then video B to the same user if it finds that to be the order that gets the highest engagement)

How long should my videos be?

The most important thing is the first 5 seconds because most video ads are skip-able after that. Make sure to include a value statement in the first 5 seconds. As for the final length of the video, it doesn't matter too much!

Where should I host my videos?

Videos will need to be hosted on your YouTube channel.

How will video ads impact my conversions?

Videos are often not clicked on directly. Instead, leads will watch the ad a few times then search the brand on Google afterwards.

This makes conversion hard to track directly, but you should see a rise in the conversion rate of your Branded Campaign and View-Through Conversions report.

How do I keep my audience engaged?

It’s important to remember that if your video ad is not engaging right off the bat, you’ll lose a big percentage of your audience immediately. So if you want to build effective video ads, you need to grab your audience’s attention with a great hook.

4 Tips to getting your audience hooked and engaged:

1. Start from the climax. Drop your viewers in the middle of the action––the most exciting, dramatic, or interesting scene in the plot. When you start at the peak of the climax, you successfully catch their attention.

2. Make sure that the story is relevant to your audience–and specifically made for your avatar. Address your viewers’ wants and needs and make them feel like the story is about them.

3. Use imagery and language (e.g. script) that your viewers aren’t expecting. This helps in disrupting behavioral patterns, beliefs, and any preconceived notions about your story or offer.

4. Keep your viewers guessing. Add some element of surprise to keep the anticipation going. Only reveal enough information that will make your audience curious to find out more.

Question 4

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 5

How can we make use of my existing customer base? / What is "customer match" used for?

Accepted Answer

If you have a large customer list, and if your Google account is eligible for "customer match," then you can implement some cross-selling and retargeting campaigns.

Because the audience size is limited and much smaller than an audience found on Google, we won't need a large budget for this strategy.

After about a month or two of gathering conversion data, we can also create a "similar audience" based on the customer list. Similar audiences are often effective, and we will incorporate it into our proactive targeting campaigns.

Question 6

Why do I need a Branded Search Campaign/Why do I need to spend money when someone is searching for my brand name?

Accepted Answer

The common thought process is “why are we allocating budget in order for an ad to appear when someone is already searching for our brand? It seems like a waste of budget.”

Here’s why:

Don’t Leave the Hot Leads Exposed to Competitors:

You don’t want to leave the brand exposed to competitor campaigns. When a lead searches for the brand name, you don’t want a competitor ad to be the first thing they see (and you especially don’t want that lead to click on the competitor ad).

Gain Extra Data For Optimization Opportunities:

Statistically it takes 2.5 clicks on average before someone is able to convert. Most people come back later. Without a branded campaign, you can see which keywords developed a conversion, but you can’t see how long it took them to convert and what path they took to come back (meaning did they Google your brand name or simply go back to your website, did they sign up for an email marketing campaign and then click on a link in an email, did they find a social media ad instead and click from there to convert, etc.).
This is because Google isn’t able to re-tie all the session data from the first interaction to the subsequent interactions.
If you set up a branded campaign, then you’re able to optimize fully because you can see which keywords have a shorter time lag, which have a heightened time decay, what is their top conversion path, etc.
Branded campaigns usually see about a 50% click-through rate and a 30% conversion rate, so they manage to catch a good chunk of the hot leads to help you see this data.
So, if you’re wondering how well the other campaigns are at driving traffic to make a return visit, you will need to raise the bid on the branded campaign.

Question 7

What are Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) Campaigns? When should I use DSA?

Accepted Answer

DSA Campaigns are used as learning experiments - You may choose to build dynamic search ad campaigns because they help you learn what ad copy & keywords to use in the other campaigns, in case you missed any important and effective words. Adding new words to the other campaigns can be helpful to optimize -- and it can be especially helpful if you’re hitting a spend ceiling and would like to raise the budget. It’s a way to identify, rather than guess, which keywords to target.

When to use - These campaigns are 100% created by the algorithm based on the words used in the landing page -- the algorithm decides what ad text and what keywords to use. These are only good for websites that are extremely specific and have content centered on a set of keywords.

How to use - Give the campaign a small budget. These campaigns have the ability to spend a lot of money very quickly, and DSA campaigns usually have a lower conversion rate than other types of campaigns, so it’s okay to let it be in the “limited by budget” status.

Optimize - When you’re ready to see it’s results, go to the DSA campaign and click on Search Terms. Sort by impressions to see which terms have a high amount of search volume. From there, find the ones that are actually getting clicks. Use those terms in the other campaigns.

Question 8

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 9

How can we target competitors even more? / What is a Competitive Proactive Campaign?

Accepted Answer

Pick a few competitors (suggesting 1-6) and create a display or video campaign. Setup one ad set for each competitor. Then, build these 4 audiences within each ad set:

Custom affinity targeting the competitor's website
Custom affinity targeting the competitor's brand name
Custom intent targeting the competitor's website
Custom intent targeting the competitor's brand name

This is a highly segmented way to have an outbound campaign going to specific competitor's users/customers/leads. Affinity means it will target people who are frequently visiting that brand's site or associating themselves with that brand regularly. Intent means it will target the people who are actively researching or planning a purchase of that business.

The caveat with this campaign is, if your competitor is a SAAS product, frequent visitors of the site might be going there to login. So this means the ads will appear for the competitor's existing users. Because of this, it's recommended to test this campaign to make sure you aren't spending a ton of budget targeting primarily existing users -- and, if you are, make sure the ads feature a competitive advantage in an effort to get those users to make the switch.

Question 10

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