Question 1

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 2

What time period should I use to judge ad performance?

Accepted Answer

It's tough to look at things on a week-to-week basis. Our team aims for hitting the ROAS goal on a month-to-month basis. Performance is intentionally bumpy throughout the month because we do things like using the Stair-Step Method to push the algorithm to grow, or testing small changes, etc.

Question 3

How can we get the product rating stars to show up on the ads?

Accepted Answer

The product ratings will begin appearing on Shopping Campaign ads whenever your business and the product itself qualifies for the program. Google is a bit vague exactly how to qualify...The rule is to gather a minimum of 50 reviews across the store before submitting the form to apply to participate in the program, but that is where the hard & fast rules end. In this article they say, "Reviews and star ratings may not always show. We’ll show star ratings when our system determines that the information is accurate and relevant for shoppers’ needs." Which means they are leaving it up to an algorithm and the parameters are left a mystery.

The only way to get reviews that aren't made directly in Google to appear in the ads is with a reviews aggregator app. Here's an article explaining this and offering a few alternatives. And here's Google's comprehensive list of approved 3rd party aggregator apps.

There is a section of your Google Ads account where the seller rating stats will begin to populate once the ads are showing the stars. The only way to know whether the ratings are showing is to occasionally check recent dates in this section. Here is how to get to it: Click on "ads & extensions" and then "extensions" and then scroll to the bottom of the screen and choose "automated extensions." The "Seller Ratings" row will populate with data on days when the ratings appeared in the ads.

If you aren't receiving enough reviews to qualify for the program or to keep the stars actively appearing on your ads, here is a tip: Use your review app to create an automated email series that asks customers to review. Schedule a large amount of emails and be very direct about wanting a review. Make sure to set up a trigger inside his review platform to stop the emails as soon as the person leaves a review. The automated emails have to be sent out of his review platform to do this, of course. He said he sends emails that say things like: reviews are so important, we're a family owned business, your voice matters, if you can’t give us a 4 or 5 start review please let us know so we can make it better, and even "we’re not going to stop asking until you review." Sounds pushy, but effective!

Question 4

Is my website ready for PPC ads?

Accepted Answer

In order to satisfy Google, there are a few of their policies that we must abide by as advertisers in order to gain the full scope of the platform's capabilities.

Google's primary goal is to keep its users happy, and Google has a plethora of people wanting to advertise to Google's users. In other words, Google gets to pick and choose which ads they present to their audience.

The bad news is that we have to compete against those other ads. The good news is that Google doesn't discriminate as long as you follow their guidelines and rules.

Individual "Thank You" page For All Forms

Essentially, this means that after a user has completed a desired action on your website (e.g. a purchase has been completed, or someone filled out a form) a "Thank You" page needs to be displayed.

Mobile Responsive

This is a big one. Have you ever visited a website on your mobile phone? We're positive you have. Have you ever visited a site on your mobile phone, only to have the end result be some "zoomed-in" portion of the main website?

Pretty annoying, right?

Google actually pays attention to these kinds of things, and classifies these seemingly minor things as "user experience".

Basically, the better the user experience is on your website, the higher your quality score for your advertisements. This, in turn, leads to happier users and better ad ranking for your advertisements (which oftentimes means more sales).

Site Speed

This is another factor that Google looks at heavily. According to a study done by the website Hubspot, if your website makes you an average of $100,000 a day, a 1-second decrease in page load time can increase your sales by about $7,000.

It seems like such an insignificant detail, but in the hustle and bustle of today's environment, people want things and they want them now.

Moreover, if your site takes too long to load, you run the risk of people bouncing off of your site. That means that they click on your advertisement (you pay for that click) and then they leave the website before it fully loads, before you have a chance to sell them your offer, all because it took just a little too long for the site to load for them.

Again a minor detail, but it has huge consequences.

Privacy Policy

A privacy policy is a requirement that indicates to your website's visitors how their personal information will be stored in your system. Things like website cookies, email addresses, credit card information all fall under this category.

Don't worry, you don't need to pay a lawyer the big bucks to write you one of these. You just need to explain to the website visitor, in a transparent way, where their information is being stored (if at all) and what is being done with that information.

Have A Physical Address On Your Site

This is something that Google looks for to see that you are a legitimate business and not some scammer who's claiming they're in California but really on the other side of the planet.

The benefit of this is that it satisfies Google, but it also makes your website visitors feel more at ease when they are considering purchasing your products/services. It instills trust in your website visitors, and often times more trust equals higher conversions and more sales.

Your Phone Number On Your Site Should Be Coded Text

This is a bit of a more technical detail. Google is very smart, but sometimes it needs some help. Having a phone number on your website is another thing that you can do to instill more trust in your website visitors, and possibly boost conversions.

However, from a technical standpoint, Google can't recognize that phone number if it's in an image and not coded onto the page.

If you have a web developer, they should be very familiar with the difference.

Have An Email Address Listed On The Site

Just like having a phone number and physical location, Google wants you to have a way for website visitors to reach you by email.

Again, just like a phone number, this needs to be coded into the webpage and not an image so that Google can read it.

eCommerce Websites

These next two points are specifically for eCommerce websites that sell physical items.

Have A Published Return Policy

A return policy is standard practice for physical stores, and it should be no different for online stores.

Just like the privacy policy, you don't need a lawyer to create this for you (although, by all means, if you feel more comfortable having a lawyer write it for you, have a lawyer write one for you).

A return policy can be very simple. It just tells the user what to expect should they want to return their item or get a refund. Questions that could be answered include: How long do I have to return my item? What's your policy if my item arrives broken?

Have A Published Shipping Policy

People want to know how long it's going to take for their item to arrive from the moment that the order is placed.

It's always a good idea to set expectation ahead of time. So be sure to tell your website visitors in your Shipping Policy how long it takes to process an order, and what kind of shipping speeds your business offers.

That was a lot! Don't worry though...

These are all seemingly minor things, but the devil is in the details. Not only are you satisfying Google's guidelines by having these things in place, but you are also boosting trust with your website visitors.

Higher trust with your visitors means higher conversions, which means higher sales.

Question 5

What are my resources as a Solutions 8 client?

Accepted Answer

When you become a Solutions 8 client, you are assigned an entire marketing department team for less than the cost of a part-time employee.

Your team is made up of:

A dedicated client manager
Specialist and backup specialist
Strategist

Question 6

How do I set up UTM Tracking?

Accepted Answer

This means you want to manually store data in your CRM platform which tells you where the contact record originated from.

In order to do this, you will have to set up hidden fields on your landing page, and you will select which words (aka parameters) to store (i.e. “source=google” and “campaign=branded”).

Once you determine those parameters, you (or your vendor) will enter into the appropriate campaigns or ad groups.

You can double check that the UTM settings are set up correctly by clicking on "ADS & EXTENSIONS", then click and "EDIT" on an ad and then click “TEST.”

Intro to UTM parameters training here:

Keep in mind: These UTM parameters aren't quite as good as Google at tracking folks with accuracy. It's simply a piece of text that's temporarily stored in the person' browser cache when they visit the site. If they come back to the site again with new parameters sent, then the browser's cache will be overwritten with the new parameters. If they come back to the site on a different device to convert, then the browser won't push the parameters into Shopify. If they delete their cache & cookies between their first site visit and the site visit that they convert on, then Shopify also wouldn't be able to include the parameters with the sale.

Google, on the other hand, is much better at tracking folks across devices and through any accidental cache deletions or overwritings. Google has people logged in on their phones, etc. etc.

But the UTM parameters should be close enough to accurate to get a quick gauge on what percentage of traffic is coming from where! You can also compare this data with your Google Analytics account in the Source/Medium section.

Question 7

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 8

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 9

Why shouldn't I judge the performance of each campaign individually?

Accepted Answer

It is tough to look at a single campaign's performance. Our team views account performance holistically. This is because campaigns often interact with the same leads/customers and depending on the attribution model, those conversions can get divided up in a way that makes one campaign look worse than it really is.

Question 10

How do I decide whether a campaign can spend more even when it doesn’t say “limited by budget”?

Accepted Answer

If you have extra ad spend to work with (or if you pause another campaign and need to allocate its budget), check out the impression share (IS) lost to see if an existing campaign can take on the new spend. If (IS) is lost due to budget OR due to rank, then it most likely can. This is due to the cyclical nature of bids:

Rank determines your ad’s position in the results.
Rank is affected by bid.
Bid is set based on what the business can afford (for example, [Max CPC] = [Break Even CPL] * [Conversion Rate]).
Higher Bid = Higher Ad Position = Better Website Visitors = Higher Conversion Rate (clicks to leads) = A Higher Bid can be afforded. So, you can sometimes raise the bid in the anticipation that the conversion rate will increase by guesstimating what it will increase to and “putting the cart before the horse.”
If NOT Smart Shopping campaign - you might temporarily switch the campaign to a manual CPC (with enhanced CPC enabled) bidding strategy if it was using an automated bidding strategy before, because the algorithm most likely isn’t intelligent enough to push the max bid in this way.
If Smart Shopping - it’s not possible to switch to manual, so here are some other options:
- Give it more budget in order to get it to increase the bid
- Before increasing the budget, make sure the product feed is optimized by including a lot of optional information that helps with rank. Be sure to optimize your feed during the eCommerce setup process.