Question 1

Should I Always Listen to Google’s Suggestions?

Accepted Answer

Google’s suggestions don’t take the entire picture into account.
They are usually focused on making more money for Google, and focused on hitting the high-level bid strategy’s target (which it perceives as the campaign’s main goal) at all costs.
There can be consequences to overstretching in one area in order to hit the bid strategy target.
Here is a video explaining a campaign’s “Limited by Bid” message & suggestion. The video explains why it’s best to ignore it in this case.

Question 2

How do I grow/scale quickly?

Accepted Answer

Trying to Scale/Grow Quickly - Training Video Here

Sometimes the ROAS will plateau, so you need to take a risk and apply more budget into the smart shopping campaign, turning off the “Target Roas goal” (this is an optional goal that lives inside the bidding strategy of “Maximize conversion value” inside of Smart Shopping Campaigns) temporarily in order to see if we can force the algorithm to “tap into” new audiences.

Question 3

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

Accepted Answer

Traditional Google Shopping campaigns 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, 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.

Question 4

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.. 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 5

Last Steps Before We Launch Your PPC Campaign

Accepted Answer

After a campaign has been built, but before it launches, we like to schedule a time with you to review the campaign before it goes live. This is to ensure that your initials goals are being strategically implemented, and allows everyone who's a part of the process to voice any concerns.

Below you'll find a list of topics and items that we will be reviewing during our discussion. Once we have reviewed the campaign with you, made any changes needed and have received your full approval, the campaign will go live!

Ad Budget

While we're confident in our abilities to successfully deliver and manage PPC campaigns, but it never hurts to double check things, especially the budget.

Campaign Schedule

The campaign schedule is the time of day and days of the week that the campaign will run its advertisements.

This is important because you may want to receive traffic to your website during the night, but also want to have traffic, plus phone calls during the day.

Geography

It's important to make sure that we have the proper geographical settings in place prior to launch.

If you are a business that is running advertisements to people who live within a 25-mile radius of your physical location, it would be inappropriate to have your ads set to run outside of your targeted market area.

Structure

The structure of your campaign is essentially another way to refer to the overarching goal of the campaign.

For instance, someone who is running a campaign to maximize conversions defined by email signups will have a different campaign structure than someone who just wants drive clicks and traffic to their website.

Ad Copy

This is a crucial step because the ad copy is going to be the first experience a potential customer has with your business.

It's important that we have proper ad copy in place that is relevant to what you are offering on the other end of your advertisement. We also want to make sure that the ads are relevant to the keywords that they are attached to.

Relevant ad copy is something that shouldn't be overlooked because the higher the relevancy is to people searching on Google, the higher your ad's quality score.

A higher quality score can help in the bidding process to lower your Cost Per Click, increase your ad rank, and increase overall campaign performance.

Negative Keyword List

There is nothing negative about negative keywords. In fact, compiling a list of negative keywords is a great thing!

Negative keywords increase campaign performance because they eliminate a lot of bad traffic and irrelevant clicks.

For instance, say that you run a business that sells luxury jewelry. The last thing you would want is for people clicking on your ads who search for "cheap jewelry".

The person who is searching for "cheap jewelry" isn't likely to buy luxury jewelry, and if they click on your advertisement you get charged for that irrelevant click.

The great thing about negative keywords is that if we add "cheap" as a negative keyword, your ad will never show for people who use the word "cheap" in their search.

This, in turn, saves you money on the campaign that can be used for more relevant clicks.

Ad Groups

Ad groups contain a collection of advertisements and keywords that are relevant to the overall goal of the campaign.

For instance, if your company offers a wide variety of services, each ad group should reflect that service. This offers much more in the way of scalability and control when wanting to expand your marketing around those specific services.

Keywords

A keyword is essentially a word or phrase that people search for in Google.

Keywords are the beating heart of each campaign. If the keywords don't match with the products/services you're advertising, it can cause problems.

We also focus on keywords and keyphrases that generate the type of conversion you want. By adding keywords and key phrases to your campaign such as “buy”, “for sale”, “near me”, etc., we can generate a conversion much more frequently.

Bidding Strategy

There are a few types of bidding strategies that you can use in an AdWords campaign. Depending on your business goals, some bidding strategies will be better suited for you than others.

For instance, if your business is trying to maximize the number of clicks to the website, a "Maximize Clicks" bidding strategy might be best. If your business is trying to capture conversions at a specific cost, then "Target CPA" bids might be best in that scenario.

It's also important to keep in mind that as your campaigns evolve, the bidding strategy used will likely evolve along with it.

In Summary...

If for any reason we have left one of your questions unanswered, you can always request another campaign walk through!

Question 6

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 7

How do I access search terms report for Smart Shopping?

Accepted Answer

This report can only be accessed by sending a request to Google because the terms in the report don’t accurately represent the search terms that would be good to target.

Since Smart Shopping is outbound (meaning the algorithm shows the ad to the type of people they think might be likely to buy, rather than the keywords most closely related to the product), there are usually 70 million signals to decide to target that person, and their search term is just one of them.

Question 8

What is the best ad copy strategy to use for search campaigns?

Accepted Answer

The recommended approach for best ad copy strategy is to use 2 Expanded Text Ads & 1 Responsive Search Ad.

Every search campaign’s ad group has these 3 ads inside it.

The expanded text ads give a structured ecosystem to try out the two sets of headlines/descriptions you think will work the best, and then use the RSA ad to give you insights into which ad copy is most effective.

Effective copy can be a better click rate (which helps with the quality score) or a better conversion rate.

After there have been 100 clicks on the ads, then you can begin making changes to optimize the expanded text ads based on those insights.

Question 9

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 10

How do we rank for organic Google searches?

Accepted Answer

Make sure your website can rank organically
Continual content creation (unique and about one topic. Doesn’t have to be long, 600 words is fine.)
Buy backlinks with a company like seo.co