Q: What is the best way to test my existing conversion action setups

The best way to check that a conversion action is working/set up: Login to Google Tag Manager (GTM) (https://tagmanager.google.com/?authuser=1#/home) and go to your account and enable the Preview Mode If you refresh (or access a webpage) after you've enabled the Preview Mode, on the bottom (or on the right side) of the webpage you'll be able to see GTM data (tags which fired and which didn't) Complete the contact form and you'll be redirected to the Thank You (TY) page. On the TY page, verify if the Google Ads Conversion tracking tag fired, If it did, everything is ok. Testing The Landing Page Used In The Ad - If you want to test the landing page URL, it’s best to Google the brand name and click on the ad. Yes, this will spend money (although the CPC for the branded campaigns is always super low), but it’s necessary because of parallel tracking. Parallel tracking is complex, but it has to do with the fact that there’s the actual URL and then there’s the version of the URL with UTM parameters added to it (if you set those up). Sometimes, the UTM “tracking template” version of the URL can work without the actual URL working...which is dangerous, because it might give you a false positive if you just click on an ad from inside the account.

Question 1

How often do you make changes to a campaign?

Accepted Answer

A very high spending account may need daily or even hourly changes. For accounts with smaller budgets, there may not be as much maintenance involved.

Similarly, this depends on if we’re achieving our goals or not. If we are, we may make slower optimizations (to not deter the performance of the campaign). If we aren’t hitting our goals, we make more frequent optimizations until we start achieving them.

On average, we generally make changes in an account every 3-7 days (again, depending on how much activity the campaign gets and your specific goals).

Too many changes harbors an ecosystem where it’s hard to keep track of the outcomes; making changes too infrequently means competitors may outperform your campaign.

Question 2

What is the best way to test my existing conversion action setups

Accepted Answer

The best way to check that a conversion action is working/set up:

Login to Google Tag Manager (GTM) (https://tagmanager.google.com/?authuser=1#/home) and go to your account and enable the Preview Mode
If you refresh (or access a webpage) after you've enabled the Preview Mode, on the bottom (or on the right side) of the webpage you'll be able to see GTM data (tags which fired and which didn't)
Complete the contact form and you'll be redirected to the Thank You (TY) page.
On the TY page, verify if the Google Ads Conversion tracking tag fired, If it did, everything is ok.

Testing The Landing Page Used In The Ad - If you want to test the landing page URL, it’s best to Google the brand name and click on the ad. Yes, this will spend money (although the CPC for the branded campaigns is always super low), but it’s necessary because of parallel tracking. Parallel tracking is complex, but it has to do with the fact that there’s the actual URL and then there’s the version of the URL with UTM parameters added to it (if you set those up). Sometimes, the UTM “tracking template” version of the URL can work without the actual URL working...which is dangerous, because it might give you a false positive if you just click on an ad from inside the account.

Question 3

Why shouldn't I show an email address on my site?

Accepted Answer

If Google Ads sends someone to the website and that website visitor copy & pastes the email address into their inbox, then we will never know we got a lead.

So, the algorithm won't have that conversion data point and neither will the ads management team.

Not only does it hurt the learning & optimization process, but it also makes it impossible to calculate the CPL.

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

What do you recommend for a new product launch?

Accepted Answer

If you are launching a new product, there are a few things we can do to get it out into the ad ecosystem.

First of all, if you add the product to your eCommerce store, then it will automatically be added to the Smart Shopping campaign through the product feed after a few days. However, depending on how large your store is, it could take the algorithm quite some time to give the new product ad spend and gather conversion data on it. If you want to speed that process up, we can give the product it's own campaign(s) to force the account to devote ad spend to it more quickly.

We can give it it's own budget and run the following campaigns:

Shopping (eventually the product will be switched over to the main Smart Shopping campaign once we are done with the "push")
GSP and Display - These work especially well with remarketing audiences of recent website visitors
YouTube - Do you have a video to promote the product? If so, we can try YouTube shopping to get eyes on it.
Search - Temporarily running a search campaign on a new product can help the ad account gather conversion data more quickly because it allows the algorithm to see what the ideal, target customer looks like.

Question 6

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.

Question 7

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)

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 8

How Do My Google Ads Affect My Other Channels?

Accepted Answer

Other marketing channels will likely experience increased conv. rate & other positive indicators when you run & grow a Google Ad account.

This happens because of several reasons... As the Google Ads account grows:

It's able to increase conversion rate in other PPC channels as well as direct traffic because of the awareness-building that occurs from remarketing campaigns, outbound campaigns, brand campaigns, and just being present in search & shopping. (Remarketing especially is a seriously underrated ninja campaign because it follows people around the internet & reminds them to come back & buy, but there's no way to track it's impact. To know that it's working the only thing we can see is performance boosted on other channels. Try turning it off for a month or two and you will see it's impact.)
It's able to increase conversion rate of direct traffic because much of that traffic interacted with an ad at some point (after all, that's how they found the website). So the website's "direct" traffic has been warmed up by ad interactions & then the tracking was dropped (for a myriad of reasons) which causes them to be labeled as "direct."
It's able to find cold, brand new leads by competing for the competitive, expensive placements & clicks with standard shopping (a powerful workhorse to win bids & gain clicks from users who know nothing about you but who happen to be shopping at the time) and also outbound display/video (brand-building to cold, unknown users who have relevant interests). These cold users have a super low conversion rate because they often don't buy on that first click. And then tracking often gets dropped later when they finally do buy.
When those cold users do finally buy, FB will try to say it was their ads who got the sale, because FB includes "1-day view-throughs" in their conversions in order to pump their numbers. So FB will just remarket the crap out of all the cold leads Google found and then claim the sale even if there was never a click on a FB ad. It's insane.
And it's also likely that Analytics & Shopify will say those folks were "direct" because those platforms are not focused on using deep tracking that can trace back to the first ad click (since they are just website tracker tools that rely mostly on UTM parameters only). And the first click could have happened days or weeks before, often on a different device, different browser profile, etc.
Those first time cold leads that were finally converted turn into returning customers, boosting email performance, direct traffic numbers, and conv. rates even higher.

The channels work together holistically.

Question 9

Why are we selective before excluding a product from shopping ads?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes when the budget is limited, having too many products in the shopping ads means the algorithm has trouble gathering conversion patterns, which can lead to low performance.

It becomes harder to optimize because each conversion on each shopping ad or product is too spread out across the weeks or months.

So the answer is to temporarily exclude products until the algorithm can get the hang of things. Then, with scale later on, those products' shopping ads can be re-included.

While it's nice to hone in on products that work, we are very selective about excluding products just because of low performance. Here’s what usually happens when we exclude products.

When we turn off a product ad that might have been getting lots of web traffic (spending the budget), people start to look at related products, see remarketing ads for those products, and end up buying them.

It seems like the product that was getting all the clicks was losing money but it was actually acting like a highly targeted TOFU (Top of the Funnel) ad to bring traffic to the site & feed the product ads which seem like they're performing well.

(Quick note: TOFU or Top of the Funnel is a marketing strategy we use to attract cold audiences and increase brand awareness. Learn more about TOFU here.)

So, if we exclude a product, it can cause a domino effect where another product stops performing, and then we exclude that one, which causes another, etc. etc."

Does excluding my product mean it won’t be purchased?

Just because we exclude a product, doesn't mean it won't be purchased. It just means it might not work well as a shopping ad & the money could be better spent on other shopping ads to bring people to the site...but those people still might buy these products.