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 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 3

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 4

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 5

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 6

Should I include Bing/Yahoo in my PPC budget?

Accepted Answer

Why Bother with Bing/Yahoo? - Consider testing ads with Bing. Even though the traffic is light, it’s worth running. You will need to allocate a budget.

It is not recommended to use shopping ads on Bing for e-commerce.

30% of all search traffic happens on these search engines.

The average Google user clicks on 4.3 ads, and the average Bing user clicks on 2.5. Half as clicky, so half as many competitors.

Audience tends to be older and more affluent. (Tend to be an older demographic because it is the default internet search engine pre-installed on Microsoft computers, and some people never change it.)

Question 7

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.
	* https://youtu.be/t55f59kx3UY

Question 8

Why is the conversion rate higher when leads come from paid ads vs. organic?

Accepted Answer

The paid campaigns are always going to bring in higher quality website traffic than organic search results because:

1. Ads have headlines and descriptions - vast amounts of them - that have been optimized for click-through-rate by us and by the algorithms.
2. Organic searchers aren't always going to be sent the correct page. When someone does a search on Google and finds your website in the results, they might not get to the landing page/homepage. They might end up on a blog post, etc. In fact, you can see what percentage of the website visitors enter your site from the landing page/homepage by going into analytics.google.com, clicking on Aquisition, then Search Console, then Landing Pages on the menu on the left.
3. You're also getting a higher percentage of people who are motivated to buy. Many people are looking for information and will end up on an article on your site. The people who do click on an ad are looking to explore your brand/product/service from the perspective of someone who is considering pulling out their wallet.

Conversion rates from paid ads tend to be 6 times higher than conversion rates from organic searches.

Question 9

What impact does running PPC ads have on my brand?

Accepted Answer

Brand Recognition is a by-product of running advertising - Companies that run PPC ads consistently receive more organic, more post ad click calls, & more direct traffic as a result. In fact, Google even takes some data from PPC ads and factors it into Organic rankings (like time spent on page, click through rates, etc.) This is anecdotal, but there is always a correlation when you look at the amount of money spent on ads and compare that with organic traffic to the site. Take this into consideration when you are calculating the impact running PPC ads has on your business.

Question 10

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.

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