Category: Uncategorized

Demystifying the true value of Paid Shopping Ads

Three questions we encourage prospective clients to ask about their shopping campaigns:

1. How much of my shopping spend is for brand keywords?  
2. How much of my spend is driving incremental growth? 
3. What is the return on ad spend for non-brand shopping spend?

Very few can answer even one of these questions.  Why? Because most other agencies group products into categories and then let Google determine the bidding strategy with smart campaigns.  Smart campaigns hide your product level data, which eliminates your ability to learn, and gives Google the keys to drive your campaign for you. 

Sorry, we’re just too type A to let that fly.

Instead, our Paid Shopping strategy includes:

• Single Product Ad Groups
• Brand only Shopping Campaigns
• Audience and Device Modifiers
• Merchant Center Feed Optimization
• Regular Negative Keyword Maintenance
• Collaboration with your team on keywords and product performance

Our approach is very granular, time intensive to setup, and requires careful maintenance. We do this because we believe the value is in the learning.  We invest the time to learn with you. We learn about the search queries and performance associated with each of your products.  We eliminate wasteful spending with the use of negative keywords, and then take our keyword learnings and apply them to your merchant center feed at the product level.

In the short term, the results may appear similar to smart bidding.  But over time, the value of the learning and ongoing optimizations build on each other, making the manual approach better for your business and achieving your growth targets.

Paid Search Advertising can be a sinkhole for your ad budget or a unique opportunity to learn about your prospect, align your products with how they are searching, and drive massive growth. The results depend entirely on how you approach it, your strategy, and execution.

Approach

If you approach Paid Search with an ROI focus only, there is a good chance you’ll find it too competitive, or will end up investing in mostly branded search terms. We treat Paid Search as an opportunity to learn about and align with our clients target audience. This shift in approach sets our clients up for long term success; both within the paid search channel, and beyond.

Strategy

At Quiet Owl, we believe in using the power of Google’s smart campaigns, but not at the expense of losing insight into the customer journey. We strive to balance the power of automation with careful oversight. While Google is advocating for turning over more control of campaigns to them, we’re an advocate, on behalf of our clients, for tighter campaign control and transparency. We help our clients strike a balance between control and automation.

Execution

What we DON’T do:
a) Set it and forget it smart campaigns.
b) Dynamic Search Ads only.
c) Write a few ads for a group of similar keywords.
d) Let Google write ad copy for you.
e) Send all ad traffic to the same landing page.

Instead, we:

a) Build Single Keyword Ad Groups
b) Create keyword relevant landing pages
b) Set device level bid modifiers
c) Set audience level bid modifiers
d) Set geographic level bid modifiers
e) Set demographic level bid modifiers
f) Provide detailed reporting with recommendations
g) Perform weekly search term audits and refine negative keyword lists

Advertising technologies that replace manual tasks with automation have dramatically increased the efficiency of digital marketers. These technologies can be used for simple tasks like managing bids and budget, or in the case of smart campaigns, leveraging the platform to manage targeting, bids, budget, and even creative.

Automation enabled Digital Marketers to shift from having to closely monitor bids, budgets, audiences, keywords, etc. to having the time to focus more on strategy, content, and landing page experiences.

Sounds great. No question these are powerful tools that give a competitive edge to those who know how to use them. But what are the dangers?

The Risks of Automation

Automation can result in complacency, a misplaced trust in the platform, and a missed opportunity for learning about your customer.

One example of this is Google Smart Shopping campaigns where critical data, like the search queries used to trigger your ads, is hidden from the advertiser. Businesses not only lose control of how, when, and where their products are shown, they also are deprived of the data that can be used to drive improvement. This can lead to their growth engine becoming a black box, where Google holds the keys.

An alternative to Smart Shopping is to use similar technologies like Target ROAS and Target CPA bidding. These semi-automated strategies provide a blend where businesses can still leverage the power of Google’s machine learning engine, but also keep a hand on the wheel and still get the insights needed for improvement.

Another example highlighting the dangers of automation exists on Facebook. The new rage among growth agencies is to go with the broadest audiences available, and let Facebook do all the heavy lifting with machine learning. Automation is used to test and optimize different creative assets based on what is likely to generate revenue. We have seen this work exceptionally well for brands that already have a deep understanding of their customers and excellent creative assets that speak to them. Where this strategy falls short is when it comes to learning about customers, how to best communicate with them, and how to best navigate their buying journey.

A broad audience automated approach like this can lead to:

1) The illusion of highly profitable campaigns without actually driving incremental growth.
2) Bottom of the funnel, purchase or sale focused content, overtaking the majority of the ad budget.
3) Neglecting top to mid funnel brand building and awareness content.
4) Over-saturating remarketing audiences.

At Quiet Owl, we believe in using the power of machine learning tools, but not at the expense of losing insight into the customer journey. We strive to balance the power of automation with careful oversight.