Google Merchant Center Tips

Google Merchant Center Still Reporting Free Clicks

2013-04-09T13:30:16Z

File this under "Why doesn't Google do what they say they are going to do, and why do they keep confusing us at every turn?"

Ever since they supposedly "flipped the switch" on product listing ads, thus deprecating "free clicks" on products in the datafeed, we're STILL seeing free click activity in the Merchant Center reports:

Google Merchant Center Report on Free Clicks (click to enlarge)

While, I'm thrilled to see my clients continue to get Free traffic from their datafeed, I have to admit it makes us look stupid when we spend six months and expend a ton of energy preparing clients for "the big change", thinking that the free lunch counter is closing.

Are other advertisers still seeing "free clicks" in your Merchant Center?

Need help making sense out of datafeeds, product listing ads, product extensions, etc.? Contact us for help!

Rant: Google's MIA for Merchant Support

2013-01-30T03:04:28Z

With the holidays in the rear-view mirror, most advertisers on Google are weary of talking about the "big change" that happened last October with product listing ads. But, being the masochists that we are, we need to chew on it some more.

Here's our rant...Last Spring of 2012, Google announced the upcoming "big change", i.e., pushing all Google Shopping traffic through the AdWords pay per click platform. The announcement was met with shock and awe as advertisers slowly grappled with the fact that their formerly "free" traffic (and conversions) from the Google Shopping page (and links above organic listings on google.com) would soon be no more.

A lot of ink was spilled about Google's "justification" for yet another money grab (it will be a "better" shopping experience for consumers and better for merchants, too!). It was going to be all lollipops and rainbows, as it frequently is with "change", you know. And Google pushed out countless blogs and "helpful" videos about how merchants could best prepare for the change. All the while urging us to "BE READY!".

While many advertisers stuck their heads in the sand, most of us tried to "do the right thing", and tore most of our hair out in the process. As pointed out last summer by Meg Geddes in her blog, Google Merchant Center - One Hot Mess!, it was clear that Google didn't have all their ducks lined up, but expected us to!

By early Fall, we were "ready" and had prepared our clients as best we could, optimizing datafeeds, making sure all connections were properly made between Merchant Center and Adwords, creating auto targets and setting granular bids to optimize the highest margin products (after all, we HAD been running PLA campaigns for PPC for over a year, so no sweat, right?).

We watched as free traffic from client datafeeds gradually turned to paid traffic, then the switch was flipped in mid-October and sayonara to organic shopping traffic (note the not so faint sounds of cash registers humming in Mountain View, CA)...gulp...white knuckle time. Jumping ahead for a second, here's one of our client's "before and after" traffic - note the switch from the old "google-base" (free) to Product Listing Ads (paid):

Before & After of Google Shopping to Product Listing Ads - click to enlarge

All was met with, well, mixed results. Some clients fared well. Others, not so well, particularly those who had made concurrent changes to their websites. Here's where it gets really ugly.

Our clients jumped through hoops to comply with PLA changes, but inevitably S*** happens. And the ugly truth about Google Merchant Center's support (or lack thereof) was exposed. On the brink of critical, life sustaining, holiday traffic, one client's feed "broke", i.e., was suddenly suspended by Google. This was after more than a year of smooth operation. Note the somewhat alarming notification in their Merchant Center on November 12th:

Google Merchant Center Suspension: 11/12/12

Said client jumped on this like white on rice, re-uploading the feed, double checking all attributes, emailing Google, checking Google site verification code and reclaiming site after recent "makeover" revealed that verification code had been dropped. Waiting on Google to reply to email.

Re-uploading feed, re-checking listings, clicking the link to view "data feed quality" only to learn that "no issues with your data have been found at this time"...waiting on Google to reply to earlier emails. Try emailing again.

Posting a question in the Merchant Center forum. Finding out that if your feed is suspended, there is some sort of "penalty period". Calling Google only to find out there's no live support for Merchant Center. Checking the forums again. Emailing again. Waiting some more.

November 13th: decide to try to create a NEW PLA account from the stupid, annoying link within Merchant Center, even though this makes no sense at all!!! Link to Adwords, create auto targets, set bids. Wait. Nothing.

November 14th: more of the same

November 15th: discover from the Merchant Center forum about some form to complete if your account has been suspended. Fill out the form, submit, wait. No reply from Google. Crickets.

We're now a week away from one of the client's biggest sales weeks of the year!

November 16th: start receiving communiques from others in the forum that they are also suspended without warning. Client reaches out to Merchant Center support for assistance. Waiting for response. Meanwhile, client removes some high margin, high search traffic products that could potentially be now viewed as not in compliance with "family friendly" policies (even though competitors with the same products ARE showing up in PLAs).

November 19th - 22nd: Still waiting on a reply from Google. Crickets.

November 23rd (Black Friday): Receive reply from "googlebase-support@google.com" advising us that "account or product listing is currently not running because Google Shopping restricts the promotion of alcohol-related products." They go on to give us a link to Google's policy on "family safe" products that clearly lists client's category of products in the "family safe" category. So, they aren't safe, but they are??? Waaah? Further instructions are to remove the products in "violation" (even though they aren't!!), and resubmit feed, then contact them again and ask for a review of the new feed upload.

November 26th (Cyber Monday): new feed is uploaded and reconsideration request submitted.

November 28th: still waiting on Google to approve feed. Meanwhile, all competitor's PLAs are jam packed with the so called "non-family-safe" products. Oiy.

November 29th: with PLAs still offline, we continue to build out product specific keywords in PPC search campaigns to try to pick up the slack.

December 4th: Account still suspended. No feedback from Google. Not even a phone number to call. We try to 1-866-2Google, but of course they are worthless because they don't address Merchant Center inquiries.

December 11th: Client tries yet again to to email Google Merchant Center

Decembere 13th: Finally a reply from googlebase-support@google.com:

Hello,
The issue that was preventing your items from becoming active has been resolved. Please know that you may need to republish any items you wish to display in the search results again. We're looking forward to including your items soon.
Sincerely,
The Google Shopping Team

No explanation of what the "issue that was preventing your items from becoming active" was. Could they BE any more cryptic?

December 15th: Fresh feed is finally uploaded - less than 10 days before orders need to be placed, filled, shipped and delivered by Dec 24th, and datafeed is finally running. We pump up the PLA adgroup bids in an attempt to achieve quick visibility.

December 16th: impression and click volume is too light - a double check of bids only to realize that while adgroup default bids were pumped up, the actual auto-target bids were not. Pumped up auto-target bids. Here comes the traffic and sales - finally.

Postmortem: all our frantic efforts to regain traffic and sales was TLTL (too little, too late). We could never recapture the lost revenue opportunity, and the closer we got to the holiday, the more CPCs for text and PLAs skyrocketed.

On a related note, another client migrated her entire ecommerce platform on Nov 1st. Over 9000 skus now had new product urls. The client's best attempts to map old urls to new urls was only partially successful, and new urls weren't as "SEO friendly", so not only did organic visibility tank, PLA traffic took a hit. This client was able to take corrective action, but again under great durress heading into the holiday - not the best timing.

Takeaways:

make sure all your i's are dotted and t's crossed before switching your ecomm platform or uploading a cosmetic facelift. All major changes are apt to "break" your datafeed. Inevitably, something is going to go wrong, and if you won't notice right away, you'll inevitably miss out on significant sales opportunities.
Ideally, don't make any changes in Q4, if the holiday season is significant to your bottom line.
Make sure your datafeed is fully optimized so that product names contain important search queries because this is how Google knows to match a search to a product listing.
Make sure your datafeed has proper adwords_grouping and adwords_labels attributes to maximize bid flexibility and return on ad spend.
Don't be passive and wait for Google. Keep trying to upload fresh feeds and watch your error messages very closely. Promptly fix any products with broken image links, missing MPNs, or any other mandatory attributes.

Last, don't expect Google to come through in a pinch with support. They are far too busy counting their money to be bothered with Merchant Center support. We have since submitted an AdWords support ticket complete with screen capture of the Merchant Center dashboard and related questions. Ticket was submitted on January 18th. Eleven days later, and we have yet to receive an acknowledgement of the ticket, yet we have physical proof that it was submitted.

It's quite outrageous, really, for Google to cause such a seismic shift in how advertisers are to conduct business and NOT give them access to prompt support. So, we've just posted a petition on change.org and ask all to please sign our petition!

Yes, I'll sign the Change.org petition!

Thanks for listing. Back to the trenches.

How to Prepare Your Datafeed and Product Listing Ad Campaign for Paid Google Shopping

2012-09-23T12:15:13Z

As you probably know by now, Google is deprecating the long-standing "free" listings in Google Shopping. Over the coming weeks, the changeover from free to paid listings will be complete, and merchants need to act quickly to set up Product Listing Ads if they want to continue to be listed on Google Shopping. Datafeed changes should also be implemented.

This announcement has had the same result as taking candy away from a baby - lots of crying and kicking and screaming, and questioning "whyyyyyyy?". It is especially tough for merchants who are already overwhelmed just getting their websites and inventory ready for the upcoming holiday season and were hoping for another season of "free" conversions.

Google's explanation (we've heard this three times so far from various Google reps): "Paid inclusion will ensure higher quality, more relevant listings on Google Shopping, resulting in a better shopping experience for the user." Oh, and make Google a TON more money, of course, as they essentially become yet another paid comparison shopping engine along the lines of Nextag, Shopzilla, and others.

So there you have it. It's time to wipe away the tears, accept the "loss", and dig in for the new reality. Many helpful blogs and white papers have been written on this subject in the past few weeks, but much confusion remains about how to properly prepare for paid Google Shopping listings.

The crux of what's actually changing isn't SO much about the datafeed, but MORE about bidding strategies. Now that Google Shopping is controlled from within an AdWords Product Listing Ads campaign, you'll want to make sure your adgroups are set up in a more granular fashion to help you control your bids and cost.

Previously, it didn't matter if you received a lot of free visits from Google Shopping listings because they were, well - FREE! You only paid for clicks if your Merchant Center datafeed was connected to your Adwords campaigns for Product Listing Ads and Product Extensions.

Now, clicks on your product listings on Google Shopping risk killing your ROI. A strategic bidding strategy will be crucial to ensure your continued visibility on Google Shopping, and to achieve conversions within your CPA targets.

We originally wrote about creating a PLA way back in 2010 when we were coming out of Beta. The basic setup process hasn't really changed. But, since we believe a picture tells a better story, we've created the following "visual" primer for you to follow along.

Assuming you already have a Google Merchant Center and assuming it is linked to your Google AdWords (PPC) account, here are the highlights of what you still need to accomplish. (Note: Refresher on linking Merchant Center to AdWords here.)

Create an AdWords Product Listing Ads campaign, if you haven't done so already. This can be done from within your Merchant Center or from within AdWords. We prefer initiating the process from within AdWords, but it's up to you. Note, even if you already have a PLA campaign in AdWords, you're probably seeing an annoying announcement in your Merchant Center with a call to action to set up a PLA. Just ignore it. According to the Google reps we've spoken with, it will go away eventually.

PLA Campaign Creation (click to enlarge)
Create an "All Products" adgroup with the "product target = all products" (you'll find this in the "Auto Targets" tab at the adgroup level). This will be your "catch all" adgroup when a product in your feed matches a user's query, but that product is not matched to another adgroup's target (more on that in a minute).
PLA - "All Products" Target (click to enlarge)
Set your "All Products" adgroup bid (ultimately, this bid should be lower than the bids for your other adgroups which will target specific types of products)
PLA - Setting Adgroup Bid (click to enlarge)
Create your "promotional ad". You'll have 45 characters to promote your value proposition. This is a great place to include any free shipping deal, coupon code, etc. Previously, the promotional ad would display under the PLA's product image, price, and hyperlink on a Google search results page. Recently, the promotion has only been visible when hovering over the image element of the ad. But, since Google has been changing the display and placement of PLAs seemingly every day, it makes sense to always have your value proposition in the promotional text. It's also been suggested that the promotional text is more likely to show up for long tail query results.
PLA Promotional Ad Text (click to enlarge)
Now, think about what additional product targets make the most sense for your website and type of products sold. Are your products grouped by "Brand", (i.e., Epson, vs. Dell, vs. HP), or are they grouped by theme (men's, women's, children's) or by season (Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas, etc.)

If your main categorization is by Brand, then each product in your feed should already have an associated value in the Brand column. In this case, simply create an adgroup for each Brand, validate the target, create a 45 character promotional ad, and set the adgroup default bid. Voila -You're done!
PLA - Target Selection for Brand (click to enlarge)
Now that you have adgroups targeting different brands in your feed, you can create promotional ads specific to your offer for that Brand (i.e., a markdown, coupon code, shipping deal, etc.) You now also have the flexibility to set adgroup level CPCs for each Brand based on your margins and ROI.
- As long as your default CPC bids for your Brand adgroups are higher than the bid for your "All Products" adgroup, Google will associate the listing that most closely matches the user's query, along with the promotional ad from that Brand adgroup. The PLA position will be commensurate with your default bid for that adgroup and the number of competitor PLAs.
In addition to segmenting our PLA adgroups, promotions and ads by "Brand", we've also been able to segment by adWords_groupings and adwords_labels. If you haven't already populated these fields in your feed with values, it's time to do it NOW! Implementation of Groupings and Labels targets are more important than ever, as they provide advertisers and PPC managers much greater control over bid management and promotional messaging. This is particularly true if the Brand target offers little or no value to you.
The AdWords Groupings field can contain one value, and should be populated according to the major categories on your website i.e., "Birthday" or "Bat Mitzvah", etc. Once you have values populated in the Groupings field for each of your product listings, you can create associated adgroups, targets, promotional ads and bids in your PLA campaign. (repeat steps 2-4 above)
The AdWords Labels field can contain multiple values separated by commas, i.e., "high margin", "low margin", "cat", "fish", "silver", etc. The beauty of Labels is that they allow you to target disassociated products across various Brands and or Groupings that might have a common discount, shipping deal, or promotional message. If you label by high and low margin, you can target an adgroup for all "low margin" products in the feed and reduce bids to improve your ROI, vice versa with "high margin" products. Let's say you want to target all "high margin" products for free shipping and offer a coupon code. Just create an adgroup with an adwords_label target = high margin, validate, create your free shipping and coupon code promotional text, set your bid and away you go!
- It's easy to then pause or change that adgroup when your offer expires or changes. (NOTE: AdWords automated rules offer an easy way to pause promotions at a specified time and are particularly helpful for offers that expire at midnight!)
- In this case, we would normally pause the promotional ad and replace it with an "evergreen" ad (a constant shipping deal, for instance), or a new promotional ad for a different offer.
Now, to the datafeed changes. To enable easy reporting on your Google Shopping traffic in Google Analytics, make sure your Product Links all end with the following UTM tag: ?utm_source=googleshopping&utm_medium=cse. We advise clients to tag their other comparison shopping engine products links in a similar way, i.e., utm_source=nextag&utm_medium=cse. We then create custom Google Analytics reports filtering on medium=cse to quickly evaluate the conversion and revenue performance across various shopping engines. Here's how the link would appear in your feed:
PLA - link utm tag
In order to further segment your Analytics traffic reports into PPC Product Extension clicks vs. Product Listing Ad clicks, you'll need to create an Adwords Redirect field. Note: It has been discussed that this field may ultimately not be necessary. As we mentioned earlier, this process is evolving as we get ever closer to The Big Day (some time in October).

PLA - adwords_redirect utm tag
There is one more optional field you should consider for your datafeed: adwords_publish. This field holds a simple "true" or "false" value and offers you the ability to suppress a particular product temporarily or permanently from Product Listing Ads, if desired.

So, there you have it. A step by step process for preparing your Product Listing Ads campaign and Merchant Center datafeed for the new paid inclusion for Google Shopping. Now, you're ready to adjust bids according to your Brand, Grouping, and Labels promotions and ROI.

If you need even MORE detail about datafeed attributes, we encourage you to read this Google Help File! We also recommend you regularly check the Google Commerce Blog for more tips and alerts on changes to Google Shopping.

PPC-Strategies offers Gotomeeting consultations to assist you in linking your Merchant Center to AdWords, setting up your PLA, implementing promotional text and bid strategies. Consultations begin at $100 per hour. If you would like a one-on-one consultation, just Contact Us!

Check back as we continue to blog about best practices for PLAs on our "Tips" pages!

Link Google Merchant Center & Google AdWords

2011-04-03T17:38:44Z

Are you using a Google Merchant Acount to submit your datafeed to Google Product Search? If so, then you can easily leverage your Merchant Account to feed product images into your Google Adwords account. In just a few minutes, you can connect the two accounts and have powerful Product Extensions and Product Listing Ads working in the Google search results pages.

Now, when your product catalog is updated, it will automatically refresh your products for both organic Google Product Search, aka "Google Shopping", as well as paid Google text and listing ads! The best part is, if your datafeed is well optimized (i.e., unique product titles and descriptions, pricing, etc.), it's possible to have your product images showing in a PPC text ad "extension" at the same time as a PPC Product Listing Ad, as well as in the organic shopping results.

ppc-Strategies has 5 clients who have successfully achieved this "trifecta" of legal Google SERP domination! Here's one example:

Click image for larger view

Here is an easy 5 step process to "get synched"!