Category: PPC

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Analytics PPC Uncategorized

Smart Shopping Ads Optimization

In this piece we will talk about how to optimize the black box that Smart Shopping Campaigns are.

As we all know Smart Shopping Ads (SSA) are very profitable and very easy to implement. All you need is a Google Merchant Center, a product feed and you are ready to go.

When you set them up the only thing you need to setup is Budget and ROAS target (keep in mind that if you don’t put anything on it it will automatically target 200% ROAS.

Roas Target

 

In Smart Shopping Ads there are no search terms (thus you can’t use negative keywords) and you also don’t have visibility on which products you sold. It’s basically a black box, you give it a feed, a budget and a target it tries to reach the goal.

The only thing you can is exclude products or product groups much like a normal shopping ad. But since you have no visibility in the product’s performance you don’t know what to exclude and what to keep.

Oh but you can! You just need another tool…

You need… Google Analytics (or whatever analytics tool you are currently using).

Do the following steps:

  1. You go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages
  2. Have as Primary Dimension: Landing Page
  3. Put the Secondary Dimension: Campaign
  4. Then go to the Advance Filter and use Include > Campaign > *The smart shopping campaign name*
    Google Analytics Filter
  5.  Press Save

You should have a view like the one below

Final Analytics Report

Now you are ready to do some serious analysis that will also come some serious optimization.

Short by Sessions and identify the landing pages that have high volumes and 0% or very low Conversion Rate

Smart Shopping Optimization

These landing pages are the first candidates to exclude/remove from my feed. Why? Because if these landing pages have traffic that means that you pay for this traffic but it does not convert so you are losing money.

After finding these landing pages, find which product they have and from there you can:

  1. Go to Google Ads > Campaigns > Smart Shopping Campaign > Product Group and exclude them from the product group
  2. or Ask your developers to remove this product from your feed.

Why you need to do this: By cutting off the high spending low performing products you give more room to the ones that perform. If you spend 15% of your budget on non converting/high spending items with this technique you force google to re-allocate your spending into more profitable items.

Till next time 😀

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Analytics Facebook Ads PPC Tips & Tricks

How to Combine UTMs with your Google Analytics to get some super tricks to optimize your PPC efforts

How to Combine UTMs with your Google Analytics to get some super tricks to optimize your PPC efforts

 

When I run Product Catalog Ads I use the prefix “DPA“ when I name the Campaigns. You will se why in a minute.

 

 

On your Dynamic Facebook Campaign Name always use an indicator (mine is "DPA")
On your Dynamic Facebook Campaign Name always use an indicator (mine is “DPA”)

 

 

In these ads the UTM parameters I use is this:

?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign={{campaign.name}}&utm_content={{ad.name}}

So the final URL where the prospect lands is this:

 

https://example.com/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign={{campaign.name}}&utm_content={{ad.name}}

 

Now I go to my Google Analytics Account to spot the bad performers that waste my budget in order to exclude them from my catalog.

Go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages

 

 

google analytics report behavior site content landing pages
Google analytics > Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages

 

 

Then on the page that will load go to Secondary Dimension and choose Campaign

 

 

Landing Page Report > Secondary Dimension
Landing Page Report > Secondary Dimension

 

 

After that go to Advanced > Include > Campaign > containing > DPA

And press Apply

 

 

Put "DPA" on your Advanced Filtering
Put “DPA” on your Advanced Filtering

 

 

And now we have the gold report :D!

So what do we see here?

 

 

landing page report filtered by "DPA"
Landing Pages Report report filtered by “DPA”

 

 

We see landing pages that we send traffic through our Product Catalog Ads (“DPA” stands for “Dynamic Product Ads”).

We also see the Sessions, Transactions, Revenue & Conversion Rate.

(Exercise for you) In this report can you spot the worst performing landing page (row number)?

 

 

Yes! It’s the line 8.

Why?  Because we have 205 Sessions but 0% conversion Rate.

Meaning that we spend budget to drive traffic to that page but they do not convert!

We need to investigate why this is happening and either fix the landing page or exclude this product from our Facebook Product Catalog.

Amazing stuff! That’s the power of the UTMs

(Exercice for you #2) Can you spot some, less obvious, landing pages that underperform?

Yeap! You guessed it again!

 

 

Line 1 & Line 4

Why? Because the overall Conversion Rate for this campaign is 2.10% and they have 1.29% & 0.96%. So we need to investigate why this is happening. Since we have conversions the approach here is different, one way to proceed is to check if the pricing is correct and if the offer is easy to understand for the customer.

Now is your Turn! Harness the power of UTMs and Google Analytics!

Share with us what you found in the comments below.

👇 👇 👇

Categories
Analytics PPC Tips & Tricks

2 Reasons to have UTMs in your ads

2 Reasons to have UTMs in your ads

Reason #1: It shows you what marketing channel works and what doesn’t.

Then you can draw insights, and then you can do actions to fix or scale.

Let’s look at the data below.

 

 

source / medium Report on Google Analytics
source / medium Report on Google Analytics

 

 

This is the data from 15/11/2020.

Since we used UTMs in our ads, every Session, Transaction and Revenue that came from the Ads is attributed in the Facebook / cpc

Everything else (organic posts for example) is attributed into the other sources / mediums that end with the /referral.

This gives us clarity on data and we can draw insights from this report.

  • Why is the ads conversion rate so low? Maybe we need to check where we send traffic (landing pages)
  • Why is our revenue so high on organic posts (referral)? Should we ramp up our efforts there and create more content?

On the other hand let’s look at an account that does not uses proper UTMs

 

 

source / medium Report on Google Analytics only Facebook filter
source / medium Report on Google Analytics only Facebook filter

 

 

As you can see everything in the Source / Medium is attributed to referral (although the client runs ads).

With this we are not sure if these 2 Transactions came from ads or organic posts thus we are unable to take actions and as a result we cannot fix or scale anything.

Reason #2: Enables you to some high level Performance Marketing Tactics that are only able when you use UTMs

Let me give you an example from one of my campaigns:

If you run Catalog Sales Campaigns on Facebook you can argue that they are some of the most profitable campaigns you can run.

You upload a Facebook Product Catalog and the algorithm shows the products to prospects (or Website Visitors if you can installed the Facebook Pixel and used Remarketing Audiences)

But the downside is that you don’t know which products are shown!😨

So if the campaign has profitable ROAS that’s great news 👍! (still you don’t know which products sell better, so you can’t optimize)

But if the campaign has un-profitable ROAS you still don’t know which products perform poorly in order to exclude them 👎.

So what do you do?

You guessed it! You use UTMs

Let me show how.

How to Combine UTMs with your Google Analytics to get some super tricks to optimize your PPC efforts

 

Categories
PPC Tips & Tricks

📈 Validate your Business Idea with Google Keyword Planner

Time to read: 4minutes

Step #1 Access the Keyword Planner from Google Ads

Step #2 Prepping the Analysis with Google Sheets

Step #3 Getting the total volume per month

Step #4 Getting Insights from your data

In this guide we will discuss how you can validate a business idea using tools from Google.

Specifically we will discuss:

  1. How to find a good market using competitor’s data
  2. See the seasonality trends
  3. Find if the market is growing or not

The tools we are going to use are Google Keyword Planner & Google Sheets.

You will also need:

  • Access to a Google Ads Account
  • Google Sheets

So let’s dig!

Access the Keyword Planner from Google Ads

You log in into the account go to “Tools” > “Keyword Planner”

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Tools > Keyword Planner

Then a page will load. Choose “Start With a Website” ,choose an industry leader’s website and press “Get Results”

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Don’t forget to choose the country you are targeting and the language

After that the page with the results will appear. In order to do a good analysis we need at least 24 months old data (we need this to compare monthly trends).

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Also make sure you have excluded your competitors brand from the keyword ideas

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After that your just need to press the “Download Keyword Ideas”

Prepping the Analysis with Google Sheets

After you upload the .csv file into Google Sheets (or Excel) you will get the data that look like this:

image12 1

Raw data from Keyword Planner

After cleaning the file you should have a more concrete dataset

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The columns you need are “Keyword” and volumes by month (e.x. “Nov 2018”, “Dec 2019”, etc)

Now we need to make sure that the numbers are actually numbers and not text.

To do that we need:

  • Get all the numbers
  • Click “Format”
  • Click “Number”
  • And then again “Number”

image9 1

Making sure that our numbers are actual numbers

Getting the total volume per month

For our next step we need to find the total volume for each month.

In order to this we do the following:

  • Add a new row below the “Keyword” row
  • Use the “=SUM()” formula
  • Do it for all the months

image2 1

Creating the Total Volume Column

Getting Insights from your data

Now we have the Month, the Year and the total search volume for that specific website

image6 1

We have the full search volume that the competitor is eligible to show for each month

Now we will create percentages in order to see emerging patterns

YoY Growth (per month)

For example in the following table we compare the search volume growth for each month. We see that from November to February we do not see much growth. Things do not look good 😞.

image4 1

But from May to Oct we see a growth in search volume at least 30% each month 😃!!

This means that Shoes seasonality starts when the weather get warmer.

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Finally if we get the volume for each year we will get the Year over Year Search Volume Growth.

We see here that from 2019 to 2020 the searches for shoe related keywords increased to 21.30%.

That means that going into this business is a good idea.

image3 1

Now try that for yourself and comment below to share any insights 😃