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.
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:
- You go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages
- Have as Primary Dimension: Landing Page
- Put the Secondary Dimension: Campaign
- Then go to the Advance Filter and use Include > Campaign > *The smart shopping campaign name*
Google Analytics Filter - Press Save
You should have a view like the one below
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
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:
- Go to Google Ads > Campaigns > Smart Shopping Campaign > Product Group and exclude them from the product group
- 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 😀