Best practices to optimize your smart shopping campaigns

Before setting up or after getting your smart shopping campaigns ready, you definitely need to optimize. Recall the machine learning timeline if you would like to adjust details to make sure it will not interrupt the learning process. Check the timeline in this article Scale up your online business with Google Smart Shopping campaign in 2021

Best practices to optimize your smart shopping campaigns

• Always start with good Product Feed 
• Use your business goal to determine how many campaigns to create 
• Separate your campaigns based on business goals
• Smart bidding helps you get more high-intent users
• Campaign checklist
• Remember to re-evaluate your campaign structure to ensure it matches with business goals
• Adjust budget to increase the sale
• Adjust ROAS goals to increase sales
• Steps to scale your smart shopping campaigns 

Always start with good Product Feed 

Make sure all available products on your website are in your product feed. And if some products in your ad groups are not approved, it should be less than 5% of them. Try to fix all the issues following Google’s guidelines, a great Google Merchant Center account and a high-quality website will be prioritized to appear on Google. For violating Google shopping policies, check this out Recap of Google shopping policies and get over account suspended. 

Use your business goal to determine how many campaigns to create 

If you have products with similar sales columns as well as profit margins, and your goal is to maximize revenue, you should create a single smart shopping campaign. On the other hand, if you have multiple products with varying sales columns as well as profit margins, and your goal is to maximize profit, you should create multiple smart shopping campaigns. 

Separate your campaigns based on business goals

To maximize profits, you can set up separate campaigns for different product categories with different profit margins and set different ROAS targets for each product category. But if you have so many product categories, you can set separate campaigns to ensure visibility for hero products or new releases. 

For example: 

Set up a campaign for new releases products with very low ROAS target (e.g: 50%) to ensure the visibility of these products, and budget is around 10% of total 

Set up a different campaign for high margin categories with a lower ROAS target (e.g: 300%) to ensure that they will sell as many high-margin products as possible, and budget is around 60% of total 

Set up a different campaign for all other products that did not have higher margin targets to give the smart shopping campaign the flexibility to match each shopper with the right product, and the budget is around 30% of the total. 

Campaign checklist

Once you finish setting up your campaigns, make sure all products are covered in your campaigns and evaluate the performance of your products. If your product impression share is not greater than 40%, you need to re-optimize the entire feed because your ads do not display in front of search users.  In addition, if you check the click-through rate is smaller than 3%, it means that your competitors are doing better than you. You need to re-optimize product title and benchmark with similar products such as price, design, etc. 

Remember to re-evaluate your campaign structure to ensure it matches with business goals

After evaluating your ad performance, you won’t see the results as you expected or your high-margin products did not get the impression that you want, you should consider again your campaign structure to match with your goal.  

Adjust budget to increase the sale

Smart shopping campaigns will not always show limited budget warnings. As in form in our last post, the budget that you set should be 20 times greater than the cost per action (CPA) that you would like to achieve to make sure machine learning has enough resources to generate data. After the learning period, if campaigns do not perform as you expected, you need to adjust your budget. 

Adjust ROAS goals to increase sales

If you set a high target ROAS, you will have better returns but the overall conversions will be lower. When you see the impression and conversion are too low, you should lower target ROAS to gain more sales.  

Steps to scale your smart shopping campaigns 

To use the guideline to scale up your smart shopping campaigns, make sure that the learning period of smart campaigns is over, if not, you need to wait until the learning process is done. 

There are 2 big questions to check: 

1. Did you set a target ROAS manually? 

If the answer is yes, check whether your campaign is hitting the target ROAS goal. 

• If it has hit the target ROAS and spent 100%, then increase the budget. If it has not been spent 100%, then lower your target ROAS. On the other hand, you can separate this campaign if you see some products have reached target ROAS and increase the budget for these products. For the other products, you set a different budget and lower target ROAS.  
• If it has not hit the target ROAS, check whether your target ROAS  was set too high or too low for each product or each product group compared to standard shopping historical performance. If it’s too high you need to lower target ROAS, if it’s too low, make sure your entire site is tagged to improve triggering, especially for Google Display Network and Youtube, and request a feed optimization to improve triggering of the ads

If the answer is no, go to the next question.         

1. Is the performance going well in terms of ROAS and conversion volume?  

If the answer is yes, check whether the budget is spent 100%, increase if it has. If it has not spent 100%,  make sure your entire site is tagged to improve triggering, especially for Google Display Network and Youtube, request a feed optimization to improve triggering of the ads, check to see if anything changed on the competitive landscape so that you can run a promotion to push more sales volume, and add more similar products to the campaign. 

If the answer is no: consider setting a target ROAS (increase or decrease), double-check if any changes were made during the learning period that can make the learning period start over, make sure your product category has a good amount of clicks/impressions (at least 100 conversions in the last 30 days and add more products) and request a feed optimization to improve triggering of the ads.   

Conclusion

Know the right way to optimize your ads, but do not forget to know the best practices to optimize your google feeds and correct everything on your Google Merchant Center account. Because when you do it well, you have gone through half of the way to a successful shopping campaign. Once you optimize your feeds and your ads, make them efficiently, apparently, your sales will grow. 

Read more: Google Feed Management Best Practices