Google Shopping’s ad program Product Listing Ads gives online merchants a lot of control in managing product visibility. It is imperative that you also control your Google Shopping data feed if you want to utilize Google Shopping properly. In this video, Rick outlines the importance of making data feed changes, such as creating feed labels, and avoiding Google Merchant center errors.
Why do you need to make changes to your data feed to impact the Google Product Listing Ads program?
We get a lot of retailers, who are trying to manage Product Listing Ads, but someone else is sending out their feed. Or, there are a lot of AdWords agencies where Product Listing Ads have been thrust upon them from their clients. They look at it as a great opportunity because if they’re charging a percentage of spend, they’re going to make more money as an agency. A lot of times, they don’t have control of the data feed. It’s absolutely crucial to your success on Google Product Listing Ads to control the feed.
The first reason, the most important reason really, is that within the feed you can create labels. Those labels will correlate to ad groups within the Google AdWords login.
You can do anything you want with labels. We come up with really sophisticated strategies for our clients to have labels for seasonal products, or we have labels for best sellers. Or, you can do price buckets, a label for all your products between $0-20, between $20-40, and between $40-60.
These labels, in breaking up your ad groups into these different groups, helps you a lot to figure out what’s performing well. A lot of agencies list an all products bid or they use categories. It depends on the merchant, but for the most part using labels is a huge advantage. You can get much more sophisticated with your strategy. That’s the first reason is that the data feed and control of the data feed helps you to use labels to build ad groups.
The next reason is errors in the Google Merchant Center login. That feed controls the errors that you’re going to see within Google Merchant Center. Guess what? If you don’t address those errors and you don’t know which ones actually matter, Google can kick you off of Google Product Listing Ads at any time. That’s usually when the frenzy starts, and we get people contacting us saying, “I got kicked off on Google Product Listing Ads. I don’t know why.” You’re like, “OK, well are you managing your own data feed?” “No.” “Well who’s managing the feed?” “I don’t know.” “Well, where’s your Google Merchant Center login?” “I don’t know.” “Well, that’s why you got kicked off.”
You need to control the feed to be able to control the errors in the Google Merchant Center just to make sure your products are still live on Google Product Listing Ads.
The last reason and kind of the overarching theme is that if you don’t control the feed as an agency or as a retailer, you really don’t have any control over your Google Product Listing Ads campaign. If you actually want to make it work and you want to be sophisticated and you’re an agency that wants to make sure that other agencies don’t take the feed from you or don’t take the client from you, or you’re a retailer that wants to outsmart your competition, you have to control the feed. If you don’t, then you’re giving your competitors a huge competitive advantage.
This is Part 4 of a 6 Part VLOG series on Google Shopping by CPC Strategy. Check back weekly for more insight on Google Shopping!
[Part 1] VLOG: Reasons NOT to List Your Products on Google Shopping
[Part 2] VLOG: Google Shopping – Why is Bidding So Important?
[Part 3] VLOG: Google Shopping Best Practices