This article explains how Smart Bidding works for Shop Sales (for Search and Shopping campaigns). If you are interested in Smart Bidding for shop sales for Performance Max campaigns, read Create a Performance Max campaign
Bear in mind
About shop sales conversions
If sales at your physical locations are important to your business, you can use conversion tracking to help you understand how your ads influence shop sales. Learn more about how to view your shop sales conversions
How to value a shop sale
If you’re receiving dynamic shop sales values through in-shop transaction uploads or from automated dynamic values reporting, the Google Ads UI will provide you with your modelled shop sales conversion value. However, if you’re not uploading or you’re only eligible to receive automated conversion counts, you can specify an average conversion value for your shop sales conversions and the system will use this to provide your conversion value. Learn more about how to set up your Google Ads account for shop sales
Whether you’re receiving shop sales values automatically or via in-shop transactions, we recommend specifying a static shop sales conversion value that aligns with an average order value for your shop sales. Setting up this static value is helpful if the system needs to fall back to using the static value instead of the dynamic values. By default, the static shop sales conversion value is 1.
For example, if you’re uploading in-store transaction data but you stop uploading for some time, the system will use the static value until eligible uploads resume.
Note:
- You can use conversion value rules to have more flexibility and control with your shop sales values. For example, set different static shop sales values by campaign depending on the products or services that the campaign promotes. Or, adjust dynamic shop sales values by a percentage to strike the right balance between online and offline conversions for your business goals. For example, to reduce your shop sales value by 20%, you can add a value rule to multiply by 0.8. When using the multiply operator, keep in mind that values can range between 0.5 to 10. Learn more about conversion value rules
- Shop sales and shop visits share the same conversion settings (for example, conversion window, attribution model, among others). Adjusting your conversion window for shop sales will also automatically adjust it for shop visits.
Set up Smart Bidding for shop sales in your campaigns
Bid strategies supported
For Search campaigns, Smart Bidding to shop sale conversions is supported in fully automated bid strategies such as target ROAS, Target CPA, Maximise Conversions and Maximise Conversion Value. Learn more about determining a bid strategy based on your goals
If you want to optimise more for shop sales conversions in your Search campaigns, use a value-based bid strategy and make sure that shop sale conversions have a higher relative value to other conversion actions. Bid strategies that optimise for conversion volume (like Target CPA or Maximise Conversions) treat each conversion action with equal importance. Learn more about conversion values
For Shopping campaigns, Smart Bidding to shop sales conversions is supported by target ROAS bidding. For Smart Shopping campaigns, Smart bidding to shop sales conversion is supported by Max conversion value bidding with an optional return on ad-spend (ROAS) target. Learn more about using optimise bidding while creating Local campaigns
For Performance Max campaigns, Smart Bidding to shop sales conversions is supported in fully automated bid strategies such as target ROAS, Target CPA, Maximise Conversions, and Maximise Conversion Value. Learn more about using optimize bidding while creating Performance Max campaigns.
Include in 'Conversions'
1. Set your shop sales conversion goal as an account-default goal (recommended)
By setting your shop sales conversion goal as an account-default goal, Smart Bidding strategies that optimise for conversions in that account will start optimising towards it. If the conversion is owned by a manager account level, that setting will apply to all campaigns using Smart Bidding in client accounts which are opted into tracking conversions under that manager account. It’s recommended that you set your shop sales conversion goal as account-default whenever possible because the best overall performance is achieved by optimising for the same set of conversions across all campaigns. Note that we recommend including shop sales in all existing conversion-based bid strategies for best performance.
Set shop sales conversion goal as account-default:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Goals icon
.
- Click the Conversions drop-down in the section menu.
- Click Summary.
- Identify the 'Shop sales' conversion action.
- Click Edit goal.
- Select Use as an account goal.
- Select the conversion actions that you'd like to use for reporting and bidding as 'Primary'.
- Click Save changes.
- Select Edit Settings.
- Tick the box next to 'Include in "Conversions"' and click Save.
Bear in mind
- Make sure that you update ROAS or CPA targets of all existing Search and Shopping conversion-based Smart Bidding campaigns when you set your shop sales conversion goal at the client or manager account level, to take into account the additional conversions or conversion value from shop sales.
- Smart Bidding strategies consider all conversion actions that are marked as 'Primary'. Ensure that the conversion actions that you'd like to optimise toward alongside your shop sales goal are marked as 'Primary'.
2. Set your shop sales conversion goal at the campaign level
This setting allows you to choose the conversion actions that will be reported in 'Conversions' and used for bid optimisation at the campaign level. The campaign conversion setting allows you to override your account-default goals and specify which goals you’d like to track in your conversion reporting and use for bidding in a particular campaign. Using the campaign-level conversion setting is recommended as an interim solution if you have existing bid strategies that optimise for conversions and would prefer to test and scale adoption of bidding to shop sales throughout the account over time.
Set up campaign-level conversion setting for Search campaigns:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
.
- Click the Campaigns drop-down in the section menu.
- Click Campaigns.
- Click the Settings tab at the top of the page.
- Go to the Workspace bar at the top.
- Click the Workspace drop-down menu and select Search campaigns.
- Select the campaign that you want to opt into shop sales bidding.
- Click on Additional settings.
- Click Goals.
- Click Use Campaign-specific goal settings.
- Select the Shop sales conversion goal in addition to other conversion goals that you would like to optimise for and click Save.
Note: You can select to use shop visits or shop sales as your account or campaign goals, but you can’t select both at the same time. If shop visits or shop sales is your only goal and you’d like to switch between them, make sure to first add a non-shop conversion goal, then remove the existing shop visits or shop sales goal before adding the desired shop visits or shop sales goal. You can remove the non-shop goal afterwards.
Tip
To make any changes to the static account-level shop sales conversion value:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Goals icon
- Click the Conversions drop-down in the section menu.
- Click Summary.
- Click the Shop sales conversion action that you want to edit.
- Click Edit settings. You can now make changes to the 'Shop sales' conversion action.
- Click the Value section and update the static value in the field. We recommend providing a value which reflects the average order value of your sales, as this will help provide better insights when evaluating shop sales data.
- Note: If you’re receiving automatic shop sales values, then the static value won’t be used. If you’re uploading in-shop transaction data, then the static value will only be used if you stop uploading eligible in-shop transaction data after a period of time.
Best practices
- Advertisers should upload in-shop transaction data regularly (daily is recommended, but weekly at a minimum) to help Smart Bidding operate effectively.
- For advertisers who upload data, the system can forecast shop sales value data for up to 30 days from the last upload. This means missing one to two uploads shouldn’t negatively impact the bidding system. However, we still strongly encourage you to upload consistently to help Smart Bidding operate effectively. Learn more about how to upload your shop sales data
- You can find out how long it takes for your customers to convert by adding predefined shop sales columns and clicking on the 'days to conversion' segment. We recommend using a seven-day shop sale conversion window for best performance and evaluation with Smart Bidding. However, for specific business models that require a longer conversion window due to longer purchase cycles, it’s possible to keep the 30-day conversion window. Note that when using a 30-day window, it will take longer after implementation to correctly evaluate the performance of Smart Bidding with shop sales.
- Bear in mind that changes to conversion settings apply going forward only. When you first include shop sales in 'Conversions', historical values in conversion columns won’t reflect the current setting. It’s best to calculate CPA and ROAS targets manually by incorporating historical data from at least a 30-day period before the conversion delay into the following formulas:
- CPA target = cost/(all biddable conversions + shop sales)
- ROAS target = (conversion value of all biddable conversions + shop sales * current conversion value per shop sale) * 100/cost
- For ROAS targets in Smart Shopping campaigns, follow the best practice above for ROAS targets, unless:
- You’re not using the optional ROAS target: No action is required.
- You’re using the ROAS target only as a safety mechanism (your ROAS target is set higher than your achieved ROAS): Consider setting the new ROAS target also higher than the number recommended above.
Cost impact for adding conversions or conversion value to target-based Smart Bidding strategies
Adding shop sales to the conversions used for bidding may cause your Target CPA, target ROAS and Smart Shopping campaigns (if using the optional ROAS target) strategies to spend more to continue achieving your targets. To maintain stable spend, follow the above suggestions to identify and update targets. If you want to further ensure that spend is stable, you can decrease your CPA target or increase your ROAS target once you include shop sales in 'Conversions'.
