Follow these best practices for campaign optimization to get the most out of your Smart Shopping campaigns.
Conversion tracking
Conversion tracking lets you keep track of when your ads lead to sales on your website. The preferred source of conversion events should be online purchases.
Other sources of conversion events, such as signups or purchases from phone calls may be included and will also be optimized for.
Remarketing tagging
Smart Shopping campaigns rely on a remarketing audience that is made up of people who visit your site. For best coverage and performance, new people must continually be added to your remarketing list
Custom parameters allow Google to gather insights about which products on your website visitors have shown an interest in. Although you may run a Smart Shopping campaign without them, it’s recommended that you set up custom parameters for retail in order to get better performance for your campaign.
If you do not set up custom parameters, Google will automatically match products from your feed based on insights provided by your Google Analytics or your Google tag, such as your page titles and landing pages.
Budget
In order to maintain a similar overall spend with your Standard Shopping campaign, use the combined historical daily spend of your current Standard Shopping and display remarketing campaigns to set a budget for your Smart Shopping campaign. Keep in mind that for the same product, Smart Shopping campaigns take priority over Standard Shopping and display remarketing campaigns for the same account.
Target ROAS
Smart Shopping campaigns automatically maximize your conversion value within a given budget. If you have a minimum return goal for your campaign, you can also set a target return on ad spend (ROAS). For example, if your target goal for your campaign is $5 worth of sales revenue for each $1 you spend on ads, you can set a target ROAS of 500%. When you set a target ROAS, your bids will be optimized to hit your target within your daily budget. If your ROAS is too high, some of your budget may not be spent and your overall sales may decline.
Note: Setting a target ROAS is the inverse of setting an ERS (Effective Revenue Share), which is a measure of spend divided by revenue. Your actual ROAS might vary from your target ROAS.
Products
Get the most out of your campaign by adding as many products as are applicable to your campaign. Shopping and dynamic remarketing ads often show multiple products from the same campaign, so the more products there are to pick from within a campaign, the better the performance will be. Also, it’s important that you keep as many of your products in Merchant Center approved and ready to serve. Learn more about keeping your products approved in Merchant Center.
Consider conversion value, not clicks
Over time, you may see your traffic fluctuate. This is expected since the bid strategy for Smart Shopping may reduce bids for clicks that don't generate much conversion value. The money you save is then used to bid higher for clicks that are more likely to drive higher conversion value. For the same reason, your cost per click may fluctuate.
Seasonal & holiday events
Seasonal & holiday events are important retail moments to get in front of customers and drive sales. These time periods often lead to an increase in traffic, conversion rates, and revenue. In order to take advantage of these periods consider the following:
- Continue using Smart Shopping campaigns. Their objective is to maximize revenue and this performs well even during periods of higher volume. The bidding algorithm picks up on short term changes in performance and is able to adjust quickly.
- Adjust your budget as needed. During seasonal periods there is often increased activity. In order to capitalize on this activity, look at the most recent occurrence of the same or similar seasonal events and set budgets appropriately.
- Adjust your Target ROAS as needed. During a seasonal period, competitors often bid more aggressively to capture more traffic. If your campaign is limited by your minimum Target ROAS, consider lowering it.
- Create a seasonality adjustment. Use the advanced seasonality adjustment tool to schedule conversion rate adjustments (increase or decrease) that accounts for estimated changes due to an upcoming event. Learn more about seasonality adjustments.
Assessment
- Allow time for machine learning to optimize. Consider giving the bid strategy for a new campaign 15 days to run before you start evaluating its performance. Allowing this time to pass gives the strategy time to adapt. It will also account for conversion delay.
- Get adequate data. Make sure you have enough data to evaluate the bidding strategy’s performance. Typically, 2-3 weeks after the learning period is enough time for an advertiser to evaluate performance.
- Take outside factors into account. Multiple factors may affect your results over a period of time, including holidays, weekends, special events, changes to your product data, and your competitors in the auction.
- Account for conversion delays. Some conversions take more time than others, in some cases days or even weeks. If you compare recent campaign performance with past performance, your recent performance might not look as strong because of conversion delay. Learn how to find a report on your conversion delay.
