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HOW HEALTHY FEEDS CAN DELIVER SUCCESSFUL ONLINE

A U G U S T 2017 Google Shopping

SHOPPING EXPERIENCES BY LIDIA FERRER, SENIOR PAID MEDIA ANALYST

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Paid Media

LIDIA FERRER SENIOR PAID MEDIA ANALYST

— Creating an easy and unique shopping experience, both online and in-store, is the future of retail. ECommerce has already revolutionised the way we shop, however it will continue to evolve, as marketers seek to satisfy and tweak the online shopping patterns and preferences that shape retail today.

T H E M O R E YO U F O C U S ON SETTING UP AND REVIEWING FOR I M P ROV E M E N T S, T H E M O R E YO U’L L S E E YO U R P RO D U CT S P E R F O R M B E T T E R O N L I N E. —

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Paid Media

In-store experiences may lack some online benefits such as immediacy, but conversely, online will never be able to let people try on a product before buying it. However, both try to offer as good an experience as possible, and the way in which we display and organise our product catalogue is key to achieving our business goals, both online and offline. Here are two cases to demonstrate why:

Imagine you go into a shop and you see mountains of items mixed up together on the same table. What would you do as a customer? Probably, you’ll touch a few key products, try to find what you want to buy, but if you don’t find anything you like the look of, you’ll probably leave the store without buying anything. My point? The way products are displayed will help you sell more.

Imagine now that you work in that shop as a sales assistant and you’re in charge of its merchandising, and must follow the company guidelines. You’d probably need to put new collection products all together, prioritise products on sale, have samples of all sizes and colours available, and have to separate areas by gender or category products. Here, the focus is on organising the shop so key items are visible and easy to find.

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Paid Media C A M PA I G N B U I L D This confirms that the way in which we display our

This channel can become our online shop window,

products is crucial to generating more sales. More-

but it can be aggravating as an advertiser as there

over, the way in which we organise and prioritise

are often resellers or other competitors that offer

categories will affect our performance.

the same product in the same “store” (i.e. Google or Bing Search). Therefore, you need to show relevant

It’s exactly the same for the online shopping ex-

products and use all the tools at your disposal to

perience. We know that site merchandising is very

approach users with the products and information

important to guaranteeing good user experience,

they’re looking for at the right time and in the right

but what about the way we reach users? Shopping

place.

can be a powerful channel, as users can look up a particular product, see a picture, land directly on

Having a healthy feed will help your customers find

the product page and buy it in two or three steps. It

what they’re looking for and will make your life

sounds great, doesn’t it? So, we have to make sure

easier when it comes to optimisations. This can be

our product listing ads are relevant and give the

done by using product data management and feed

right information to each search query.

optimisation tools such as Productsup.

PRODUCTSUP This tool provides cloud-based software for manag-

getting a diagnosis and recommendations for each

ing and optimising product data for small and large

feed column, and getting warnings of any errors

accounts quickly and easily. There are so many

that need to be fixed.

functions available, such as creating rules or lists,

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Paid Media

In Productsup, start by focusing on optimising ad titles, as they’re an integral part of your ad, and then create custom labels so you can easily push categories or specific products. Here’s how to do it:

1 OPTIMISING TITLES

Productsup allows us to apply different rules and “if functions” that help to create relevant titles, like: öö

“Append/Prepend Column” box: this enriches the title with key product attributes by

Example of a good title structure for apparel:

“appending” or “prepending” the brand, colour, product type, gender, material, etc. from the

BRAND + GENDER + TITLE OR MODEL + PRODUCT TYPE + COLOUR + SIZE

respective attribute columns öö

“Append/Prepend Value” box: this allows you to manually type in the specific product information that you want to add to the title

Title optimisation will: VV Increase the number and the quality of

öö

several different text elements in one go

impressions – a good product list ad acts like an impressive shop window VV Improve click-through rate (CTR) and get more qualified clicks – effectively like getting more people to walk into your shop

“Map Replace” box: this box allows you to edit

öö

“Replace If Column Contains” box: replace ‘!’ with ‘.’

öö

Be sure to make use of the“Remove Duplicate Words” box, “Remove Consecutive Whitespace” box and “Remove HTML Tags” box

VV Increase cost efficiently – more relevancy will mean better performance


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Paid Media

2 C R E AT I N G C U S T O M L A B E L S

There are hundreds of ways to achieve this in Productsup, but I prefer the below useful guidance: öö

Create lists to assign values or group products (“category mapping”): assign

You can have up to five custom labels. This

values like product_google_categories,

means that products can be grouped in many

product types, collections, colours

ways and you can easily apply different bids to

to different products, attributes or

them. Each business needs different labels and will need to be adapted accordingly, but these ideas should be helpful:

information öö

“Detect colour” box: if you have missing values in your colour column, the Productsup software can detect the colour in your description and add it to your

BASED ON AT TRIBUTES

colour column

VV Gender

öö

Append/prepend columns

VV Sale / non-sale / promotions / clearance

öö

Map and replace attributes

VV Product category

öö

Remove white spaces and duplicated

VV Seasonal / new products

words automatically

VV Price range

Once we have the titles optimised and the

VV Margin

custom labels in place, it’s time to go into the search engine interface and push the relevant

BASED ON PERFORMANCE VV ROI

products or categories appropriate for the season, in order to increase visibility and boost performance via this channel.

VV Bestsellers VV Clicks

As you begin optimising, you’ll notice the amount of time, quality and cost efficiencies that start to form. The more you focus on setting up and reviewing for improvements, the more you’ll see your products perform better online. It’s when you realise how much you’ve improved performance that you appreciate the platforms that facilitate the process; if you’ve not already begun working on your Shopping feeds, I urge you to do so – you won’t look back.

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