Online merchants have long to-do lists to prepare for the busy make-or-break holiday shopping season. As you prioritize the tasks most likely to bring in conversions, optimizing your Google advertising should be at the top of the list. Here are three important questions that can help you get your Google holiday season strategy in order.
Are your Google Shopping Ads a major contributor to your sales?
Google Shopping ads (previously called product listings) have seen tremendous growth since this product was initiated. Last shopping season, shopping ads started to be a significant part in conversions and sales. Many retailers are now reporting shopping ads have overtaken their text ads. This trend will continue as Google and Bing show more text ads more frequently on all devices.
If you haven’t seen these large increases in your Google shopping ads, it is time to evaluate your strategy and optimizations now as you prepare for the holiday season. Google has significantly increased features and capabilities in the past 18 months. The platform is much more comprehensive, and the days of simply setting up a feed and bidding are over. Take advantage of the new optimizations to increase your shopping sales or improve return on ad spend including:
- Feed Content
- Negative Keywords
- Segmentation by Labels, Product Category, Item IDs
- Mobile Bidding
- Promos and Extensions
- Campaign Priorities
- Assist Value
Are your marketing tactics reflecting the large shift to mobile?
The mobile takeover has been talked about for years, and now mobile revenue is here to stay. Many ecommerce sites are reporting higher sales from mobile than desktop sales. A user-friendly mobile site is now a “must-have” to compete and capture all revenue opportunities. Given the surge of mobile conversions, marketing tactics have to be adjusted as well.
In April, Google made a big change to its search alogorithm that could affect your site’s SEO. Google now penalizes non-mobile sites by only displaying mobile friendly sites in the search results for queries from a mobile device. You can check to see if your site is mobile-friendly here.
Here are some other considerations to make sure your marketing tactics are aligned for mobile:
- Are your emails mobile friendly?
- Are you using mobile paid search ads and sitelinks differently than your desktop ads?
- Are you testing different landing pages for mobile versus desktop?
- Are you making bid adjustments differently for mobile?
- Do you have different banners for retargeting for mobile devices?
Are you utilizing all available extensions in Google?
Most advertisers are aware of sitelinks and how they increase performance. Google continues to add new extensions, each with its own advantages. They improve click-through rate and conversions when implemented successfully. Some of them include:
- Call out extensions
- Call extensions
- Location extensions
- Review extensions
- App extensions
- Structured snippets extensions
If you need help keeping your Google marketing campaigns in line with the ever-evolving ad products and changes, Cajam Marketing’s Google® certified paid search specialists can help. Just in time for Q4 and the start of 2016, Cajam Marketing is offering specially priced audits of Google Shopping accounts.
Prepping for Black Friday? Learn how the discontinuation of Amazon product ads and recent comparison shopping engine changes can affect your holiday season online marketing.
