June 18, 2021
Google Smart Shopping: What Makes it Special and How to Make it Work for You
When it comes to running an ecommerce business, remarketing campaigns are key. In general, only two percent of site traffic converts to a sale on a first-time visit. Remarketing allows you to reach the remaining 98% of visitors. And Google reports that the more customized experience that dynamic remarketing provides can drive a conversion rate up to 5 times stronger than standard ad formats. Although implementation of dynamic remarketing requires some technical skill, the benefits can significantly outweigh the time cost.
What is Dynamic Remarketing?
There are two types of remarketing campaigns you can run on the Google Display Network. Standard remarketing allows you to show ads to past site visitors with a limited amount of creative options. Dynamic remarketing goes further, allowing you to reach past site visitors with display ads containing products they viewed.
Placing a unique remarketing code on your site allows Google to track specific pages, categories, and items viewed by each visitor. Google then matches this information to IDs in your product feed which allows Google to trigger an ad containing the item or item type in which the viewer showed interest. With proper tracking, a user who browsed men’s coats on a clothing retailer’s site will see ads featuring men’s coats.
Benefits of Dynamic Remarketing
Once tracking and feeds are set up, the dynamic remarketing template can pull any product from your feed into an ad, giving you instant ad coverage on your entire product inventory without time consuming effort to create and manage ad creatives tailored to every product and audience. This scalable automation is guaranteed to free up time for you and your team.
In addition to including products viewed, dynamic ads can insert other popular and related products. This functionality gives you the opportunity to re-engage your audience with additional products they may not have seen during their initial visit to your site.
Google will automatically generate an ad layout to fit the available placement and platform where the ad will show. This eliminates the need to create ad variations that not only meet sizing requirements for all placements, but also appeal to audiences at all stages in the buying funnel.
Best Practices
Most of the elements in your ads will be automatically selected from information in your feed, but there are a few customizable features you should take advantage of to ensure AdWords creates the strongest ad for your products. Upload your logo and utilize custom color options for your ad’s background, buttons, and outlines to match your website for consistent branding. Additionally, you can select the wording for the call to action displayed in your ad (“Shop Now”, “Visit Site”, “See More”, etc.).
Use remarketing lists that will maximize return. Viewers who clicked on products, visited specific product categories, or abandoned items in the shopping cart are likely further down the buying funnel than all-site visitors. Plus, ads generated from these segments will show more relevant products, increasing the likelihood of a conversion.
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Tips For Optimizing
Choose Your Products Wisely – Consider excluding products that are not profitable for remarketing. For example, if a pair of socks sells for $3 on your site and you have to spend $7 on remarketing to drive a sale, plus the initial cost of driving the initial site visit, you should consider excluding this product (unless sock purchasers have an unusually high LTV).
Target the Correct Placements – Avoid ad fatigue and wasted spend from over-served ads by setting a frequency cap, somewhere between 3-8 impressions per user per day. Mobile app placements can also rack up wasted spend from accidental clicks by app users and gamers. Make sure to monitor these placements closely and exclude weak performers.
Segment Your Audiences – Segment out remarketing lists into 7, 30, and 90 day windows to allow for more strategic bidding. A visitor is more likely to convert in the few days immediately after viewing a product, and this structure will allow you to target more recent visitors with higher bids. Make sure to consider the length of your customer’s average buying process when creating these time frames – if 98% of customers purchase within seven days of visit, then it probably doesn’t make sense to remarket for 90 days.
Make Data-Driven Decisions – Make sure to continually optimize your remarketing campaigns, especially if performance is weak immediately after launch. Adjusting your timeframes, adding new remarketing lists, and excluding poor-performing products will make your campaign more profitable over time. Make sure to use enough data to achieve a meaningful conclusion, especially when using automation features, since Google’s algorithms perform better as more data accrues.
Dynamic remarketing is a great tool for automating highly targeted ads and takes the guessing out of choosing the audience to put your products in front of.
