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E-COMMERCE
7x ROAS with Google’s Smart Shopping Campaigns
Google’s Smart Shopping campaigns now allow you to automatically target audiences who are extensively searching for your products and services.
Sandeep Kumar shared some insights that helped him achieve a 7x ROAS using Smart Shopping, so let’s have a look at them:
+ Requirements: You should have at least 20 conversions from traditional shopping campaigns. You need to set up a dynamic remarketing tag on your e-commerce site.
+ Campaign Setup: Your budgets should be at least 50% of your standard shopping campaigns. Always provide enough budget for machine learning to gather enough data.
+ Bid Strategy: He recommends going with the “Maximize Conversion Value” bidding strategy with a defined Target ROAS. You can set up the target ROAS based on your actual product margins.
+ Choosing Products: To gather enough data quickly, you can add all your products at first and then trim it down to your bestsellers once you have the data.
+ Remarketing Lists: Once you’ve set up a dynamic remarketing tag on your e-commerce website, you’ll see lists of remarketing audiences created and used by the Smart Shopping Campaigns to target your audiences.
+ Product Segregation: Smart shopping campaigns give top priority to best selling products, so it’s always better to create separate campaigns for such products.
You can also create separate campaigns based on product pricing, clearance sales, seasonality etc and have different ROAS goals for different product lines.
Keep in mind that, with Smart Shopping Campaigns, you might see CPC and click fluctuations.
In the first week, there’s a chance that you won’t gather enough data. However, once you have enough data you can eliminate the non-converting clicks and bid higher on the ones that convert.
Announcements from the Conference that never happened
Well, this year’s annual Google Developers Conference, like many other conferences around the world, was cancelled. So, Google had to resort to making this announcement for game-marketers in a blog post.
+ Open testing ads: As per Google, more than half of all app installs happen within the first eight weeks of a new app releasing. Hence, in order to help developers bring in more beta testers to try apps before they’re released, Google is launching open testing ads in Google Ads App campaigns.
You can use these campaigns to target more users to test for things such as app stability, user retention, monetization and the effectiveness of creatives.
+ App campaign asset reporting: Two new columns at the adgroup level have been introduced. They’re called asset source and orientation and allow you to compare similar assets more easily.
Performance columns such as Low, Good or Best will bring up a tooltip with recommended actions for the specific asset. You’ll also be able to see performance charts to view changes to asset performance over time.
Starting April, new asset previews will offer you “View ad previews” in the asset column of your report.
+ Gaming-specific analytics reporting. App + Web properties in Analytics now show in-app behavior and user funnel metrics such as acquisition, retention, engagement and monetization for gaming apps.
+ AdMob mediation testing. A new tool to A/B tests different monetization approaches to test Open Bidding against waterfall mediation.
Here’s an official recap of the entire set of announcements.
SPONSORED
🛠 How and when can The Crew help you reach more marketers in Q2, even when there’s a pandemic
We’re going to keep this short. If you have any sort of product you want to get in front of over 9k hungry marketers, whether it’s affiliate offers, ad network, educational content, software… We’re here. Especially now when marketers are looking for what works during this pandemic.
We’ve put together a new offer for Q2 2020. We will publish it in our Sponsors Updates newsletter that you can sign up for here. It will go out on Thursday.
Do you want to get this updated offer now? Submit your info in the form on this page and we’ll be in touch right away.
Or just reply to this email and get in touch with us directly.
FUN WITH THE CREW
The Crew’s ‘bout to drop a value BOMB. Be careful
How much do you like marketing nuggets?
You know, all those shiny words such as next level, knaaauledge, crush it, like-minded people, top-notch information… You get the idea.
Maybe that was the wrong question. Maybe instead it should be: How much do you hate these words?
Well, whatever the right question is, The Crew has crafted some short animations on this topic. Listen, this is next level social media content. This is the kind of entertainment you won’t find anywhere else. This is the mother of all memes. This is top-notch something.
Check them out before we run out of stock. (what?)
PS: Sorry if we used some of these words in the past. And sorry again, because we’ll keep doing it!
SEARCH
COVID-19 search trends. Are you thinking about completely changing your business?
What searchers are looking for and where they moved
The WordStream blog shared another post on the impact of COVID-19 on search trends. Let’s have a look at it and see how you can adjust:
- COVID-19 dominates the search.
Okay, no surprises here. Google has even created a Coronavirus Hub, the Google Trends specifically for coronavirus related searches. Explore it to see what people are looking for and look for ways you can leverage these trends.
Moreover, this post from SearchEngineLand highlights how Google’s ‘corona’ results page changed.
- Cross-networks chances to benefit from.
The outbreak pushed Google Search and Google Shopping results down, but Internet usage spiked by nearly 50%. This means that your audience has just changed where they’re spending their time.
YouTube traffic grew by 21% and the Google Display Network traffic by 13%. So, the answer is go multichannel amigos! Also, besides GDN and YouTube, you should also include Google Search Partners in your camps.
The other two trends are a shift from mobile to desktop usage and a drop on local business conversions. Check the post for more insights.
Should I stay or should I go now
It’s a rough time for online businesses, and those suffering the most from this outbreak are probably thinking about jumping to another biz. More specifically, they could be thinking about jumping into affiliate marketing.
Our fellow reader Paul Jey shared his point of view on the matter, and how entrepreneurs should approach this (hopefully) temporary crisis. Here’s what you should consider:
- Did your company’s business model die overnight?
- Did people completely stop buying? Nope, they just changed what and how they buy.
- Try to reposition your messaging so that your product is more relevant to what’s going on in users’ heads.
- Try to change your product mix to make it more attractive.
- Chances are, you probably won’t jump into affiliate marketing today and start crushing it tomorrow. There’s no overnight fix to such a crisis.
The juice is: Don’t make drastic decisions. Instead, try making some adjustments to your business and adapt it to the current consumers’ mood.
Nobody has the last word at such times, but these points look useful!
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
- SEO: Matthew Woodward reveals one of the hidden ranking factors that most SEOs have been unknowingly deleting.
- FACEBOOK: The company announced a new, bold and user-friendly redesign of the website, which of course includes a dark mode.
- BING: Bing follows in Google’s footsteps and adopts SpecialAnnouncement structured data for COVID-19.
- SEO: Check out the detailed summary from a video released by Google, which explains how to use Search Console to find out which pages have been crawled and indexed and how to deal with any problems found during that process.
- MARKETING: Inspired by TikTok, Singaporean video app Likee has announced its intentions to make a push into the US market.
BRAIN TEASER
I am taken from a mine, and shut up in a wooden case, from which I am never released, and yet I am used by almost everybody. What am I?
You can find the solution by clicking here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things affiliates like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
Karen! Are you even listening to what I am saying?
Sometimes it’s nice to spend time at home without feeling the FOMO. But the more time you spend at home, the lazier you become.
And even those one off calls you have with your boss can start to look like climbing Mount Everest.
This isn’t just our feeling, either.
Indeed, we’ve heard that many people have found a way to avoid that Zoom call with co-workers that would ruin their Game of Thrones marathon.
How, you might ask?
Well, we’ll tell you, but please, don’t use this tactic to fool your boss and coworkers!
Apparently, more and more people are looping through videos, or in some cases just adding a still image of themselves seemingly paying attention.
Both teens during online classes and adults during work calls have been using this tactic.
The world is becoming a lazy place, but still not lazy enough to play videogames!
PS: This post has been written while playing Call Of Duty. We bet you can’t do it!