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How to keep Google Product Listing Ads profitable
However, since it is paid service, there is no guarantee that this ad gives you a positive return. Thus, SEM manager needs to dig deeper on how to optimize ad performance and if possible, manages bid by cost per conversion or ROI. Because of this goal, more advertisers start tracking ad performance by product level instead of ad summary of all products. Once this ad is managed by product level, advertisers also need to manage bid by product level. Thus, we thought it is a good idea to show advertisers how to turn product ad summary into lines of product based ad and manage product level bidding by pay per click bidding software.
To list your product image on Google.com, you must have a Google Merchant account with a linked Google AdWords account. Here is how to link your AdWords account to your Merchants account.
- Log in Google Merchants account
- From the dashboard screen, click ‘Settings’ link on the left pane.
- Click ‘AdWords’ link and enter your AdWords customer ID.
Once you have your Google Merchant Center and Google AdWords accounts linked to it, follow these steps to create a new campaign (stand-alone) to run your Product Listing Ads and manage bidding by product level.
- Create a ‘Search Network only’ campaign from your AdWords account.
- From campaign setup screen, choose ‘Product listing ads’ for Campaign Type.
- Set ‘Default bid’ and Budget, and click ‘Save and continue’ button to set up AdGroup.
- Set AdGroup name and fill out optional ‘Promotion’ field. From ‘Auto targets’ section, uncheck ‘All products’ option and click ‘Save AdGroup’ button. By default (if ‘All products’ is checked), Google would create an AdGroup targeting ‘All products’ in the feed file with one bid price. That means you do not have any control managing bid prices by product level.
- Your will be automatically led to ‘Auto targets’ page. Click ‘+ Add product target’ button and then you are allowed to add product target.
- Select an attribute and enter the attribute value from Google Merchant Center feed file, and click ‘Validate’ button. Repeat it until you finish adding all your products. Google provides 6 different attributes, and you can choose ‘id’ or ‘adwords labels’ to manage bid by individual product level. If you want to manage bidding by group of products, ‘adwords grouping’ can be a good option. Keep in mind that these values must match the values in your Google Merchant Center feed exactly. To utilize ‘adwords labels’ and ‘adwords grouping’, your product feed file must have optional attribute columns with values.
- Now you can see the list of all products with individual bid fields, and you are ready to manage bidding for Product Listing Ads by product level.
There are a few major PPC management software, but it is not clear how many vendors support product level bidding for Google product ad. One of them is ClickSweeper PPC Management Software, which provide ROI bid management function which updates daily bid by cost per conversion or keyword ROI goal.
Once product ad is available from the screen of bid management software, you need to calculate cost/conversion that can achieve positive return after subtracting all expense where it includes ad spending and product cost. As for ROAS, 100% is equal to ad spending. Thus, adding product cost and target return will target ROAS goal at least 200% or higher.
ClickSweeper as a hub for keyword performance management
Whether you are managing thousands of keywords with a budget of hundreds of dollars per keyword or, more commonly, managing fewer than 100 keywords with a moderate budget, ClickSweeper’s new keyword management page can help. This page is accessible by clicking the keyword link from the Keywords Tab page. Users who manage their campaign at the keyword level spend most of their time in reviewing keyword performance. For these users, having easy access to weekly and daily keyword performance trends aids in making quick decisions and smart campaign adjustments. These adjustments are likely to include revisions to the current bid price, keyword level max bid or target rank.
To update the current bid of a keyword, simply go to the ‘Fixed bid’ column in the keyword bidding section and enter a new bid price in the box. Remember to save the change before you leave the page. For those who manage keywords with ROI bidding, review keyword performance trends from the keyword performance page and then adjust max cost per conversion, ROAS or keyword level max bid from the same page.
ClickSweeper 3.1 Release
bringing new enhancements to its pay per click software.
Santa Clara, California December 26, 2012 – Varazo, Inc., an
innovator in pay per click management software, announces the release of
ClickSweeper 3.1 with enhanced user interface and feature updates.
In the 3.1 version release, ClickSweeper has implemented the
Java GWT (Google Web Toolkit) widget on menus and windows to enhance the look
and feel of ClickSweeper. While this
enhancement does not affect the software’s functionality directly, it will help
developers implement new UI features more quickly.
Additional enhancements introduced with the release of
ClickSweeper 3.1 are:
Recommendation of
Keyword ROI goal. ClickSweeper has a bidding feature called Keyword ROI
based bidding. With this feature,
customers can set maximum cost per acquisition or target ROI goal to improve
financial performance.
According to James Lee, President and CEO of Varazo, “one of the challenges
in achieving the desired goal is to define the appropriate maximum cost per
conversion or ROI goal from the campaign setting as neither an aggressive goal
nor conservative goal help improve campaign performance. To address this challenge,
we developed the Recommendation of Keyword ROI goal feature and believe it will
become a powerful tool for advertisers.”
Bidding Simulation.
ClickSweeper has added a function that allows users to test different estimated
bid pricing to achieve their target rank.
Users select a keyword to test then click on the checkbox next to ‘Rank
Based’ and select their desired rank. Once
a user clicks the ‘Simulate Bidding’ button their estimated bid price is
displayed.
API update. Updated
API support for the latest Google and MSN features have been implemented.
About Varazo, Inc.
Varazo, Inc. is an innovator in pay per click campaign
management software and offers a full suite of online marketing services
including PPC search marketing, PPC optimization, affordable SEO
services and online marketing consulting.
For more information, contact Varazo, Inc. at 408-615-7194 or visit us
at www.ClickSweeper.com
Tips for maximizing search ad performance with Analytics data
Long before most advertisers started linking analytics data to AdWords, we recognized the power that optimizing keyword bidding using analytics data could bring. We spent over a year developing, testing and perfecting the logic and rules for analytics based bidding. This powerful tool is now available in ClickSweeper. ClickSweeper is a sophisticated PPC management and campaign optimizer software solution designed to provide easy to use tools to help search marketers with common yet time consuming tasks. One of the many features of ClickSweeper is the ability to setup and manage bidding strategies based on your business goals. These bidding strategies include:
To illustrate how the ClickSweeper analytics based bidding works we’ve described a typical scenario.
You’ve set up your campaign performance goals and bidding rules but find that conversion count is low and there are only a handful of keywords that are performing well for conversion. As a result, you are limited in the number of optimization possibilities available.
With analytics based bidding you can rely on ClickSweeper’s logic to optimize bids based on the analytics data and quality rating. On the ClickSweeper Keyword page each keyword with its corresponding analytics data and quality rating are displayed side by side. On this page you can perform a number of tasks such as change bid price in real time, pause keywords or drive bid price based on ranking, all without leaving the page. If you prefer to manage bidding manually with analytics data, this can also be performed from the same page.
ClickSweeper analytics based bidding also offers automated bidding based on quality rating and the ability to set filters to pause keywords based on time on site or bounce rate. ClickSweeper automatically adjusts bids daily to meet the bidding criteria based on each quality tier. If conversion performance data is available, ClickSweeper makes another adjustment based on conversion performance such as rewarding keywords for excellent conversion performance and penalizing keywords for poor performance.
For more about ClickSweeper’s analytics based bidding, contact us today.
3 keys to improved PPC profitability
Optimize keywords
With Google AdWords’ keyword research tool, generating a list of relevant keywords is now as easy as the click of a button. While generating a long list of potential keywords is a good start, you can’t stop there. The list must be optimized in order to have a positive impact on conversions and avoid wasting campaign money on poor performing keywords. In order to improve performance it is necessary to actively purge or demote unsuccessful keywords, optimize keyword matching type and add in negative keywords in order to eliminate unwanted search strings and more closely target your keywords.
Streamline keyword bid management
One task that never goes away from PPC management is keyword bid management. Since your business competes with others to win more views at the lowest cost, keyword bid management must be done aggressively and consistently. This task is as dynamic as any other financial analysis, since there are many factors that determine ad visibility, the cost of a click and the cost of a conversion. Effective keyword bid management can be complex and time consuming. However, since keyword bid management is based on mathematical calculations where past performance is a good predictor of future performance, it is well suited to automated tools. While Google AdWords offers free bid management features, we believe these are inadequate as they limit your PPC intelligence due to Google’s black box approach. For success in keyword bidding, it is important to be able to analyze all of the potential variables that impact conversions including those provided by conversion tracking and web Analytics. Continue Reading
Selecting PPC management software for Tourism & Hospitality Industry
There are many different requirements that businesses can have in regards to their PPC management software. When beginning the selection process for PPC management software, it is critical that a company first define its current and future requirements. On the other hand, you’ll want to make sure you have a clear picture of the features included in the PPC management software and associated costs so that you don’t end up paying for features that your business will not need.
Just as the requirements differ between industries and individual companies, so do the features offered by various PPC management software vendors. In other words, not all PPC management software is alike and not all is likely the best suited for your business.
In our research and development efforts, we have found that there are PPC campaign requirements typical of certain industries that tend to be particularly well-suited to the features offered by ClickSweeper. In particular, we have found that the requirements of e-Commerce and Tourism & Hospitality companies are especially well-suited to the features offered by ClickSweeper.
The Tourism & Hospitality industry relies heavily on paid search to generate leads and maximize sales. In this industry, the average sales price is relatively high. To maximize their advertising ROI, tourism and hospitality advertisers want to control both search networks as well as display networks in their bidding. ClickSweeper addresses this requirement by providing campaign management and bidding on both networks. Another characteristic of this industry is that it tends to attract good quality traffic from MSN Bing search as well as Google search. As a result, advertisers in this industry typically place a high level of importance on PPC bid management software that offers features covering both Google and MSN. This requirement is met through ClickSweeper’s bidding & campaign management feature; one of the features is campaign copy from Google campaign to MSN instantly.
Another characteristic commonly seen with companies in the e-Commerce and Tourism & Hospitality industries is that they tend to generate a high number of conversions. This characteristic is a prerequisite for running campaigns utilizing conversion based and ROI based bidding. While we have seen some companies, particularly in the hospitality industry, experiment with position based bidding; the trend favors ROI based bidding that maximizes conversions while containing acquisition costs. ClickSweeper’s bid management feature supports conversion based bidding, ROI driven bidding and position driven bidding. It also provides the flexibility to manage bid strategy at the keyword level giving advertisers the ability to select any one of the three bidding options for any keyword.
Finally, the economical pricing packages offered with ClickSweeper tends to win the favor of businessman who have a good ad budget but still want to lower software cost in Tourism & Hospitality industries.
In review, the close alignment of the features and pricing of ClickSweeper with the requirements of advertisers in the e-Commerce and Tourism & Hospitality industries makes it one of most well-suited PPC management software options available for these companies.
Keyword Matching Type Optimization
However, when conversion based keyword bidding evaluates keyword performance and identifies keywords that do not meet conversion goal, their bid price would be automatically adjusted downward which is likely to result in few to no clicks. And, this can result in loss of conversion opportunity which is undesired effect. To address this scenario, ClickSweeper has just added a new feature, Keyword Matching Type Optimization. With our new keyword optimization feature, the under-performing keyword will be given a new opportunity with the addition of the keyword with different matching type. Continue Reading
How important is ad position for paid search ad?
Marketers who utilize paid search advertising typically have one of two objectives:
- Building brand awareness
- Lead Generation and sales
The importance of ad position depends on which of these objectives you are trying to achieve. If your primary goal is to build brand awareness, achieving a top ad position is critical in a similar way that achieving page rank is critical in SERP (search engine results page). Commanding a top position represents dominance in the market, financial strength and marketing power. Securing a top position will increase brand awareness and generally translates into more clicks but at a higher cost per click. More people will see your ad but less than half of them will click. If your goal is brand awareness, this strategy can produce the desired results. Continue Reading
Guaranteed Improvement in Pay Per Click Ads – MSN Ads
The key is to focus on MSN search ad performance. Unfortunately, many advertisers either totally ignore MSN advertising, spending their entire ad budget on Google, or loosely manage their MSN account with the result being minimal traffic and poor ad performance.
As part of my responsibilities, I routinely review account performance for clients with our managed service plan. As part of this review process, I have identified many accounts with impressive MSN ad performance. As an example, local advertising for plastic surgeons and lawyers show MSN ad performance as good as or better than Google in terms of conversion performance. The MSN click volume for these clients sometimes equals that of Google and oftentimes is at least 50% of Google click volumes. As far as conversion performance; cost/conversion of MSN ads is often better than that of Google.