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CONTENTS

WHY FOCUS ON PLAS DURING THE HOLIDAY SEASON? 3

PLAS ROCK PAID SEARCH TRAFFIC DURING THE HOLIDAYS 3

MOBILE MICRO-MOMENTS: GET YOUR BRAND IN FRONT OF YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE AT THE TOP OF THEIR PURCHASE FUNNEL 4

PLA MISTAKES TO AVOID THIS HOLIDAY SEASON 6

NOT USING PRODUCT ADS ON MOBILE DEVICES DURING THE HOLIDAYS 6

NOT HAVING HOLIDAY-SPECIFIC SHOPPING CAMPAIGNS WITH MERCHANT PROMOTIONS MEANS MISSED COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 10

NOT STAYING ON TOP OF GOOGLE’S POLICY SHIFTS 17

NOT OPTIMIZING YOUR DATA FEED 18

SHOPPING CAMPAIGN OPTIMIZATION PRIORITIES 18

DOING YOUR SEO FOR PLAS JUST MAKES SENSE 31

SUMMARY 32

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THIS HOLIDAY SHOPPING CAMPAIGNS EBOOK, BY NETELIXIR UNIVERSITY WILL Outline common PPC mistakes advertisers make with their Google Product Listing Ads and product feeds.

Provide actionable tips and best practices that will help you improve your online holiday shopping campaigns this year.

BEFORE READING ON, TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE

ABOUT THIS EBOOK’S CONTENT BY TAKING OUR

SHORT QUIZ AT - HTTP://BIT.LY/PLAEBOOK

WHY FOCUS ON PLAS DURING THE HOLIDAY

SEASON?

Why should you focus on your Google Shopping Campaigns and Bing Product Ads this online holiday shopping season? Keep reading for a couple of key reasons.

PLAS ROCK PAID SEARCH TRAFFIC DURING THE

HOLIDAYS

NetElixir expects PLAs to drive more than ½ of all paid search traffic this holiday season for key gift-oriented retailer sectors, such as women’s apparel, jewelry and watches, flowers and gifts, consumer electronics, and beauty supplies. We based that projection on the growth rates we saw last holiday season, as well as this year’s growth so far. For example, last year, retailers in those sectors experienced PLA order growth rates YOY that ranged from 173 - 416%, while revenue grew 184 – 447%. PLA-driven orders accounted for almost 30% of their entire online transactions for the season, not just of those driven by paid search. Although the ranges have narrowed a bit, triple digit growth rates still continue this year. For example, YOY order growth rates range from 174% to 242%. For some of these retailers, PLAs this holiday season might exceed ½ of their entire online holiday shopping sales, not just paid search sales!

X = 50% OF HOLIDAY SEASON

PAID SEARCH TRAFFIC WILL

COME FROM PLAS IN THESE

SECTORS:

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Figure 1 Holiday Season 2014 PLA Growth Rate Range Figure 2 2015 YTD PLA Growth Rate Ranges

MOBILE MICRO-MOMENTS ARE KEY OPPORTUNITIES TO GET YOUR BRAND IN FRONT OF YOUR TARGET

AUDIENCE AT THE TOP OF THEIR PURCHASE FUNNEL

1. The second key reason to use PLAs this holiday season is because user behavior is changing. Google recently introduced their idea

of ‘Mobile Micro-Moments’, which are the times when customers pull out their smartphones because: 2. They want to know something or find the answer to a question 3. They want to buy something and need information to help them make their decision 4. They want to go somewhere and need to know how to get there or want to know what options are nearby for say a Mexican

restaurant.

Figure 3 Typical Micmoments – source: Google

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Consumers are increasingly starting their shopping journeys on their phones. In fact, a study sponsored by Google back in 2013 showed that 81% of smartphone owners had spontaneously whipped out their phones to start shopping for something. Considering how Google has designed its mobile SERP with a carousel of expandable PLAs across the top that can push organic results out of sight, retailers who are not using PLAs to capture that first click on mobile devices are losing out.

PLAS ARE EFFECTIVE AS TOP AND MIDDLE OF THE FUNNEL PLAYS, NOT JUST

BOTTOM In our recent whitepaper on Mastering Attribution through Conversion Path Analysis, we pointed out that PLA ads outperform other campaign types for the Apparel and Fashion sectors, with respect to bringing prospects into the top of the conversion funnel. We went back to that dataset and isolated all of the conversion paths from all sectors that contained either a Bing or a Google Product Ad touchpoint. We then looked at the position of that PLA ad touchpoint in those paths.

The results, in Table 1, were a bit surprising: over ¾ of the orders and revenue from PLA-inclusive conversion paths have a PLA ad as the first step in the conversion funnel. When we isolated even further to exclude single step paths, PLAs still appeared as the first step most often, accounting for 50% of the orders. You can see why Product Ads may be a critical component for expanding your market reach this holiday season.

There is one other huge surprise in this data. Anytime PLA campaigns showed up in the middle of the conversion path, the AOV was 27% higher than for a single-click conversion. When you isolate down to PLAs that only appear in the middle and not as the first or last step, the AOV jumps another 20% to $102. Although the % of orders that have PLAs in the middle is much smaller, this fact reinforces that PLAs should be an integral part of your paid search efforts because they play a role for all positions in consumers’ journeys towards a purchase decision.

Without Last Step Direct

First Step, Any Path Length

Last Step, Any Path Length

Middle Steps, All Conv Path >2

Path =1

First, Path >1

Last, Path >1

Middle steps only, Path >2

Conv Count % 81% 67% 30% 40% 50% 26% 10%

Conv $ % 76% 63% 34% 36% 50% 27% 13%

AOV $ 69.45 $ 70.36 $84.57 $66.72 $72.11 $75.9 $101.88

Avg Path Length 2.18 1.82 6.35 1 3.34 3.08 8.73

Table 1 PLA Conversion Path Position Performance

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Figure 4 Average Order Value of PLA-Related Conversions by PLA Path Position

PLA MISTAKES TO AVOID THIS HOLIDAY SEASON

So now that you’re convinced to pay attention to your PLA ads, let’s review some key holiday shopping ad mistakes to avoid!

NOT USING PRODUCT ADS ON MOBILE DEVICES DURING THE HOLIDAYS.

As we outlined above, not having your PLAs appear on mobile devices is a critical mistake for any retailer, as you’ll be missing a large chunk of your market at the beginning of their customer journey. Another reason to enable mobile PLAs this holiday season is because of the amount of real estate that search engines dedicate to PLAs on mobile devices. Depending on your smartphone model, PLAs can take up from 25% to 45% of the “pre-swipe” real estate on the SERP, which pushes text ads and organic results further down the screen, sometimes even off the screen entirely.

$0.00

$20.00

$40.00

$60.00

$80.00

$100.00

$120.00

Path = 1 First, Path > 1 Last, Path > 1 Middle Only, Path >2

PLA AOV By Path Position

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This “pre-swipe” screen measurement does not consider Google’s carousel effect which can have 10 PLAs in it on a smartphone, nor does it consider the expanded format that happens once you swipe. Here are a few samples we recently measured for the amount of space PLAs take up:

Samsung S4 it’s 33.3%

Samsung S5 it’s 40.2%

iPhone 5S it’s 45.2%

On the iPhone, there were no organic results visible on the before swipe screen. We saw the same thing on a Samsung Note, which has a much larger screen than the iPhone.

BRICK AND MORTAR STORES - HEADS UP

For brick and mortar stores, the old reality of driving foot traffic is an outdated concept. Now it’s all about the finger traffic! Google has been studying the role of foot traffic on retail sales with a group of its larger brick and mortar accounts since 2010. Through 2013, they saw a 55% decrease in foot traffic, but more than a 2X increase in the value of each store visit. This means that consumers are visiting stores to buy, not necessarily to shop, and their loyalties are shifting from brands to their own needs, i.e. which store near me has what I need at this moment at the right price?

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Want a few more reasons to use mobile PLAs for the holiday season? Check out these statistics from the aforementioned study by Google in 2013:

Figure 5 Mobile Shopping Statistics from Google Research

65% of people begin shopping activity on their mobile devices

46% of people make purchases on their mobile devices

81% of people shop spontaneously on mobile devices

41% of people shop outside the home on mobile devices

A more recent study showed:

82% of consumers have done a search inside a store

66% of smartphone users had used their phone to look up a product they had just seen on TV

60% of smartphone owners had used their phone in the middle of a conversion event

39% of smartphone users had made a purchase on their phone in their kitchen

28% of smartphone users had made a purchase on their phone in their car

33% (1 out of 3) of consumers who have used their phone in a store to research a purchase, end up spending more than they would have had they not done the research

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Still not convinced you should be running your PLAs on mobile? How about these facts:

Mobile searches have surpassed desktop searches in 10

countries so far. This happened for the US last October (2014).

Current YOY run rates for mobile queries are up 20%, duration is down 18%, and conversion rates are up 29%. This tells you that users are finding what they are looking for more quickly and taking action when they do.

“Near Me” local searches have grown 2X.

Of the 100MM hours of watching “How to” YouTube videos per month, 65% is done on a smartphone.

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NOT HAVING HOLIDAY SPECIFIC SHOPPING CAMPAIGNS WITH MERCHANT PROMOTIONS MEANS A MISSED

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE. According to Google Shopping Campaign Specialist Sofia Altuna, using shopping campaigns specifically designed for peak selling seasons is an “under-utilized tactic that outperforms regular shopping campaigns”. In other words, creating a shopping campaign aimed at the specific characteristics of your customers’ shopping behavior during your peak season is a no-brainer way to create a short-term competitive advantage. What makes a peak selling season shopping campaign different from a regular shopping campaign? One element can be the merchant promotion feed. What are merchant promotions?

Merchant promotions are not to be confused with the promotional text you could add to your PLA ads in AdWords that Google recently announced will be discontinued. Merchant promotions are set up in your Merchant Center account. You populate them via a data feed that you submit for processing similar to the way you submit your product feeds or you can manually add them with the +Promotion tool in the Merchant Center. Merchant promotions content appears underneath your Google Shopping ad with a price tag icon and the words “Special Offer”-- see Figure 6 for an example. You can immediately see in Figure 6 how merchant promotions can create a competitive advantage. Where is a consumer more likely to click in this set of PLA ads? On the two retailers who have Special Offer links.

For those of you who like facts or evidence to back up claims of competitive advantage or superior performance, here’s the beef. Figure 7 below compares the performance of shopping campaigns to all of the other text ad campaigns for some clients who know a thing or two about beef during the holidays. The percentages represent the change in the key metrics shown, (CTR, ROAS, and conversion rate), from before the holidays started to during the holidays. The key piece of information to make sense of this chart is that these clients added merchant promotions to their shopping campaigns just for the holidays. So, in this case, the other search campaigns had losses in their CTR and ROAS (not uncommon during the holidays when competition can be fiercest), and a nice bump that doubled their conversion rate (also not uncommon in the holidays) versus substantial gains across all 3 metrics for the PLAs. You can see the impact the Merchant Promotions had on the relative performance of the PLAs.

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Figure 6 Example of a Shopping Campaign Ad with Merchant Promotion Attached

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Figure 7 Merchant Promotion Feed Impact During Holiday Selling

THE RUNDOWN TO AVOIDING THIS MISTAKE: Add a separate shopping campaign that focuses your budget on your top historical holiday sellers. Set that campaign to High Priority when the holidays hit. Set your regular campaigns to Medium or Low priority so that the holiday shopping campaign takes precedence. Remember that priority trumps bids when it comes to deciding which Shopping Campaign will be matched to a given query. Use a merchant promotion, especially if your competitors are not, even if your offer is part of your everyday value proposition. For example, if you offer free shipping on orders above a threshold, create a promo code for that threshold and include it in a merchant promotion. If you give every buyer a free gift with their purchase, message that in your merchant promotion. You can run the same merchant promotion for up to 6 months.

NX PLA TIPS: 1. Add separate campaigns aimed

at top historical holiday sellers and

set priority to High.

2. Use the merchant promotion feed

even if you don’t have a promo.

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USEFUL LINKS

Merchant Promotions Help Center https://support.google.com/merchants/topic/2877465?hl=en&ref_topic=3404821

Merchant Promotions Quick Guide

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bUP3KcrjtUxE08-IqYqHT0oXbW72x7ZCpDqSBwO2b-I/edit#

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NOT STRUCTURING YOUR CAMPAIGNS WITH THEMES FOR BUDGET AND BIDDING PURPOSES. Do you know how to structure your campaigns for optimal success? Often times when NetElixir takes over management of a client’s shopping campaigns, we find all their products thrown into one big campaign with no logical segmentation. The problem with having all your products in one campaign is that dominant SKUs can consume all of your budget and your other SKUs will never get much exposure, if they even get any at all. NetElixir has a client that has 1 product with 25 SKU variants that contributes more than ½ of its online revenue. That’s right, 1 product produces more than 50% of its sales. Talk about a Pareto principle! That product has its own shopping campaign while the rest of the client’s portfolio is split into different product groups in a 2

nd shopping campaign. Another client who sells 3

rd party brands plus its own brands, has its

own branded items in one campaign while the others go in a 2nd

campaign. In both cases, the clients have better flexibility to control spend for their top performers.

Figure 8 below shows a PLA campaign that goes to the other extreme: segmentation that is too granular. Notice that the competitive intelligence columns for Benchmark information and Search Impression Share are empty for the items in the electronics product group. The reason for this is that those individual products did not generate enough impression data for Google to present statistically valid competitive intelligence. Had those items been lumped together into logical groups, such as tablets, laptops, and TVs, it’s likely that competitive intelligence would have been available.

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Figure 8 Poorly Designed Shopping Campaign

We recommend an approach to Shopping Campaigns and Product Ads that organizes your products into campaigns with logical themes, such as by type of product, and to then spread your budget across those campaigns in a weighted fashion to ensure all products get some exposure, while top sellers and performers get the most. A common approach for us when structuring or restructuring a client’s PLA campaigns is known as a hybrid approach (see Figure 9). In this approach, we will separate the client’s portfolio for each key line of business into its own PLA campaign, and then segment the product groups for bidding purposes based on a combination of category, brand, and performance considerations.

Figure 9 Breaking down a PLA Campaign

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Figure 10 shows 3 typical structures for shopping campaigns. The top example is a very logical approach to segmenting your campaign by product and brand.

You start with your top level product categories (in this example, Apparel).

You then break that down into logical further buckets, such as gender.

You then divide those buckets into individual brand product groups, so that ‘Brand X women’s slacks’ gets a different bid structure than ‘Brand X men’s slacks’.

The next example is of a retailer who focuses on sales performance first when segmenting its portfolio. This is a similar approach to our client with the single product producing more than ½ its revenue. Here you can see the retailer leverages the Custom Label fields in the product feed to apply a segmentation that groups its items into 3 margin buckets, each of which has a stratified bidding strategy. The last example combines the previous two ideas. It involves product type segmentation, and then product performance segmentation to those product types. This is very similar to the hybrid approach we have deployed for a number of our clients.

Figure 10 Typical PLA Campaign Structures

We took a look at clients where we had applied the hybrid approach of combining logical segmentations with performance characteristics to their shopping campaigns. We compared the 90 days prior to our taking over their account to the first 90 days afterward. The next 2 graphics show the results. One fact that makes these results even more outstanding is that the industries of these clients are all dealing with average CPC “inflation” of 18 to 24 % YOY across all device categories, and yet this approach cut CPCs by 4.4%.

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Table 2 Benefits of Hybrid PLA Structure

Metric 90 Days Before NX Managed 90 Days After NX Managed

Conversion rate 4.84 5.57

CPC $.68 $.65

ROAS 4.06 6.27

CPA 14.11 11.69

Figure 11 Change in PLA Performance After Hybrid Approach

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THE RUNDOWN TO AVOIDING THIS MISTAKE: 5. Apply the Pareto Principle and understand how your product portfolio performs. Does this pattern hold year-round, or do you have

distinct seasonal patterns to consider for their own product ad campaigns? Knowing you control spend at the campaign level, how should your portfolio be divvied up into separate campaigns?

6. Think about how you would like your product sales portfolio to look. Which products, categories, and brands do you want to see at the top of your list? Which campaign structure strategy will place maximum exposure on those items?

7. Remember you can have the same product in multiple shopping campaigns. Use the Campaign Priority settings to control which campaign takes precedence.

NOT STAYING ON TOP OF GOOGLE’S POLICY SHIFTS. A policy shift by Google can come at any time and have a domino effect on your PLA campaigns. Take a look at Figure 12, which shows a Merchant Center Dashboard that had a sudden increase in disapproved products. You can see that over the course of just a couple of days, the number of disapproved products jumped by about 50%.

Figure 12 Merchant Center Dashboard With Sudden Jump in Disapproved Products

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NX PLA TIPS: 1. Review your Merchant Center

error reports regularly. 2. Enable all Merchant Center data

processing notifications.

3. Add Google Analytics alerts for sudden drops in PLA traffic.

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NOT OPTIMIZING YOUR PRODUCT FEED. We know product data feeds can be an online retailer’s worst nightmare. We also know the challenges you may face, such as: Using an internal ERP system as the source for your product feed Using your website content to populate your feed and the following fun task of figuring out how to remove all of the HTML markup from your description fields. Knowing that your website content for all your products is not optimized for search engines or for driving conversions. Having a website that lists all SKU variants on a single product page URL. OK, we’ll stop there. We feel your pain. That said, we’re here to tell you that optimizing some key

elements in your data feed, (and they may not be the ones you think they are), is critical for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your Product Ads.

WHERE TO START?

We will answer that question with another question, which is from our quiz at the beginning of this ebook:

WHICH OF THESE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ATTRIBUTE TO OPTIMIZE IN YOUR GOOGLE PRODUCT FEEDS? A. Title B. Description C. Unique Product Identifiers (UPIs) D. Product Attributes

SHOPPING CAMPAIGN OPTIMIZATION PRIORITIES The answer might surprise you. Here is Google’s advice on where to prioritize your efforts when improving your product feed.

Unique Product Identifiers (UPIs) – Extra kudos to those of you who got this right. UPIs are: o Your Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), commonly known in the US as UPC codes and ISBN numbers. o Manufacturer Part Numbers (MPN) – generally, this is the number or code the manufacturer uses internally, and sometimes

externally, to identify one of its products. o The product’s brand. More on this later. Google’s view on this might surprise you.

Title – Your product’s name. Simple. Just copy this from your website content database to your product detail pages, right? Wrong! For most of you, if you do this you’ll be leaving money on the table.

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Description – Important for query matching and for the users who go to the Google Shopping interface, rather than clicking through to an advertiser’s site.

Images – Duh! PLAs are a visual medium. Having product thumbnails that are too small to see your product or poorly photographed images are shooting yourself in the foot.

UPIS OK, you might be saying to yourself, “my feed’s not in bad shape…I have the required 2 out of 3 for every one of my products”. You are right, your feed is not in bad shape, but it’s not in great shape either! Think about it, the UPIs, especially GTIN and MPN, are the most important product feed values.

WHY ARE GTIN AND MPN THE MOST IMPORTANT? Because they are numbers. What’s great about numbers? They are unique! There is no way you can have two numbers match and be different numbers. Therefore, if you are the programmer who has to write the algorithm that combs through millions, probably billions of product feed records to figure out which ones refer to the exact same product, what are you going to look for? A unique identifier that all of the records share. This is why UPCs and ISBNs were invented in the first place. Take a look at this string of text characters: “TREK ROAD BIKE, aluminum, 51 cm, black” Could you see this string of characters being used to describe a particular bike on a retailer’s web site? We do. Look below to see what bikes Google thinks this string refers to.

Not taking advantage of the 150 characters for

a product title is leaving money on the table.

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Figure 13 Google Shopping Results Page

How many different bikes do you see on this page? 8? Although we thought our intent was pretty clear that we were looking for a Trek black bike, how many non-bike products do you see? 4? Now, we hope you understand why GTIN and MPN should be 100% populated in your product feed with 100% accurate numbers. You want to make Google’s life as easy as possible to identify your products so that they will be put in the right query bucket. For the companies that make the bike helmets shown above, you can debate whether or not their products have been put into the right query buckets. If you need to crawl before you can walk with respect to optimizing your UPIs, try to get your Pareto SKUs (aka your 80/20 rule) 100% complete and accurate. You’ll still be leaving money on the table, but at least it won’t be your biggest pile.

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NEW MANUFACTURER CENTER PUTS EVEN MORE EMPHASIS

ON UPIS Google announced a new feature for manufacturers called the Manufacturer Center in July of 2015. You can think of the Manufacturer Center like a Merchant Center that is only available for manufacturers, where those manufacturers can load all sorts of information about their products, such as correct UPC codes, product attributes like color or size, product technical specifications, their own descriptions, and more. One cool marketing feature is the Manufacturer Center’s Analytics Dashboard, which in a way is similar to what Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting in Google Analytics does for retailers. This dashboard shows the manufacturer how often their SKUs appear on Google. So if you’re the VP of Ecommerce or the CMO for an online or omnichannel retail business that sells other manufacturers’ products, why should you care about Google’s Manufacturer Center announcement?

There are 2 implications for you. 1. SKU Eligibility for Ads - We know how difficult it can be to gather and maintain accurate GTIN information for all of the SKUs you

sell, especially if your business has a lot of turnover each year. Now you have to deal with how Google’s algorithms have a new “trusted” source for accurate GTIN by manufacturer: the manufacturer themselves. If your value for a SKU’s GTIN differs from the manufacturer’s, e.g. someone opened your product feed in Excel and inadvertently dropped the leading zero from the UPC code, then your product might be disapproved for ads. Joy, Joy.

2. Search Engine Rankings & Product Conversion Rates – One of the largest challenges online retailers face when it comes to selling other people’s products is creating product copy or content on their site. You have to find a way to provide the same basic information that all your competitors do while still coming up with a way to make your copy more compelling to both the end user and to the search engine algorithms that determine where your product page shows up in a related query. Now, with Manufacturer Centers in the mix, you have to find a way to differentiate your product copy from the company who makes the product as well.

One last tip: If you want the Google Shopping algorithm to be your friend, give it SKU-specific GTIN and MPNs, not manufacturer or brand level numbers. Just remember, you want your bike ads to appear for people looking to buy bikes, not bike helmets.

Figure 14 Analytics Dashboard in Google’s New Manufacturing Center feature

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BRANDS, PARENT-CHILD BRANDS, SUB-BRANDS – THE 3RD UPI Take a look at the toy in Figure 15. If you were creating the Merchant Center entry for Mr. Potato Head, what would you put down for his brand name?

A. Disney B. PIXAR C. Hasbro D. Mr Potato Head E. Playskool

The correct answer, in Google’s eyes, is C, Hasbro. This came as a bit of a surprise to the majority of the audience at a recent Google Shopping Guru Day, including the NetElixir representative at that event. That disclosure also produced one of the more lively discussions at that event. Some marketers would tell you that Hasbro is just the manufacturer and Playskool is the brand, while others would argue that Mr. Potato Head is a brand unto himself. Why is this important? The 2

nd surprise at that event for most in the audience is that since brand is

considered by Google to be one of the 3 UPIs, if you incorrectly “brand” an item, you are at risk for disapproval. That’s right: call Mr. Potato Head a Playskool brand item and your ad might never

show up for a query for “Playskool Mr. Potato Head Figure”.

NETELIXIR’S GOOGLE SHOPPING BRANDING RULES 1. The Parent Brand always goes in the Brand attribute. If applicable, you can add your Child

Brand or Sub-brand into the title. Character length permitting, you can even add your Parent Brand at the end of your title with a “by <Parent Brand>”. For example, Playskool Mr. Potato Head by Hasbro.

2. Not sure which is the brand, which is the sub-brand (e.g. Hasbro vs Playskool)? Check what Google Shopping has for that item. This is a good practice for any keyword for which you are unsure of Google’s interpretation. Just enter the term into Google and see what kind of results you get. Here in Figure 16, you can clearly see that in Google’s mind, Hasbro is the brand. Note how the one vendor has the sub-brand or child brand, Playskool, as the first word in its product title.

3. In the Brand attribute of your feed, do not include any reference to the product or to your store, just list the brand name of the product. These are other reasons for disapprovals. “Hasbro at Toys R Us” as a brand value will not fly.

Figure 15 Mr. Potato Head

Figure 16 Google Shopping View of Mr Potato Head Products

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NX UPI TIPS: 1. Include all UPI info for your Pareto SKUs 2. Use SKU-level GTINs or MPNs, not manufacturer 3. No product names or store names in the Brand field 4. Retailers – demand accurate GTINS from suppliers.

Fill in gaps using 3rd

party data like eandata.com 5. Mfrs – provide accurate GTINs. Consider joining

data networks like gs1.org/gdsn for syndicating sku info to your channel.

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SEO FOR PLAS: TITLE & DESCRIPTION OPTIMIZATION FOR CLICKS AND QUERY MATCHING If you are like most of the retailers we work with (and most of our employees prior to the recent Google Shopping Guru event), you probably thought the Title or Product Name field was the most important part of your product feed. Although it’s not the most important for helping Google identify which query sets your products belong in, the title is still the most important for the outcome that you care the most about: clicks that lead to conversions. The UPIs are critical for ensuring that your products get approved for ads and for ensuring that they get associated with the right query sets, but those are more back office functions that don’t really have a direct impact on your clicks or conversions. That said, your product name, and to a lesser extent, the description field, do directly impact your clicks and conversions. The key to optimizing those results is a process we call SEO for PLAs.

SERVING 2 MASTERS The title and description fields serve 2 masters when it comes to serving Product Listing Ads. First is the back office function that determines for a particular query in a queryset if your product ad is one of the top 8 to 10 relevant ads. The second master, where the rubber meets the road, is on those actual SERPs where a human is trying to determine which option on that page will yield them the shortest path to the outcome they had in mind when they entered their query. The tried and true principles of direct response marketing, plus a little common sense, take over.

WHY DO WE CALL IT SEO FOR PLAS? Because, like SEO for your site, the goal is to get your “listing”, (in the PLA case, your ad), to appear on the first page in the visible portion of the page for a given query or set of queries, and then to have the user decide to click on your listing, rather than all of the other options they see. If there is one area where you can create an advantage for yourself, it’s in that latter step of enticing the click on your ad. While we don’t have empirical data to support this claim, it is something we have observed from our collective years of experience working with and for retailers in the search space. We’ve found that many retailers and SEO “experts” take a more mechanical or scientific approach to their SEO efforts, including their product feed SEO efforts, which ignores the “art” or “right brain” aspect.

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LEFT BRAIN SEO FOR PLAS That said, let’s first talk about the left brain side of SEO for PLA: the part that optimizes your feed for matching specific queries within the queryset that Google has already placed your products in after processing your UPIs. We’ll then visit the right brain aspect of SEO for PLA. Here are tips for optimizing your title and description for query matching that are based on our experience and suggestions from the Product Specialists at Google.

TITLE Use all of the characters the product feed allows. For example, Google Shopping Campaigns allow you 150 characters. You can say

a lot in 150 characters-- Just ask Twitter.

Include the product’s brand in the title. For both query matching and enticing clicks, you want to use the brand term that consumers use to describe your product. Use Google Trends to help you figure out which term they use most frequently to describe your brand. Using our previous example of Mr. Potato Head, you can see in Figure 17 that the sub-brand Playskool is used more often than the parent brand Hasbro.

Figure 17 Google Trends Example

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Add the product category term. For example, Schwinn Women’s Phocus 1600 Road Bike.

Use converting keywords, not just high traffic terms. This is one key difference between regular SEO efforts and SEO for PLAs. Google uses the expected performance of your ad in its Ad Rank calculations, so focusing on including converting keywords for query matching will increase your Ad Rank for search terms where your odds for a conversion are better.

Optimize the first 22 to 70 characters for clicks, and then optimize the remaining “hidden” 80 characters for query matching.

Add product attribute data like size, color, style, type, etc. to your title, especially for variant SKUs. For example, if the variant feature is color, each SKU’s title should include the color. If you don’t have room to add important product attributes in the first 70 characters, make sure you have them in the “hidden”, or post-truncated 80 characters, so that your ads can be matched to queries containing product attributes, e.g. women’s red dress, size 6, petite.

DESCRIPTION: Include the product name, brand, sub-brand (if applicable), product category, and appropriate product attribute information.

If applicable, add keyword variants for both the product and product category.

Target 1,000 characters for your description length, despite the 5,000 character limit listed in the specification.

RIGHT BRAIN SEO FOR PLAS - DIRECT RESPONSE MARKETING & COMMON SENSE Optimizing your feed for generating clicks is where you get to apply your right brain and common sense. Refer back to Figure 6, which was our example of PLAs with a merchant promotion. There are 4 elements in a PLA that most retailers have control over that can make their ad more enticing than a competitor’s.

1. The image 2. The title 3. The price 4. Merchant promotions

Our tips here are going to focus on the title. We have already covered the 4

th item, merchant promotions. Price is self-evident and since

there are instances where a retailer’s hands are tied with respect to advertised price, such as MAP programs, we’ll skip that element. Similarly, we’ve mentioned images already and there are also situations where retailers’ hands may be tied with respect to the product images in their PLAs as well. For example, when resources to do their own photography are not available so they use manufacturer provided images, or when the manufacturers require that their channel partners use their provided images. The net result is that many of the PLA ads will have the same image. For example, in Figure 6, you can see 2 of the 5 have the same product image. That just leaves the title.

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TIP #1 – FRONT LOAD THE TITLE WITH IMPORTANT TERMS TO YOUR USERS - COMMON SENSE WHEN YOU THINK

ABOUT IT If you look at a typical PLA grid on either Bing or Google (See figures 18 through 21}, you get at most 22-26 characters to communicate to your audience what your product is before your title gets truncated. In the Google Shopping search engine, you have the old Google Base limit of 70 characters to convey that information before truncation occurs. Once you realize these limits, it’s common sense that you would want those visible characters to contain terms that appeal to most of your users. The right brain challenge comes in when you’re determining how to optimize those 22 to 70 characters.

Length Visible Name

22 New Balance W940V2 Wom

23 New Balance Women's W89

24 New Balance 680 V2 Runni

24 New Balance Running Shoe

22 Men's New Balance 810V

23 New Balance 10804 Men's

25 New Balance 574 Sweatshir

24 Women's New Balance 3190

Figure 18 Google SERP PLA Example - New Balance Running Shoes

Figure 19 Length of Visible Titles in Google PLA Grid

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Figure 20 Bing SERP Product Ad Example - New Balance Running Shoes

Figure 20 Bing Product Ad Grid Visible Title

Length Visible Title

24 New Balance Men's M1080v

26 New Balance Men's Leadvill

25 New Balance Men's M890v4

25 New Balance 8102 Men's Ru

25 New Balance 7803 Men's Ru

24 New Balance Men's Vazee

25 New Balance 771 Men's Run

26 New Balance 10v3 Trail Run

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TIP#2 – PUT HIGH VALUE, HIGH DEMAND BRAND NAMES IN THE VISIBLE PORTION OF THE TITLE. If the brand name of the item is a popular one or a high value brand, it makes sense to put some variation of that name as far in the front as possible of those first 22-26 characters. If the brand of the item is a lesser known or lower value brand, you may be better off putting it later in your title, so it appears after the truncation. You can then front-load your title with other terms that you believe consumers will be looking for when deciding where to click. When it comes to which brand name to choose, as mentioned earlier, with 150 characters to use, you can usually get both the parent brand and sub-brand in the title. If character limits are at play, choose the brand term your audience knows the product by (see Figure 17).

TIP #3 - ADD THE ATTRIBUTES TO YOUR VISIBLE PORTION THAT MAKE YOUR PRODUCT UNIQUE. Figure 22 demonstrates this idea. The addition of “Women’s Polka Dot” differentiates the ad on the right from the more generic version on the left.

TIP #4 – ADD LAYMAN’S TERMS FOR INDUSTRY JARGON Figure 22 represents another good practice for title optimization, which is adding everyday language to augment or replace manufacturer-specific jargon. For example, in industries like art or home décor, there are hundreds of different color names. Adding the color family name of yellow to the title of items with colors like Lemon Twist, Daisy or Forsythia will help increase your matched queries. Let’s look at an example that demonstrates some of these tips. In Figure 18, you will notice that 7 of the 8 SKUs in that PLA grid have model number references in the visible portion of the title. We questioned that choice and took a look in Google Trends. Figure 23 shows the results of comparing our original query and a query containing one of the model references in our result set. Very few people are entering the model number, which implies that those characters in the visible title could have been used more effectively to entice more clicks.

Figure 21 Google Trends Comparison

Figure 22 Adding Unique Attributes

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Figure 24 shows the PLA results of our model number-specific query. We will use the Zappos ad as our example. The original title, shown in Table 3, is just 40 characters long. You can see our suggestion for an improved version that incorporates some of our tips. Note that at 130 characters, there is still room to add terms that could increase query matching. Based on the content of the product detail page, we chose to put the word “mesh” near the front, as mesh is associated with a couple of the key features of this shoe. You’ll also notice that we abbreviated the brand name in the beginning of the title and spelled it out fully at the end. By doing so, we are able to articulate that the product is a Women’s Mesh Running Shoe in those first 25 characters. For the 70 character visible title, we added the size variant, the extra cushion arch support and the branded term “Abzorb”. In the hidden characters, we added the other variant color, another adjective, the model number and the complete brand.

Table 3 Title Optimization Example

ORIGINAL VERSION New Balance W940V2 Women's Running Shoes

IMPROVED VERSION NB Women's Mesh Running Shoe Sz 9, Xtra Cushion Arch Support, Abzorb Shock Absorber, White/Blue, Lightweight, New Balance W940V2

FIRST 25 CHARS NB Women's Mesh Running S

FIRST 70 CHARS NB Women's Mesh Running Shoe Sz 9, Xtra Cushion Arch Support, Abzorb S

TIP #5 – UPDATE YOUR FEEDS DAILY We have seen anecdotal evidence that the freshness of your feed seems to correlate to performance, even to the point where we were loading some client feeds on a daily basis, regardless of whether or not anything had changed. Now, Google is recommending that you update your feed daily instead of the previously recommended weekly updates. There are 2 features available to help you automate those updates: a scheduled fetch and the content API. There is also a feature that helps keep your Merchant Center information as accurate as possible called Automatic Item Updates. Your site must have schema.org metadata in place to use this. If it does, Google will automatically update you on any discrepancies it finds between your site and the Merchant Center, such as price mismatches or stock position mismatches.

Figure 22 Model Number Query PLA Results

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TIP #6 – STANDARDIZE THE ATTRIBUTE FIELDS TO

MATCH GOOGLE’S SPECIFIED VALUES Although Google is getting better at recognizing synonyms and variants, they require specific values to be used when passing information into the Merchant Center via product attribute fields like Gender, Age and Condition. For example, the values for Gender are Male, Female and Unisex, not Men’s, Women’s, Girls, Boys, etc.

DOING YOUR SEO FOR PLAS JUST MAKES SENSE If you’re wondering if all of this effort is worth it, we promise you it is. Figure 25 represents the results of a PLA title and description optimization that NetElixir performed in the cosmetics industry. The chart compares the PLA performance after optimization of the title and description to the same length of time prior to the change. No other changes were made to the campaign at this time than the updated titles and descriptions. The values are indexed against the before optimization levels, which are set to a value of 100. You can see that by optimizing the title and description, we almost doubled the impressions, and with the CTR growing by 11%, clicks more than doubled. Another Google client increased their PLA sales by 266% just by adding a brand and a product category keyword to the title.

Figure 23 Title and Description Optimization Impact

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SUMMARY Here are the 5 key actions you need to take to avoid mistakes this holiday season with your Google Shopping Campaigns and Bing Product Ad Campaigns.

Use seasonal Google Shopping campaigns to boost performance during peak selling seasons.

Use PLAs on mobile devices to optimize your share of mobile SERP pages, and use ETC to measure success.

Structure your Google Shopping Campaigns with budgeting and bidding strategies in mind.

Stay on top of Google Merchant Center’s policy shifts.

Optimize your data feed starting with UPIs, Titles, and Descriptions. If you have any questions on the content of this ebook or could use some help optimizing your PLA campaigns for the holidays, feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to help!

HERE’S TO INCREASING YOUR PLA CONVERSIONS!

THE NETELIXIR UNIVERSITY TEAM

FOR MORE INFORMATION Call NetElixir at 609-356-5112 or visit www.netelixir.com Join NetElixir University on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=4626057 Follow us on Twitter @NetElixir For over 10 years, NetElixir has been helping 100’s of online retailers succeed in their search marketing efforts. Our services cover PPC management, SEO, Product Listing Ads & CSEs, Mobile Advertising, Social Media Marketing, Web Analytics and Google Analytics Consulting. NetElixir University is our complimentary educational program that provides businesses with proven strategies and analytical tools for running successful search marketing campaigns. Through webinars, workshops and data-driven whitepapers, our goal is to train 10,000 businesses on the best practices of search marketing.

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