Demystifying Smart Shopping Campaigns

June 15, 2019 by
Smart Shopping Campaign Optimzation & Best Practices
Smart Shopping Campaigns are a mix of standard shopping campaigns and display remarketing campaigns. It is backed by Google Ads machine learning and helps retailers maximize conversions while helping shoppers find the exact product they are looking for.
 
Before starting off with a Smart Shopping Campaign, ensure that your remarketing tags are properly implemented. If the tags are not implemented properly, you will see this error.


Remarketing Tags Smart Shopping Campaign
  • Pass In-App Events with required parameters via 3Ps, S2S, or Firebase
  • Recommended: 3rd Party App Analytics Partners (3Ps)
  • Currently, Branch is not supported. If you don’t have any supported 3rd Party App Analytics Partners, you can use Firebase
view_item
product View
view_item_list
Listing Page view
add_to_cart
Add to Cart
ecommerce_purchase
Purchase
 
Once your remarketing tags are all in place, you will see this:

Merchant Center Remarketing Tag Success
 
 
Next, it’s important to ensure that conversion tracking is implemented correctly – that is, conversions on both the mobile/desktop site and mobile app are getting tracked properly. For mobile app conversion tracking, we recommend Firebase or 3rd party mobile app analytics partners like Branch, Appsflyer, and Apsalar.
 
Bidding Strategy (Maximize Conversion Value – ROAS):

  • If you have a brand with fewer products and can’t afford to lose impressions on your brand’s related terms, then we suggest keeping the ROAS low.

    Smart Shopping Campaign ROAS Bidding

  • You can also try a Standard Shopping Campaign, which allows Manual CPC bidding, along with enhanced CPC. It will help you get greater search impressions.


    Manual CPC on Standard Shopping Campaign

  • Initially, it’s better to run a campaign at a lower ROAS, so that it can generate some conversion data. You can then gradually increase your ROAS to spend your allocated budget.

Product Schema for Automatic Item Updates:

  • You must add product schema on product pages. This will help Google in fetching important information like price and availability.
    Automatic Item Updates Merchant Center

    Merchant Center>> Products>> List

Optimize Product Titles:

Since Smart Shopping Campaigns don’t have the option to add keywords, we can add important keywords (like brand, product type, or colour) in the product’s title.

Recommended Structure
Example
Apparel Brand + Gender + Product Type + Attributes (Color, Size, Material)
Ann Taylor Women’s Sweater, Black (Size 6)


  • Create Size & Colour variants for each product using item_group_id

Variants can be made based on size and colour, and it’s better to create variants of each product. You just need to add the item_group_id field in your feed. Each variant should be submitted individually and then grouped together with item_group_id.
Product Variants Smart Shopping Campaign

Image Source: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324507?hl=en-GB

 
So, if there is a product which has the item id ‘12345’ on your site, you can put that as an item_group_id in your feed, and enter variants as individual products with the item id ‘12345-S-R’ where S denotes ‘small’ size, and R denotes ‘red’ colour. Please note that the item id starts with ‘12345’ which is the same as group_id, but it’s not compulsory to keep item_group_id same as item_id. It’s done to simply make data readable. 
 
Products with the same item_group_id need to have at least one different product attribute. Just make sure you add size and colour product attributes in the feed, and that each variant has a different size or colour attribute.
 
For example:
Green kurti M: item_group_id: kurti11 – color: green – size: M –  age_group: adult
Green kurti L: item_group_id: kurti11 – color: green- size: L –  age_group: adult
Brown kurti L: item_group_id: kurti11 – color: brown- size: L –  age_group: adult
Blue kurti M: item_group_id: kurti11 – color: blue – size: M –  age_group: adult


Tip for creating variants if you have existing products:

If you use the format mentioned above for creating variants, you will lose conversion data associated with those item ids. In this case, you need to keep one of your best performing variants as an existing item id. 
For example: 
In this case, you can use item_group_id as ‘12345G’ (G for the group for our own understanding) 
The rest of items can be:
12345-S
12345 (considering that the medium size is the best seller, we will use the existing item id data for this variant to preserve conversion data)
12345-L
12345-XL
 
  • Separate Campaign for Bestsellers
As you continue adding variants, the count of your products will increase and in this case, some of your products may never get exposure or impressions. You can use a custom label and mark your bestsellers which deserve impressions. 

Now, create another campaign with a lesser ROAS to give priority to your bestsellers over other products, and in product groups, put in the ones marked ‘bestseller’ on the custom label while excluding the remaining products. Also, don’t forget to exclude these products from your previous campaigns with higher ROAS. This will ensure that your bestsellers are not losing on impressions.
 
  • Product Type
Product Type is an important attribute for classifying products and matching with search queries. Further, it will help you in better analyzing the data based on the product categories.
 
Shopping Product Type Report
Product Type Report Shopping
    • Use the full ‘breadcrumb’ information. Wherever possible, including more granular categories is recommended as it classifies your product more precisely.
    • It’s alright to give the same values for google_product_category and product_type attributes e.g. Clothing & Accessories > Clothing > Activewear > Motorcycle Protective Clothing > Motorcycle Suits

  • Product ratings & customer reviews for boosting CTR

You can sign up for product ratings once you have at least 50 reviews on your website across all products. A valid GTIN for all those products would be a plus. 


You can apply for product ratings using this link: 
 

  • Create a dashboard to control products

You can create an internal dashboard to restrict certain products from showing up in the feed on the basis of the data you extract from campaigns, along with what you already know. You can apply a cap for the price range for different categories, show only specific brands, or remove any kind of price cap for some specific brands. 
 
So, why do you need to create a dashboard for this? Well, Google allows very limited functionality for applying rules on products. You can sort via custom labels or brands, and there’s nothing much to do. 

Errors

Missing value [gtin]:

Once you submit a blank value for a GTIN field, you need to add one more attribute – Identifier_Exists.
Just add the Identifier_Exists attribute with a value of FALSE or no for all products classified under this issue.
 
Keep in mind that if Google finds out the GTIN value of these products via some other merchants in case they provide it for the same products, it will reject these items from the feed, irrespective of your Identifier_Exists attribute. 
 
If you have a small set of products, you can look up the GTIN number from sites like upcitemdb or barcodelookup.
 

How Do I Fix It?

Recommended way:
Collect the GTIN number from sellers for each product, as it will help you in leveraging all features of the Smart Shopping Campaign (like product reviews).
 
Not recommended, but last possible solution:
You can remove the brand information from the product pages, schema, and feed for the set of products with this issue. Once it’s done, the Merchant Centre will most likely stop showing the Missing Value [gtin] error. 

Image too small:

If you can scale the images then it’s alright, otherwise, remove these item ids from the feed if you have created some dashboard/tool to create filters or rules for the products which need to be added to the feed.


Mismatched [price]: 

When the price on your product page changes more frequently than the number of times the Googlebot visits your product page, it can lead to mismatched price. 


Account warned for policy violations: Insufficient contact information

The product pages on your website must have links to your Refund Policy, Return Policy and Contact Form. It will be better if you implement it on all pages rather than just product pages. 

Incomplete Contact Information Merchant Center

Example of Amazon.com’s footer

 
 
You can ignore crawl rate related errors, like:
  • Image not retrieved (crawl pending)
  • Image not retrieved (crawl rate too slow)

 

Smart Shopping Campaigns aren’t that confusing after all! With the right tools and strategies, you can always boost your campaign further.

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Aakash Goyal

+Aakash+is a tech enthusiast who also keep on discovering latest seo and geeky tips.

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