Google Shopping is an essential part of any retailer’s marketing campaign, but you can get more out of it than you might think. Faced with a pressure to continuously excel online, retailers need to understand their product performance data to thrive. Unfortunately, Google provides only limited campaign visibility, making it difficult to understand how your campaigns are performing.
To truly understand your brand’s product performance, you need an intelligent solution like Upp. Upp can be used to enhance Google Shopping campaign performance in a multitude of ways. Let’s look at the ways Google might be holding you back and how to fix the problems.
Google Shopping is often the foundation for ecommerce marketing, but because of the surface level data that it produces, it’s impossible to really know what’s working and what isn’t.
While Google provides data on high level metrics to determine the effectiveness of your overall performance, it doesn’t provide you with SKU level analysis of your entire campaign performance. That means you never have a real grip on individual product performance. Is one product selling better than another? Does your stock inventory reflect this? These are all questions that you need to be able to answer if you want to run a truly effective Google Smart Shopping campaign.
Your Smart Shopping campaign will only grant you visibility into your Google-native data — ignoring all other relevant retail datasets that have a very real, tangible impact on your campaign performance. To drive growth, you need to understand budgets, trends, demand, product feeds but also have access to additional retailer data like order data, cost of goods, site metrics and return rates. If you rely on Google Shopping alone, your metrics will inevitably fall short of a comprehensive campaign overview.
A platform like Upp will help you fully understand your data. This ensures you can make the necessary strategy changes dependent on performance.
An example of this would be unveiling that a leading customer acquisition product within your campaign is out of stock. If that’s the case, you can restock the product or Upp automatically redistributes your marketing accordingly to decrease wasted ad spend and improve the health of your marketing budget as a whole.
Unfortunately, switching Smart Shopping on doesn’t always work in your favour. The result may look promising with a sudden increase in impressions but that’s often followed by a dip — in other words, there are various Smart Shopping pitfalls you can fall prey to if you use it in isolation. Smart Shopping requires a lot of attention to work well and if not monitored, campaigns tend to push products that aren’t performing and not maximise visibility on your best sellers. If you cannot set up your Smart campaign in a way that ensures success and growth specifically for your business then it won’t be a fruitful venture. But it’s difficult to know how to do this perfectly for your unique requirements when you only have access to Google Shopping data.
Smart Shopping also produces common automation issues that can have a huge impact on your campaigns. But the biggest issue is the lack of transparency. If a Smart Shopping campaign fails, it’s impossible to analyse why. If it succeeds, you still can’t learn why or how to replicate your success.
Understanding how your business is performing is the key to success and having the right tools at hand will help. Upp will help you understand your data in a way Smart Shopping doesn’t through an exhaustive approach to datasets — retail and Google Shopping. You’ll understand why your campaigns are failing or thriving and Upp will guide you on how to make active and transformative changes — even automating this process at the click of a button!
Google Shopping only has the chance of intelligently executing your campaigns successfully if you invest a lot of time monitoring what’s working and what’s not — time that most brands don’t have. Even if a member of staff took on the role exclusively, it would be a heavily time-consuming and arduous process. On top of that, it wouldn’t be entirely fruitful due to Google’s lack of detailed data.
Upp takes the pain and time out of campaign management by intelligently automating the process. It will monitor campaign performance for you and automatically adjust and update campaigns. This allows you to be both efficient and effective, unlocking increased revenue for your marketing teams.
A positive of Google Shopping is that it allows you to set up multiple campaigns. But where it falls short is that it doesn’t consolidate your performance across those campaigns. These campaigns also aren’t aligned to your company objectives, such as revenue growth — essential in driving your business forward.
The problem becomes more complicated when you’re trying to track progress across different departments. For example, the marketing team may look at data metrics like ROAS without taking into account the bigger picture of achieving overarching company goals like growth — a divisive and vulnerable situation for a business to find themselves in and one that needs fixing immediately.
Consider setting your campaign target as ROAS optimisation. In many cases, Google will optimise your campaign to meet your ROAS target, for example 3:1 RoAS. But, Google’s restricted data access and collection can leave your campaigns poorly optimised. The Smart campaign may be hitting your ROAS target, but also could be ignoring poorly performing products altogether — which is not efficient for growth.
Upp can overcome this issue by giving you visibility into your wider retail data, as well as your Google-native data. Alongside reporting detailed data and automatically managing campaigns, Upp allows you to set your goals and targets, and then works to improve your campaign performance in line with these. Upp will automate these campaign changes and also align your budget with your goals.
Investing in a solution like Upp is your foolproof way to minimise the simplicity and even the damage of Google Shopping. It helps you understand your entire retail ecosystem, helping you make your ad spend healthier, your management more efficient, your goals aligned across departments and your overall growth better. That way, you’ll gain the competitive edge you need in order to excel within your industry.