Spend more Wisely – With a PPC Agency or Without

The mandatory rollout of Performance Max campaigns (PMC) has placed online retailers in a tight spot over a perceived loss of control over their Google Shopping campaigns. To rectify this unease, many are considering taking up third-party solutions or placing all their bets on their PPC agency or team.

There is however a better way – that works with whatever format you have, be that an in-house PPC Team, a PPC agency or the suite of reporting tools that you analyze.

PPC Agencies are the experts on best-practice and if you’ve hired your own in-house PPC experts this may well have given you a competitive edge.  However, Google’s upgrade of Google Shopping to Performance Max is set to bring advanced automation to the board, and with this comes an opportunity for retailers to spend their ad budget more wisely.

No agency or in-house team can work continuously 24/7 to maximize ad performance opportunities.  No one can combine and read all the data, make all the adjustments in real-time, and spot the trends as they happen in order to capitalize on them.

Upp Can

And Upp can do this directly for retailers, brands and marketplaces.  OR work with their PPC agencies to enhance their performance and allow them to concentrate on higher-value decisions and actions.

Upp is an operating system for retail trading that empowers timely decision making (not costly retrospectives). Upp’s retail intelligence technology is constantly optimising, adjusting and performing so that retailer’s can focus on their product and customers rather than wading through large volumes of data.  Upp gives retailers or their PPC agencies a full commercial picture of how they are trading in real time and complete control over the levers they have to change business outcomes.

Upp is the ONLY solution that has always worked with Google Shopping (Performance Max), not against it, to fill the gaps naturally left by humans and reporting suites.  Experts in retail trading, whether businesses themselves or PPC agencies, must step away from relying on best practice (and gut instinct) and instead turn to the right automation that drives the right outcomes.

Suggested reading: Find out all you need to know about winning Google Shopping in the face of Performance Max with our latest Guide, Success with Performance Max.

Gain optimal ROI in your Google Shopping

Performance Max comes with some considerable improvements over previous campaigns but still does not resolve the black box that is Google Shopping — which means that online retailers will still have little to no visibility on how Google is promoting their products or spending their budget. 

This is where Upp comes in by combining data and providing full control and transparency.   Effectively bridging gaps within Google Shopping that will continue with Performance Max. And these gaps cannot be fully bridged by any agency or in – house team and they simply don’t have the time or the AI needed to do it.

Upp delves deeper – we don’t use a category split on your inventory. Instead, Upp runs accounts by item ID, splitting by marketing and inventory metric performance, which allows Upp to control spending against all SKUs and provide transparency on exactly how much each SKU is receiving in Ad Spend versus Actual Revenue generated. Meaning you can finally align your long and short term business goals with Google Shopping and have full visibility and transparency of how Upp is achieving these for you.

Upp implements AI and machine learning to automate and optimize your Google Shopping campaigns and integrates Google data with 100’s of product performance data points from your entire sales ecosystem.  This gives you comprehensive insight into your performance – to better make business decisions and achieve your revenue potential… 

Let’s look at how Upp helped a UK-based retailer effectively drive their ROI

Men’s clothing retailer Charles Tyrwhitt wanted to capitalise on the rising trend of formal, yet comfortable office wear in light of hybrid workplaces becoming the norm. With over 1450 product lines, it became quite difficult for the brand to effectively analyse performance and optimise Google Shopping accordingly.

With Upp, the cost of new customer acquisition was brought down considerably within minimal time while increasing the conversion rate by 5% on average per day. This resulted in Charles Tyrwhitt gaining an excellent ROI uplift of 14x, a metric that would have been impossible to achieve without Upp.

In short, Upp uses Performance Max, enriches your data, bridges existing data gaps and — where there is no or limited data on your products — uses Standard Shopping to test, gather insights, and further optimise campaigns. Agencies, alone will miss out on an accurate data-led approach due to their limited scope of manual data handling. 

Suggested reading: Online retailers need to educate themselves on everything Performance Max has in store — get started with our blog, The Performance Gaps of Performance Max.

Upp v PPC Agency Alone

• Agencies implement best practice, not real-time solutions
• Generalised strategies are OK, business centric ones compared to real time market indicators are better
• Agencies rely on percentage of budget spent and don’t need to be aligned to business goals
• Upp improves granular level visibility
• No human team can optimise and perform 24/7
• No human team can spot trends in real time and action them instantly
• No human team has the access to data that Upp affords

Lack of granular level visibility

Collating and interpreting data from the SKU level is key to improving the profitability of products. SKU-level visibility is critical to understanding your product performance, leading to more effective campaigns and better strategies for growth. Agencies that do not use an advanced platform like Upp can never utilise SKU-level data for optimising campaigns, which considerably reduces the overall effectiveness of such services. 

Restricted resources and workflows

The technology that agencies utilise to optimise Google Shopping mostly relies on manual changes and is solely based on Google data. While it is no doubt a reliable data point, there are several other equally important data sources across your sales ecosystem. Agencies completely miss out on these data points — meaning that their analysis cannot deliver the actionable insights vital to a winning strategy.

Suggested reading: See how Upp stack against PPC Agencies and existing PPC Solution Providers

Choose your next step carefully

We’ve shown that working with Upp, whether you retain and agency or not, is worthwhile.  But what about Upp’s alternative? Historically platforms similar to Upps retail trading intelligence platform have competed with Google’s Performance Max rather than work with it. Very recently some have changed this as why would you want to “fight” Google who has undoubtedly the best technology for online shopping?  

Upp is not only backed by Google Shopping experts, we bring the most advanced technology-driven solution to optimise your campaigns and deliver optimal ROI. We have ALWAYS worked to enhance Google Shopping and built our platform to work WITH the technology.  Therefore we have the most nascent AI and advanced ML on the market to support your business. Upp prevents both overspending and underspending, and utilises Ad Budget to its fullest, helping you get more reach and higher sales. 

Upp is the only solution out there

Upp’s connected retail performance platform delivers what agencies and  similar platforms cannot:

• The most advance AI and ML
• Working with Google’s latest technology to enhance and enrich it with your business and product performance data
• Connected to over 70+ data points
• SKU-level data analysis for transparency and visibility over your campaigns
• 24/7 optimisation of campaigns

On average our clients have enjoyed a 27% increase in revenue growth and a more than 16% increase in new customer purchases. Book a free consultation to find out how Upp can supercharge your Google Shopping today.