The holiday season is upon us and Google has some early gifts for retailers – new shopping campaign optimization features in AdWords. Despite Black Friday and Cyber Monday driving large amounts of traffic, Google says, “mobile will make every day a shopping day.” Retailers will need to be able to adjust budgets and campaigns quickly, so AdWords has released new tools that will help retailers analyze product sales and bids more efficiently and effectively.
The first focus of the new shopping features is product group optimization. There is now a “product groups” tab within shopping campaigns. The product groups tab allows retailers to group products into categories to see overall performance metrics for that category. The product groups tab view is available at the campaign or account level as seen below.
The second feature is called product group filtering. Product group filtering gives retailers the ability to adjust bids based on the success of an entire product group. This means retailers do not have to manually check individual product performance, which saves precious time during retail’s peak season.
The second focus for the new shopping campaign features is bidding. Google now has a mobile bid adjustment simulator. This tool shows retailers estimated traffic changes when increasing or decreasing bids at the campaign level. It also shows how many conversions retailers could have received with various bids.
The next bidding feature consists of performance columns specific to subdivisions of product groups. In Google’s example scenario, these columns could be used when a clothing retailer is looking at the subdivision “brand” for the product group “jackets.” A retailer could use the subdivision performance columns to analyze cost per conversion for each brand. With that insight, the retailer can then determine which brands require higher, separate bids.
What do you think of these new features? Do you think they’ll be effective in the ways that Google hopes?
