Over the last month or so there have been a few Google announcements regarding its Shopping ads. Firstly there were the changes to the Google Shopping feed specification, that Victoria wrote about a couple of weeks ago and now they are making changes to both bidding and extensions too.
New suite of bidding options
Google has now launched a suite of bidding strategies for its Shopping campaigns, all with their own purposes; maximise clicks, enhanced CPC and target ROAS.
For advertisers that are trying to get as much traffic as possible from their shopping ads, there is the maximise clicks option. This setting automatically adjusts bids to ensure that the advertiser gets as many clicks as possible for their daily budget.
Enhanced CPC is the option that allows advertisers to have more control over their bids or even use bidding software to manage the process. Enhanced CPC optimises alongside your keyword bids, in real time, to achieve the optimal CPA.
Similarly the target ROAS is also driven by sales, but is for those advertisers that do not have the time or resource to manually set bids. Using this option advertisers set a target ROAS and the system will dynamically bid so that the top performing products, with regards to sales, are prioritised with higher bids.
Automated Shopping extensions
Another feature that they are adding is automated shopping extensions. These are a development to the current promotional text advertisers can choose to add to their products.
Google said:
“We noticed many of you use promotional text to highlight special offers or free shipping, so today, we’re excited to introduce new automated extensions for shopping ads (PLAs).”
This feature does not require any input from the advertiser in order to appear, Google simply takes information that is available in the Merchant Centre feed and adds the extensions automatically:
At the end of September 2015 the promotional text will be retired and everyone will have to have these automated extensions instead. For those that are using promotional text, you don’t need to do anything, but availability of the extensions does currently vary per country.
