Want to know how to audit your Google shopping campaigns? Here we’ve gathered for you a full audit checklist to follow and that will help you in optimizing your campaigns for a better performance. We’re warning you…auditing shopping campaigns can get complicated as sometimes you’ll need to deeply dive into data and other elements of your shopping campaigns.
But hey, the reward is worth all of your efforts. And the more frequently you audit your shopping campaigns, the more you’ll master them! You’ll be able to determine which products are costly and which ones are performing best and driving conversions. Besides, they allow you to make sure that you’re driving the right traffic and assess the costs of conversions.
Check the Policy
You should check that your products’ types, descriptions and categories are in line with the latest Google policies. Also, make sure that you’re aware of Google’s technical and editorial guidelines as well as the list of their prohibited products and content. In this way, you’ll avoid any product performance issue.
Check metrics from Google Shopping Reports
There are four Shopping reports that you should use on a regular basis:
- Product groups page report: allows you to customize columns based on your specific KPI and to add segments by days, devices used by users or even types of clicks.
- Products page report: allows you to monitor performance metrics for each product in each campaign and make sure that you don’t have any product with poor performance driving down your overall campaign performance and ROAS.
- Predefined reports page: are reports that you can customize based on your specific KPIs and needs at granular levels, allowing you to prioritize data to analyse that is most important to you.
- Auction insights report: allows you to compare your campaigns performance with your competitors and determine any opportunity that you may be missing by providing you with impression shares and overlap rates data.
Analyse your Google Shopping campaigns performance on Google Analytics
It is essential to pair your Google Ads reports with your Google Analytics account to audit your Google Shopping campaigns.
Here are four top Google Analytics data points to assess when auditing the health of your Google Shopping account and campaigns.
- Sitewide Analytics Data
In your Google Analytics account, if you go to the Behaviour tab you’ll be able to access data including bounce rates and frequency of exit pages. This data metrics helps in monitoring the performance of specific site pages. For example, a high bounce rate or a high frequency of exit pages would lead to poor conversion rates. Besides, if you notice a low performance for a specific product page or category page, it might be worth auditing and optimizing the page first before implementing any optimization on the campaign.
- Traffic and Revenue rates from shopping campaigns
In your Google Analytics account under the tab “Source/Medium” you’ll be able to determine the percentage of traffic and conversions that come from your shopping campaigns. I recommend you to make sure that your shopping campaigns are driving a good amount of traffic and revenue because it’s one of the best types of campaigns on Google Ads with regard to ROAS. That report also allows you to compare your shopping campaigns to the overall ups and downs in the revenue. For example, if the overall revenue is up and the Google Shopping revenue is constant or down, that means you would need to allocate more budget to your shopping campaigns.
- Product Performance data
In your Google Analytics account under the tab “Conversions”, go to “Product performance” to access the report and get a complete understanding of a product’s performance across all channels. That report is more complete than Google Ads reports as the latter ones only give the total number of conversions based on impressions and clicks. The Google Analytics product performance report allows you to list your best performing products that you can use when segmenting your shopping campaign and deciding which products to increase the bids on to boost performance.
- Conversions analytics reports across all channels
The conversions analytics reports give you the whole conversions paths picture across all channels including users that didn’t buy but are planning to return to your site and make the purchase later. You can access that report in the tab “Multi-channel” under the “Conversions” tab to analyse conversions paths and metrics to get an understanding of how your shopping campaigns fit inside the overall consumer buying journey and how they influence users in their buying behaviour. Additionally, when users buy from one of your shopping ads, this report allows you to determine which path they are taking which you could reproduce with other products or campaigns.
Shopping campaign structure and priorities
As you have less control on shopping campaigns than any other type of Google Ads campaigns, it’s critical that you pay attention to the structure of your shopping campaigns to make sure you’re not wasting your budget and reducing your ROAS. That say, I would recommend you to use a “multiple-campaign” structure. Or if you’re using a standard structure, you would need to segment it into multiple shopping campaigns by either products, priority or devices. I listed here the most common structures that are used by experts and that you may want to use:
- 3 campaigns with different priorities
- Multiple campaigns with different ad groups in each
- Campaign segmented by product profit margins
- Campaign structured by generic/brand priority at three levels
- Campaign segmented by query length at three levels
Analyse product grouping and product segmentation
Grouping your products into different segments and compare their performance to your KPIs allows you to determine which ones are best performing in terms of ROAS and allocate more budget into them. You can segment your products by brand, category, best sellers or seasonality for example to find the right combination in your industry. I’ve listed here the most common product grouping strategies that you can try on your campaigns:
- Best sellers: segmenting products by the revenue they’re driving and leverage the products that drove the highest revenues to increase conversions and the overall ROAS.
- New products or categories: it’s recommended to put them into new groups or new campaigns to test before adding them into existing ad groups or campaigns. In this way you’re sure that the new products don’t drive down the performance of the campaigns that are performing well.
- Brand or category: segmenting by types of product or by brand makes it easy to manage your groups and allocate more budget into the best performing ones to increase the overall ROAS.
- Large category segmentation: if you have a wide range of products, it’s best that you split it into sub-segments to optimize the ROAS.
- Seasonality: segmenting products by the season (summer, winter and annual) and invest more budget during the seasons in which products are most popular.
- Product price: segmenting products based on their price will help you in bidding based on their value. It will also help you in targeting new buyers with low-priced products and retargeting users that already bought from you with high-priced products using remarketing campaigns.
Update your negative keywords list
As you can’t use keyword targeting in shopping campaign, it’s important to keep your campaign relevant by regularly updating your negative keywords list. You can do that by negative matching non relevant keywords from the Search Terms Report. Otherwise, you would run the risk to drive non relevant traffic to your site and wasting your budget on users that will less likely convert. Furthermore, users that are clicking on your products but are not interested in what you offer will lower down your Quality Score which will affect your overall account performance and ROAS.
When updating your negative keywords list you need to make sure that you have enough lists at campaign or ad group level so that each ad is optimized. Additionally, you shouldn’t rely only on one type of matching but instead include phrase and exact matching to refine your keyword matching strategy to accurately filter traffic in your market.
Product Feed Optimization
Your campaign structure and products segmentations are excellent, and you update your negative keywords list regularly but still if your product feed isn’t optimized you run the risk to lose traffic. That say, it’s critical that you audit and optimize your product feed on a regular basis to make sure you’re not wasting your budget and drive as much traffic as possible.
The product feed optimization includes auditing your product titles, images, descriptions, prices, categories and other elements from your feed to make sure they’re not causing any confusion or driving down your campaign’s performance.
Conclusion
Now you have it all! All the steps that you need to go through for a perfect Google Shopping campaign audit. Well you got it, you’ll need to regularly audit, test and optimize your shopping campaigns if you want users to convert. That sounds like a mountain of work to accomplish but it’s worth it to boost your campaign’s performance and meet your KPI goals.
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