By Alan Coleman on 29 Aug 2014
So the big date is upon us, on Sunday 31st August traditional Product Listing Ads will be upgraded to the Shopping campaigns. Any campaigns that have not been transferred across will automatically be transferred by Google. This may result in a big change in performance as some elements of your old Product Listing Ad campaign may not be successfully transferred across.
The simple solution is to handle the switch yourself. With
Google shopping coming to Ireland, we recommend advertisers pause all existing Product Listing Ad campaigns and create new Shopping campaigns. Recently, we wrote a
piece on changes that the advertiser and searcher can expect from the switch. Now, we can give you some insight to changes that we have noticed since we transferred to the Shopping campaigns.Naming no names, we have an ecommerce client selling into the UK who has been active on Product Listing Ads since early 2013. In this time, Product Listing Ads have become the top source of sales in the UK for this client.
Google Product listing ads conversion rate
From January 1st 2014 to May 31st 2014 the Product Listing Ads had a conversion rate 149% higher than the website conversion rate. As you can imagine we were pretty pleased with this performance. So you will understand that we were a little apprehensive with the switchover to Shopping campaigns as we didn’t want to lose the impact of more than a year’s optimisations and lessons learned on the existing campaigns. Still, it is in our DNA to test out all new Google releases as soon as possible. And we did not want to just sit around and wait for Google to switch things over for us. We began by testing the new Shopping format on a selection of campaigns. The introduction of Product Groups within Adgroups and the ability to narrow targeting within the Product Groups was a very welcome feature. However, the loss of ability to add negative keywords easily was a big blow. Like Google’s last big switchover to Enhanced Campaigns there was good and bad.
Google Shopping Campaigns have a higher conversion rate!
However, what we are most connected to are the outputs of the switch, that is, the results. And to be honest they have astounded us. The conversion rate on Google Shopping campaigns from June until now is 84% higher than the conversion rate of the old Product Listing Ad campaigns. And the Shopping campaigns conversion rate over this period is 255% higher than the website conversion rate. With these results we quickly migrated all of the old campaigns across to Shopping. Additionally, we have seen some incredible performances from individual campaigns. One campaign in particular has given the best Return on Ad Spend that any of us have ever seen, over 300 in the first month of the campaign. And, it is not just within the UK that we have seen such a marked improvement in performance through the move to Google Shopping campaigns. Another client selling into the US has seen an improvement of 95% in conversion rate with Google Shopping campaigns in August versus Products Listing Ads in June.
It's time to switch to Google Shopping
So the clock is ticking. Switch over and control the transition or Google will take care of the transition and the performance of your campaigns may suffer. As we have seen with our clients taking control of the switch has been very effective and we have seen some fantastic results with Google Shopping campaigns.
Share This Article
