New tools and insights to optimize your Shopping campaigns this holiday

Last month, we shared our 2015 holiday trends on how shoppers are preparing to shop early and throughout the holiday season. Though Black Friday and Cyber Monday remain key traffic drivers, mobile will make every day a shopping day. As a retailer, you’ll want to prepare your budgets and campaigns for peak traffic drivers but also optimize to reach shoppers throughout the holiday season.

To help you quickly analyze your Shopping campaigns and make the right adjustments, we’re launching a few new features just in time for the holidays:

Identify which product groups to optimize first

• A product groups tab view at the campaign and account levels make it easier to compare performance and make changes across all product groups
• Product groups filtering helps you select which product groups to optimize (e.g. those with the best cost-per-conversion) without needing to manually review all groups in your account

More insights to make better bidding decisions

• Mobile bid adjustment simulator, launched earlier today is available at the campaign-level so you can size up your mobile opportunity as you change your mobile bid modifier
• Conversion estimates included in bid simulator provide insight on how many conversions your ads may have received if a different bid was used
• Performance metrics added to the subdivision dialog, like clicks and cost per conversion, to help you structure your product groups based on your performance

Let’s walk through how these will help you save time and make your holiday a little less crazy. Imagine you’re an apparel retailer, and you want to check-in on your campaigns a few days before Black Friday with plans to optimize your top selling products.

Firstly, shopping-related mobile searches have grown more than 120% year-over-year with no signs of slowing during the holidays.¹ You’ve noticed a similar surge in your mobile traffic as well. Use the mobile bid adjustment simulator to optimize your mobile bids at the campaign level to see how adjusting your mobile bids can help increase traffic to your mobile site.

Mobile bid adjustment simulator

Now you want to dive a little deeper to optimize your product groups. By taking a look at the product groups tab at the account-level, you use product group filters to identify the “jackets” product group as the product group with highest conversions and lowest cost-per-conversion. Knowing this, you decide optimize the “jackets” product group.

Product group filters at the account-level

A low cost per conversion for “jackets” is a sign that there’s opportunity to scale and increase sales volume. By taking a look at conversion estimates in the bid simulator, you see the impact your bid changes might have on your product group to drive additional conversions and set bid to the conversion level you’d like to get for “jackets.”

Conversion estimates in bid simulator

Lastly, you see site data that a few jacket brands are already gaining traction from shoppers during early-bird sales. You can find out which jacket brands are selling better in your ads by taking a look at performance columns in the product group subdivision dialogue. Sort by total conversions or low cost per conversion to get an idea of which brands require separate, higher bids.

Performance columns in product group subdivision dialogue

And that’s it! This should help you optimize throughout the holidays quickly and efficiently. Now you can get back to your own shopping moments and maybe find a gift for yourself for all your hard work!

For more information, visit our Help Center to learn more about Shopping campaigns, the mobile bid adjustment simulator, and product group filtering. Also check out other ways you can analyze and scale your optimizations using the dimensions tab and scripts.

Posted by Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager, Google Shopping

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¹ Google Global search data Q3 2014-Q3 2015, as defined by searches that trigger Shopping ads