Let us show you how we create product PPC Campaigns from the product feed in one click using the data from price comparators.
Meeting with a client:
“I’ve tried a number of agencies, but it’s very hard to do the PPC advertising for my e-shop.”
“Why? What e-shop do you have?”
“There are up to 9 000 products and I would like to advertise all of them but I have low margins, so I can only use 5% of a product’s value for marketing, not to mention that I have low inventory, therefore the stock availability of products changes every day.”
“Okay, and what about the competition?”
“It’s not easy. The market is full of big fish who have unlimited marketing budget and even entire marketing teams. My marketing budget is limited.”
“Hmm, and what is your competitive advantage?”
“I offer most of my products for the lowest prices on the market and many of them can’t be found elsewhere than in my e-shop.”
“Okay, so let’s advertise only the products in stock and for the lowest prices, or those which are sold only by you. Let’s not run ads for other products, those which aren’t the cheapest and which are offered by a number of e-shops.”
This was an example of what the communication with our client and his following response looked like. It was a trigger which led us to creating automated PPC campaigns from the feed based on the data from comparators. We used the tool called Power Query, which is the Excel add-in used for data analyses.
If you have an e-shop with products which the public is acquainted with and which are searched for in Google, this is the best way to get the most out of PPC.
When creating these campaigns, we had to deal with 3 basic issues:
- Automating the creation of new campaigns and sets based on the feed
- Creating current adverts (e.g. a product name in the title, a current price)
- Running ad sets on selected products only
Automating the creation of new campaigns and sets based on the feed
How does it work? It’s very simple! First, we need to get the product feed of a given e-shop. Based on the data from the product feed, we can prepare an ad set for every product on the web, using the right keyword and a current ad. We can either create one campaign only with all products or divide products by categories, by their prices or, ideally, by the absolute margins of individual products. The options are really endless.
But the most important thing is that we regularly update our ad sets based on the current data from the feed. What does it mean? If a new product appears in the offer, a new ad set for the product is automatically created. If the product is no longer in the offer, the ad set will be suspended or removed (depending on whether the products will be reintroduced or not). Moreover, we update the campaigns with the data from comparators. For example, if we advertise a product as the cheapest on the market and the competitor suddenly cuts the price significantly, we will change the ad in the ad set, or we will completely suspend it. But we will talk about this in the following parts of the article.
Creating current adverts
I’m sure you have already encountered an out-of-date ad in Google ads. The ad promised a product in stock, but it was already sold out, or the ad promised a special offer which had long expired. Yes, if the ads are created manually, the e-shop with thousands of products and large amounts of special offers has great difficulty keeping the ads current.
When creating campaigns from the feed, it is a good idea to create ads from the feed as well. In the feed, each product contains basic information, such as its exact name, the product description, the URL address, the price, the stock availability or the number of items in stock, the transport price, the margin, etc. Yes, you’re guessing right. All this information can be used in an ad as needed. And it will always be up-to-date. When the product’s price is changed in the e-shop, it will be changed in the feed, and at the next update of PPC campaigns, it will be changed in the ad, too.
In this case, creating ads really is a creative process. Here too, it pays off to test different versions of ads, include various competitive advantages in the ad, and track how people react to them.
For example, if our competitive advantage is having the lowest prices on the market, ads can always include current prices. If we have large stock supplies, we can state that the product is in stock, or how many pieces remain in stock. If we offer free shipping for the purchases over a certain sum, let’s not burden visitors with having to study and check whether they can get the free shipping or not. Let’s just write it in the ad for them.
What kind of ads have we already created for our clients based on the data in the feed? Here are some examples of Headings 2 which were automatically generated in accordance with the conditions and information set in the feed.
- Only in our e-shop for the lowest price – €79
- In stock
- Last 5 pieces in stock
- Free delivery
- Shipping within 24 hours
- We have the lowest price on the market
- We deliver the goods for free
To create automatic campaigns from the feed as described above, you can use amazing tools with which you can create these campaigns in virtually a few clicks. We have tried most of them and they have many outstanding features, but they still failed to solve the important problem we have.
We do not want to run campaigns for all products. Instead, we want to choose which products we want to advertise. And we do not want to just thoughtlessly choose random products. We want to do it automatically and based on the data.
In the highly competitive age of today, only those e-shops are successful which have some distinct competitive advantage. So let’s focus on that!
Now, the last issue to solve is how to get the competitors’ data to find out what competitive advantage our products have and whether they even have any.
However, we have already resolved this issue. Thanks to the unbelievable amount of quality data from price comparators and thanks to the excellent tool Ahrefs, we can run ads only for the selected products. For example, products with the lowest prices on the market or products which we have in stock, but the competitors don’t etc. To learn more, read the second part of our article.
