Customizing For Customers: How Campaign Structure Impacts Performance

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A successful Shopping campaign is a lot like a muscle car – it’s what under the hood that really drives performance. PLAs are eye-catching and a powerful revenue driver, but the format of title, image, and price doesn’t offer a retailer the same opportunity to customize messaging as, say, a text ad or a piece of creative. Instead, how you set up your campaigns determines whether or not you’re set up for success.

The Role Google Smart Shopping Plays

So, what’s the best way to build a high-performance PLA campaign? Smart Shopping is Google’s out-of-the box option for PLAs, but that box…is a black box. The Smart Shopping algorithm doesn’t play well with standard optimizations like query funneling and geo-targeting. Its longer learning cycle can make it challenging to shift priorities in real-time. Additionally, tracking down orders and revenue from specific products can involve a lot of back-end reporting work.

That’s not to say that Smart Shopping can’t be a good fit for your business. If you’re a retailer with a small- to medium-sized product catalog, or if your key KPIs stay relatively stable over time, the automated aspects of Smart Shopping can save time and deliver consistent performance.

How to Improve Shopping Campaign Performance

At Adlucent, we work with our clients to understand their unique performance and reporting needs and create customized campaigns that range from full automation like Smart Shopping to highly granular structures that split out products based on their products, key KPIs like revenue per click, or even the quality of the queries they match to.

That’s the real advantage of our DIY, science-based approach. If it works, we can use it – and we can mix and match critical features as needed. An office supply client ran a three-month test with a Shopping campaign set to target only Business Professionals and saw a click-through rate nearly three times that of their branded terms – and an AOV almost $40 higher.

This test had another factor at play. The client was only interested in sales of one category of products from this campaign, so we set up a custom conversion to track those specific products’ sales. That AOV gain? Definitive proof that this audience is the right fit for those products.

Adlucent combines strategy and technology to create powerful, adaptable solutions for your unique marketing needs. Why settle for the black box when you could get the whole package?

Are your Shopping campaigns customized to the needs of your business – and your customers? If you’re interested in learning more about how to build and test campaigns that connect with your customers and drive performance for your key categories, contact us for a free consultation today!

Sarah Flynn