If you’re an eCommerce site looking for access to a large market of active buyers with a low cost of entry, Shopping advertising is a channel that ticks the boxes. But when you have millions of products, how do you ensure Shopping delivers the best return on investment possible?

Talk to FIRST.

Google Shopping and Bing Shopping provide advertisers with access to a large market of buyers looking for the right product at the right price. If you’ve got a few hundred products, or even a few thousand, it can be as easy as setting up a product feed and letting machine learning optimise your advertising.

However, if – like Dymocks – you have millions of products in your catalogue, maximising the investment in Shopping advertising takes technical and strategic knowledge, as well as the ability to adjust to nuances in the market caused by consumer sentiment and competitor behaviour.

In Dymocks’ case, there were five factors that had to be addressed:

1.
The mechanics of supplying data for millions of products to the Bing and Google Merchant Center had to be done accurately and in a timely manner. This included correct and up to date Schema.org product metadata on the website.

2.
Custom fields in shopping data needed to be incorporated that would support advanced configuration of Shopping advertising.

3.
Campaigns had to be designed to ensure appropriate segmentation to control factors including device type and brand-oriented vs brand-agnostic shoppers.

4.
Campaigns had to support scaling up and down based on delivery times and critical cut off shipping dates such as Christmas and Mother’s Day.

5.
Campaigns had to be managed to deliver sustainable returns.

The result

Over an 18-month period since launch, Shopping has developed into a critical revenue channel for Dymocks. Return on advertising has been doubled through this work, making Shopping the second most effective Paid channel for Dymocks after brand advertising. It has also allowed increasingly accurate planning of advertising costs and associated sales revenues, providing greater certainty in business planning.