We don’t like charging a startup fee. But for eCommerce clients, that fee covers necessary costs:

First, we have to rebuild and optimize your data feed — i.e. the massive data file that tells Google Merchant Center what products you want to advertise from your site. We do this using DataFeedWatch.

This usually means we have to do quite a bit of “cleaning,” in the ways of updating and adding product names, prices, images, descriptions, attributes, and much more. The reality is, most websites do a poor job of explaining all details of the products, so we rebuild it to have the most accurate and relevant data possible; this way, Google can do the best job at targeting users based on that information

Once this cleaning process is complete, we integrate with Google Merchant Center. (GMC is a tool that uploads your product listings into Google Shopping, Google Product Ads, and Google Commerce Search).

This is about when we rope in a Tag Implementation team to set up modified cart value conversion tracking and build out dynamic remarketing.

All this is to say:

Building an eCommerce campaign is extra complex.

Configuring DataFeedWatch is time consuming. Conversion tracking is more difficult to set up. And this is all further complicated the more products a business has.

In fact, many Google Ads agencies refuse to work with eCommerce businesses because of this extra work.

We, on the other hand, love the challenge.

You can read more about why there is a startup fee in our blog here.

Traditional Google Shopping campaigns are only directed at users searching Google for a product to buy. This user sees the ads on a search engine results page.

Google Smart Shopping, on the other hand, is a step up. This outbound-heavy campaign uses algorithmic targeting to show ads to a very specific user. This user has shown serious interest in a specific product through their past search activity.

Every month.

Here’s how it works:

After 100 clicks, we compare the performances of two ads.

We keep the ad copy with the highest click-through and conversion rate, pause the ad that didn’t perform as well, and build a new ad to compete against the winning one for another 100 clicks.

This cycle continues on a monthly basis.

Generally, a $2,000 monthly startup ad budget allows us to gain enough data to make optimizations within the first month.

A budget that is too low doesn’t offer enough data to see what’s working and what’s not.

On the other hand, exorbitant ad spend puts you at risk of overspending in areas that don’t provide good results.

Our solution? We test every Google advertising channel (such as search, display, GSP, and Shopping) to see how each performs and influences other campaigns within the account.

Then, we reallocate ad spend to the higher-performing campaigns.

A very high spending account may need daily or even hourly changes. For accounts with smaller budgets, there may not be as much maintenance involved.

Similarly, this depends on if we’re achieving our goals or not. If we are, we may make slower optimizations (to not deter the performance of the campaign). If we aren’t hitting our goals, we make more frequent optimizations until we start achieving them.

On average, we generally make changes in an account every 3-7 days (again, depending on how much activity the campaign gets and your specific goals).

Too many changes harbors an ecosystem where it’s hard to keep track of the outcomes; making changes too infrequently means competitors may outperform your campaign.

In some instances, yes.

If you have a good organic ranking and good organic traffic, branded campaigns can steal your organic traffic. The way to subvert this is to bid very low ($0.05 per click) so it’s not costly.

**But, the pros far outweigh the cons: **

First, running a branded campaign protects your brands from competitors.

The first four spots on the Google search engine results page are all Google Ads listings. So, competitors who bid on your name can show as the first listing.

And because the highest you can rank organically is #5 on the page, all your organic traffic in this case would end up seeing your competitors first.

Let’s keep in mind that the #1 spot on Google has an average 20% click-through rate. So, competitors who bid on your name can be detrimental to your brand.

Suffice to say, you should always want to be #1 on Google for your brand name.

Next, running a branded campaign gives us the ability to see what keyword a user searched to get to your site (before leaving and coming back to search your brand name next).

This allows us to bid efficiently on keywords that introduce your brand to the masses, and also brings them back to the site to convert.

It’s best to let us know about 72 hours in advance.

For lead generation, it’s very simple to update ad copy; but, for eCommerce, any special offers have to be approved by Google Merchant Center before they can be used. And approval typically takes about 2-3 days.

This report is not proprietary and is easily reconcilable within your Google Ads account (which you retain full ownership of).

After you receive the report, we offer a meeting to review all activities in your campaigns, what happened over the last month, what is happening now, and what our plans are for future growth.

Yes!

Typically, we wait until we have maxed out Google Ads. But in some cases, if your target audience is older, Bing can be a great channel to reach them.

Bing has about 10% of the traffic compared to Google, but it is very inexpensive and full of high-quality leads.

That’s a great question that deserves a great answer. Read more here.

A: Ultimately, the answer depends on your unique campaign—but there could be a few potential reasons for this:

You are in a competitive industry and/or have a limited budget: In this scenario, there are two options for bidding:

1. You can bid to be at the top of the page (in which case you may spend your entire budget on one click per day)
2. You can opt for more selective bidding, resulting in more leads

Setting a lower budget allows only the right people to find you, instead of paying a lot of money to claw to the top of the page.

You have other keyphrases that have proven to convert After running a campaign for some time, data shows us which keywords perform the best. If an ad doesn’t appear for a specific keyphrase, chances are it hasn’t converted as well as others—and more money is spent on those proven successful keyphrases instead.

Low search volume Sometimes, a keyword has low search volume altogether. In this case, ads are ineligible to be shown until search traffic increases.

Where did you Google from (physically)? It could also be a regional issue. If you’re out of town—where your ads are turned off—they won’t appear from a Google search.

From here, you have a couple options to get to the bottom of why you aren’t seeing your ads:

1. Check out the “Ad Preview Diagnosis” tool in Google Ads. If an ad isn’t showing, this should tell you why—or, it may tell you that your ad is, in fact, showing up in Google search results, but you just haven’t seen it yet.
2. Still feeling uneasy? Just reach out. We can give you the reason why you aren’t seeing your ad; but chances are, there is a strategy behind it—and we’re happy to go over it with you.