Patience Hurlburt-Lawton
You may have noticed, either from browsing our online pricing structure or discussing your free growth plan with a member of our Google Ads management team, that our eCommerce campaigns include a $1,000 one-time setup fee.
Why is this fee necessary and what is it used for? We’re glad you asked!
In a nutshell, building an eCommerce campaign is a highly complex process.
And as much as we would prefer not to charge a startup fee, a lot of the initial groundwork involved with creating and launching a high-performing eCommerce campaign is pretty labor intensive—meaning it involves a few necessary costs on our end.
To help you understand our process and where those costs are coming from, the following is a quick breakdown of the steps involved.
First, we have to rebuild and optimize your data feed.
Your data feed is the massive data file that tells Google Merchant Center what products you want to advertise from your site.
Solutions 8 uses a platform called DataFeedWatch to optimize your product data feed and ensure it includes the most accurate and relevant data available. This may involve manually supplementing your feed with additional data or manipulating the data that is already there. For example, our team will restructure all of your product IDs, titles, descriptions, links, and image links from the feed to ensure Google can do the best job of targeting users interested in purchasing your products.
Though essential, the process of configuring DataFeedWatch is extremely time-consuming because, as we mentioned, it involves a lot more than simply passing your feed along to Google Merchant Center. Instead, we spend a considerable amount of time making the necessary enhancements to ensure a higher-quality feed.
And, not only is conversion tracking more difficult to set up, but things become more complicated the more products a business has. You may even find that many Google Ads agencies will refuse to work with eCommerce businesses because of this extra work—but not us; we love a challenge.
Once the process is complete, we integrate with Google Merchant Center.
At this point, our team will upload all product listings, build new product groups, and revise any feed discrepancies. We’ll also install Google Enhanced eCommerce analytics to help us track and measure consumer behavior at every stage in the funnel—from the initial product views and clicks to purchase behavior and transactions.
Also around this time, we bring in Google’s tag implementation team to build custom code to capture revenue data that will be imported as a goal in Google Analytics. Those goals are then imported into Google Ads and into Google Tag Manager for dual tracking and discrepancy monitoring.
Next, we launch your campaign, beginning with standard Shopping.
Once we reach the required 20 conversions in the standard Shopping campaign, we then petition Google Ads to enable Smart Shopping for your account. Why? Because Smart Shopping campaigns typically outperform standard Shopping campaigns.
(You can read more about Shopping vs. Smart Shopping campaigns here.)
Once your campaign is eligible for Smart Shopping, our team then goes back and starts the process all over again, building new product groups and importing all of your products for the new Smart Shopping campaigns.
If it sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is.
At the end of the day, eCommerce campaigns are considerably more involved than lead generation campaigns, hence the initial startup fee. Luckily, our Google Ads team is a Google Premier Partner, so they know exactly how to turn that thousand dollars into a highly successful campaign.
More questions? We’re all ears! Contact Solutions 8.
