Another day, another AdWords update. Even better when that update affects a campaign type that’s very close to our hearts: Google Shopping.
Google is always enhancing its products to help customers adjust to an evolving marketing landscape. And last week, it made the Google Shopping Products tab a little more, well, productive.
As updates go, this one isn’t life-changing, but it’s the first in a while to impact the Shopping channel exclusively. Plus, the new features are pretty helpful in their own right for a few reasons.
What’s Your Status?
First up is the new Product status column, which tackles the sworn enemy of any marketer who has painstakingly labored over a Shopping campaign: products that are not approved to show up in Google Shopping.
With this new column in their dashboards, marketers can see whether or not a product is approved — and even sort and filter products by their statuses.
By including Product status in the Google Shopping Products tab, marketers can view each unapproved product’s traffic, conversions, revenue, etc. This paints a better picture of what a campaign is forfeiting because of the offending products’ unapproved status — and might be just the kick in the pants needed to get them approved.
Google is always enhancing its products to help customers adjust to an evolving marketing landscape. And last week, it made the Google Shopping Products tab a little more, well, productive.
Previously, Google’s Merchant Center was the only place to find disapproved products, with a few high-level stats on the overall percentage of the catalog affected. The new column in AdWords can show this data at a product-specific level, right in the AdWords interface.
Though you’ll still need to go to the Merchant Center to investigate why a product is disapproved, the Product status column could help you see which products deserve attention right. this. second.
To the Max
Also included in the update is the new Effective max. CPC column. Personally, I find this one to be the most useful of the new features — and I’ll explain why in a second.
By activating the Effective max. CPC column in the Google Shopping Products tab, AdWords users can see each product’s bid. Before this addition, finding an individual product’s bid could be challenging for marketers with large catalogs or complex campaign structures.
In Google Shopping, bids are typically set at the Product group level. And because each product group might contain thousands of unique SKUs, locating just one item within it can be a serious chore.
So the true magic of the Effective max. CPC tab is navigational.
A Hop, Click, and a Jump Away
Nearly every retailer runs promotions for seasonal items or particular brands at different times during the year. Pretty standard in e-commerce, right?
To give these promotions the proper exposure, many e-commerce marketers using Google Shopping naturally want to also increase bids for items that are being reduced in price or that they’re looking to sell quickly to make room for next season’s inventory.
But if the items in question are spread across multiple product groups, adjusting all of their bids can be a tedious, time-consuming task. It can sometimes feel like hunting for a needle in a stack of needles.
This latest update could potentially save e-commerce marketers using Google Shopping precious time — particularly during busy periods like the lead up to a sale or a seasonal spike in traffic.
The Effective max. CPC column displays the bid as a hyperlink, so navigating directly to the partition where a specific product lives now requires nothing more than a simple click and — voilà — you’re there.
This could be a huge convenience for any marketer with a large catalog or complex campaign structures in Google Shopping.
No doubt, Google has been busy this year making modifications to AdWords. In addition to rolling out helpful features like custom formulas in AdWords, it also recently announced a redesign of the entire AdWords interface.
We’re excited to see what comes next, but all things considered, the features included in this latest update could potentially save e-commerce marketers using Google Shopping precious time — particularly during busy periods like the lead up to a sale or a seasonal spike in traffic.
