Putting Your Product Feed to Work Across Search and Social
Product Listing Ads are key for retailers - not just through Google and Bing campaigns, but across social platforms like Facebook, as well.
For retailers, the product feed can be a valuable asset in your advertising strategy. It acts as the base to help translate and automate a catalog of SKUs into ads on both search and social: Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) via Shopping campaigns or Bing Product Ads in search and Facebook Dynamic Product Ads in social.
Making the most of product advertising means starting with a clean feed and understanding the nuances of each channel, as PLAs, Product Ads and Dynamic Product Ads all act and operate differently, although they could be working off the same foundation.
Google Product Listing Ads and Bing Product Ads
Within search, PLAs and Product Ads are not triggered by keywords in the same way text ads are, so this is why ensuring you have rich and accurate titles and descriptions in your feed is of utmost importance. Keep a lens of how a consumer searches when adjusting titles and descriptions to make sure you’re making intuitive choices. A common example of this is around color – would a consumer be more likely to search aubergine or purple, eggshell or beige?
When it comes to accuracy, make sure your prices, availability, and links all match up or else you’ll risk getting penalized and have your ads not shown. Plus, you’ll create a positive and relevant user experience for customers, which will hopefully encourage return visits and future purpose. Of course, don’t forget about your images, as they are what make your ad standout. Images should correspond to the exact product variations you’re selling. Keep them straightforward, in focus, and appropriate.
On the Bing side, it should be noted that Product Ads are moving to a Shopping Campaigns format in the U.S. this summer, similar to the move Google made last year. The good news is, if you’re running Google Shopping campaigns, you can utilize the same feed for both, and Bing allows you to import your Google Shopping campaigns structures as well. If you’re not planning to mirror your Google campaigns on Bing, get caught up on the updated feed fields with Bing Shopping campaigns. The new format has additional attribute options including new Custom Labels and updated category taxonomy.
Facebook Dynamic Product Ads
Dynamic Product Ads start with a product catalog that contains the basic product information including name, description, product image, product details, price, stock, and more. Your existing product feed can be uploaded to Facebook, so you don’t have to start from scratch. Within your catalog, you can have one feed that accounts for all your SKUs or multiple feeds that could be divided by product lines, categories or geographies, for instance.
From there, you can identify specific Product Sets to advertise in a dynamic ad via filters in your catalog. You’ll want to group identical products with variations together with Product Groups. This means a shopper might be able to find a top in a different color if their desired choice is out of stock, for example. To capture activity, you can modify the code in your Custom Audience pixel to capture when product IDs from your catalog are being viewed, added to cart, and purchased. If you have an app, you can also engage shoppers across devices by enabling App Events.
Targeting for Dynamic Product Ads can be based off user actions on your site or within your app, and can also be layered with Facebook’s targeting parameters for more granularity. In addition, you can select whether you’d like to show a single image ad or a multi-product ad, which will pull in the image, description, and click target for the relevant product from your feed.
Think About Product Advertising Holistically
Your product advertising strategy is just one piece of your overall marketing portfolio, so don’t forget to think about them in context of your entire program. For instance, in an analysis we did at Kenshoo, we found that retailers running both ad text ads and shopping campaigns saw increased ROI across brand keywords and non-brand keywords versus advertisers only running text ads.
In addition to this boost in performance, there are also insights that can be gleaned with these ad types to improve optimization strategies. Once you put your product feed to work, don’t stop there. Continue to uncover areas for improvement and coordination across channels to strengthen your overall message, program, and brand.