Expensive Google Ads

[sam2381]

Are other merchants paying a lot for Google Ads/Shopping Ads ? Want to get a sense of how many are paying over 2k a month and are concerned over rising costs. 

[Sara32]

Hi @sam2381 

I wouldn't be overly concerned with spending more as long as the ROAS is still within target.  The cost increase could be because the demand online is still increasing because of the current situation, not just because actual cpc's are rising, if you see what I mean.  I haven't really seen any dip in demand since lockdown has started easing with most of my eCommerce clients.  

How's the profitability of your campaigns since your costs started going up?

Sara

[EmmanuelFlossie]

Rising costs can mean a lot of things.

For example more competitors, check the auction insight of your shopping campaign and or text ads.

For example you have not improved the quality of your feed or text ads, while competitors do, when you improve the quality, ie ranking you get lower CPC's. So if you don't improve your costs go up while others go down.

For example, you are bidding on generic search terms that you could remove due to poor performance

Advertising and using Google Ads is pretty complex, with so much going on. Try to first improve at source, ie the data feed. For example with my application, I improve my clients data on a weekly basis, improve title, product type, variant attributes, adding product details and product highlights (new) etc....

[sam2381]

My primary issues with buying google ads/shopping ads is buying branded keywords and in general spending money on re-acquiring repeat customers. In my view, this spending is inflating ad spending un-necessarily as ideally this channel should be targeting only new customers. 

[EmmanuelFlossie]

You can exclude existing audience lists (for example converters) by adding them as an audience and setting a negative bid modifier.

[sam2381]

Here is a solution I was able to develop to fully tackle this problem I was having, curious to hear what your thoughts are: (developing the plugin for Shopify next): https://woocommerce.com/products/google-ads-roi-optimizer/

[Sara32]

@sam2381 yes, do what @EmmanuelFlossie says, exclude your converting traffic from the campaign by adding them as an audience (observation only) and reduce bids on those.  You could also upload your customer list and create an audience from that too.  You can now use Zapier to link your CRM to Google Ads so that your customer list stays up to date - everything about customer match is here; https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6379332?hl=en-GB&ref_topic=6296507

[sam2381]

There are a few issues with this approach you suggested @Sara32 @EmmanuelFlossie. First is that your competitors will bid on your keywords and show up to take advantage of this suppression tactic. Customers are not as loyal as you think, if you are not showing up on ads for your repeat customers they will not necessarily keep shopping with you. This is why it is still important to maintain ad exposure to all new and repeat customers. This approach does nothing to build customer loyalty to keep those customers coming back, there is no incentive to do so particularly if your business are not as easily accessible when customers conduct a search when shopping. 

[EmmanuelFlossie]

The solution that I provided was to address your specific concern, ie a solution. Not that the solution is actually a good idea. Maybe I misunderstood your reply as to how to reduce costs for repeat clicks.

I personally would never do this with my clients. As a returning visitor is twice as likely to convert than a first time visitor.

[EmmanuelFlossie]

Sorry, I misunderstood your first post as a question, it looks like you are promoting your app.

Ignore all my replies, thanks.

[yu91]

Google isn't too great with keeping costs low if you rely solely on their recommendations. 

There's a google ads hack called Single Keyword Ad Groups where you put each keyword into its own ad group and add negative keywords, and this way it will keep your costs low and ensure that the traffic that comes to your ad is always for the specific search term you want it to be. 

Aori is the go-to platform to create SKAGs quickly. For a shopify store, you can import your product feed into their platform, and they will then automatically create a keyword list based on all your products and put the products into their own ad group to control costs. 

They've got a referral program where you get $100 for each person you invite and sign up, which is pretty sweet too. 

You can check them out here aori.com/ecom-tool