Holiday shopping season has seemingly become a “winner take all” proposition in the world of PPC. Think of it as the Fall playoff season leading up to the big championship game in December. Brands are scrapping for every click, every lead, every conversion.
Mistakes can be devastating to the end goal. And with each passing day in November and December, opportunities lost are gone. There’s little chance at re-earning the sale.
Shopping Campaigns have become heavily automated at the platform level, so on the surface it would seem that Google is making it easy for every brand and every merchant to launch effective shopping campaigns. So why worry?
Therein lies the latest challenge for PPC pros with all the pressure on them to execute flawless Shopping Campaigns. EVERYONE has access to the same heavily automated foundational toolkit. So if everyone plays from that same playbook, nobody can truly be out front.
Layered Automation: Deeper control for PPC rockstars
The core automations from the search engines essentially help marketers get efficient with the foundational elements of good PPC across the various ad types typically deployed. Optmyzr provides what we call layered automation to make it possible for strategically-inclined marketers to stand out from that “good” pack. Our team spends a lot of time tracking all of the advancements at Google and Microsoft to create tools that help marketers better utilize a search engine platform’s automation and transform PPC pros into strategic marketers as opposed to being tacticians.
The latest development from the Optmyzr team is a fully revised version of Optmyzr Shopping Campaign Builder. This week we formally introduced Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0, which taps the latest platform automations and make it much easier to build perfectly structured shopping ads faster and with more power behind them.
Version 2.0 culminates months of intense work by our team, connecting Google Merchant Feed data to new automation tools to build the perfect structures for shopping ads. Doing so meant ensuring the new version works across virtually any ad structure methodology. Thinking through the various ways PPC pros need to structure, we address a multitude of specific campaign needs, for example:
- Creating one campaign per brand
- Creating one ad group per SKU or product ID
- Establishing separate campaigns for each range of profit margins which enables varying tROAS targets
- Building and managing unique smart shopping campaigns for each product
Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0 makes it even easier to build perfectly structured shopping ads in record time. By maximizing the standard platform automations and layering in Optmyzr’s own automation protocols, it’s quite easy to build literally thousands of product groups in a matter of minutes as opposed to multiple days.
The essential linkage between the Google Merchant Feed and creation of product groups removes thousands of manual tasks. Within Campaign Builder, version 2.0 also includes enhanced capabilities within the Shopping Refresher module. Automations now extend to adding and removing campaigns as needed, acting on changes in data from the merchant feed. The earlier version had a simpler capability that was limited to working with a single campaign, requiring significant manual intervention (and time) to replicate across multiple campaigns.
Take, for example, the common approach of structuring campaigns based on similar products with similar profit margins. A good idea, which also allows for automated bidding to help maximize results. Such an approach, however, could box the marketer into a structure that isn’t nearly as dynamic as it could be. A marketer may decide it would be more beneficial to have one campaign for each product type. Shopping Refresher can now detect if a new product type suddenly appears in the feed and then automatically create a completely built out campaign with all product groups for that new product type.
The tool can also automatically detect the opposite – when a product is no longer available in the merchant feed. Campaign Refresher can automatically pause the campaign for that specific product and quickly cut off needless ad spend.
Move from tactical to strategic
Automations from Google, Bing and others can make things seem like doomsday for PPC pros in the long term. It’s understandable when considered purely at face value. However, the innovations that transformed other industries such as manufacturing over the last several decades have moved many smart professionals into much more strategic value-add roles.
Tightening bolts on the assembly line of yesteryear was an essential tactic/function many years ago. But repetitive action yielded the same core outcome while failing to tap the deeper thinking and intellect of the production line employee. In PPC, our value add as the human being running programs is not in managing repetitive actions. Our value add comes in the form of creativity and strategy – figuring out the intangibles and the if-this-then-that variables.
PPC pros who will lead the industry to greater relevance in the overall marketing mix will be the ones who layer powerful automation on top of the core automations from the search engines. The less time spent in the weeds of tactics will continue to elevate PPC pros from being “The Google Ads person” to being a strategic visionary with a much more essential role in the overall marketing hierarchy.
Check out Shopping Campaign Builder 2.0. As always, contact us directly and we’ll gladly provide a 1:1 demo of how it can transform your PPC work day.
