1. Product Listing Ads/Google Shopping
Product listing ads allow advertisers to pull specific products from a data feed and display in front of relevant users based on their search. There is no better way to show the most specific product possible to your targeted audience. Specific advantages include:
- Cheaper CPCs
- Unique way to get specific products in front of customers immediately without normal website funnel
- Pulls specific product data from feed, which can be set up to auto update as often as you prefer
- Available across Google AdWords and Bing Ads
2. RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads)
Are you already using remarketing lists for a display remarketing campaign? If so, there is no reason not to layer these audiences onto your search campaigns. Start using the “Bid Only” option, which will allow you to see the differences in performance between returning visitors and new users. If you notice the RLSA audience performs better, you might consider bidding up on these users (or even break them out into a unique campaign to really improve ROAS). Advantages of RLSA include:
- Use remarketing audiences in search
- Determine performance differences between new and returning users
- Option to adjust bids on returning users
- Easy way to learn more about converters and improve efficiency
3. Dynamic Remarketing
In nearly every instance, I find dynamic ads outperform non-dynamic static (or even HTML5 ads). Sure, you can segment audiences, but creating ads for five (or however many) segments wastes bandwidth. Dynamic remarketing utilizes the data feed we discussed above to show dynamically created ads to users based on which pages they previously visited on your website. All you have to do is ensure your product feed is up to date, the tracking code is updated according to Google (I recommend having a tech rep walk you through this), and you choose messaging for your dynamic ads. Advantages include:
- Show ads to previous website visitors on the Google Display Network based on user’s history on your website
- Dynamically generated ads (no creation needed!)
- Easy, cheap way to remind previous site visitors of your value
- Tends to outperform normal retargeting
4. Ad Extensions
This one really isn’t e-comm specific, but it can be especially helpful here. Ad extensions are perhaps the simplest way to quickly improve CTR, Quality Score and overall quality of traffic. The above will reduce costs in the long run and improve your ROAS. Advantages include:
- Improve click-through rate
- Improve Quality Score
- Expand upon content of ad copy, gain more ad space on SERPs (callouts)
- Give users additional click options other than main URL (sitelinks)
- Show phone number (call extension) right next to ads (free, no click call on desktops!)
- Show specific address based on location (location extensions), great for local advertisers
- New extensions coming out all the time