Google Ads, Real-Time Updates: The New eCommerce Call-to-Action

Google has recently came up with new ad customizers to get real-time promotion or event updates directly into the ad text. First of all, this is great! It is a much needed form of automation that we were all waiting for. We can finally automate this long process of modifying ads based on the number of days remaining for a promotion or how many items are still available for sales.

E-commerce best friend

Most of the customizer’s best practice comes from e-commerce.  If you are operating an e-commerce, you have to embrace this change. This is what you need to know to get started with Google real-time ads.

  1. Build a spreadsheet with your promotion details. You can use all sort of customizers such as the target keywords, your product model, inventory (capacity), start price, and sales end date.
  2. Once your spreadsheet is built, upload it into Adwords, and start writing ads using the large number of ads customizers.

ad customizers

All the details regarding the numbers of customizers and how to setup the spreadsheet are easy to find in the Adwords Support Centre.

Don’t worry, I won’t just copy the support center in this post 🙂 Instead, I will give you so far the best usage we did of this great feature.

Flash sales

We’re getting into the biggest shopping period of the year. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas are just around the corner. Use the ads customizers to create flash sales on specific products.  Make sure to manage your bids based on how fast items are sold. Also make sure to create landing pages with the same countdown as in your ads. A/B test different products on short or medium term to see how they perform. You can program your bid management strategy manually or use a script to automate it based on product sales and the time remaining to the end of the sale.

Test different discounts on low performing products

You have a some products that are not selling well? Use the percentage off customizers to test what level of discount (%) drives sales. Pre-program a series of discounts on different products or product lines and monitor what is the percentage threshold for sales to start coming in.

Get insights on what drive sales without spending money on research

I think this is one of my favorite best practice of the Google real-time ads. If your are kicking off a new e-commerce or adding a new line of product, you can easily setup testing and generate useful data using various customizers to monitor if discounts, sales with an end date, or other programmatic factors influence customer behaviour compare to none. It is easy to setup, you can try it on a short term period and you get the data quickly. You can even test some promotions before running them in store which requires print and logistic resources.  It tells also if a product is popular or not based on how much incentives it requires before generating sales.

Post Thanksgiving & Christmas Period = Inventory clearance

You got an amazing November & December sales record but some items are still in your inventory? The ads customizers are the perfect fit! Create clearance landing pages and text ads that disclose how many units left to sell.  Established your bid strategy based on the cost per conversion you get and the profit margin on each items. You want to remain profitable. Acquisio offers some great features to automate profitable bid strategies.

Mix & Match

I provided you with some examples of how to use this new Adwords feature, but the ideal is to mix and match the ads customizers. Match a flash sales with a limited inventory and a percentage off discount to maximize the impact of your campaign. Also, never forget to cross reference your bid strategy to maintain a reasonable cost per conversion. The last important thing to consider (and do) is to always match the content of your landing page with what the ads dynamically generate as content. This is the key to close the loop and get the desired conversion rate.

Happy sales!

 

eric-cholette-Durour

eric-cholette-Durour

Entrepreneur and Founder at Planning Media, an internet advertising company that helps ad agencies and businesses to acquire, maintain, and retain customers via the internet. I am passionate about internet/digital/mobile advertising, and aviation. Everything is managed by data and passion: internet campaigns & aircraft.

The First Machine Learning Marketing Platform
Built to Scale Search for Local Resellers & Agencies

Automate, optimize and track more campaigns, more profitably.