The more latitude you give Google, the more those interests can diverge.Google’s interests are not always aligned with your interests.To understand what happened, you have to remember a few things: And this tipping effect was negatively impacting the client’s ROAS. So what happened? Google had “tipped” the scales and was serving out virtually all impressions to just one SKU. Yet, a quick scan of impression share showed that 95% of all impressions within the product target had gone to a single SKU - a pair of hot pink wedge pumps that were very uniquely shaped, attention grabbing, and pretty expensive - and that single SKU had an ROAS of 0.23. The client had several hundred products in its Pumps product target.
(Note: just because your overall campaign is meeting or exceeding goals doesn’t mean there’s no opportunity for improvement!)ĭrilling even deeper within Pumps, something else seemed amiss. What’s up with that? The performance of the overall category was, in fact, masking the sub-par performance of the Pumps sub-category. One sub-category, Pumps, had an ROAS of 1.2 - well below the target ROAS. (Note: US “pumps” = UK “court shoes”.) Within Shoes, there were several sub-categories of Shoes. All was well, right? Upon Further Investigation: The Tipping EffectĪdchemy’s client decided to drill down into performance one level deeper, following the path of its store taxonomy. As an aggregate, therefore, the PLA campaign appeared to be achieving its objective and required no additional optimization. In the Shoes category, the ROAS of its PLA campaign was 4.9 on approximately 100,000 impressions. (Specific product brands, store name and campaign results have been disguised.) This problem may seem very esoteric at first, but if you look closely, chances are the same problem occurs multiple times in your PLA campaign The Problem, Or Seeming Lack ThereofĪdchemy’s client was a retailer that sells products across many different categories.
This article delves into a very specific problem within an actual campaign of a marketer that was using Adchemy software to manage their PLA campaigns. With any new online marketing channel, you would expect some kinks in the system - i.e., some idiosyncratic behavior that is unexpected - and PLAs are no exception.
The takeover of the formerly-free Google Shopping by Product Listing Ads (PLAs) is less than a year old.