5 Data Optimisation Hacks to Boost Your E‑commerce PPC Performance

In the eCommerce industry, you are constantly competing with many other online retailers, each trying to break through. The popularity of online shopping is increasing year on year, as the figures prove. It is expected that worldwide eCommerce sales will reach $5.7 trillion by 2022 (Statista). Over the next year 2023, this figure is expected to grow by 10% and eventually reach around $6.3 trillion. By 2026, eCommerce retail sales will apparently reach $8.1 trillion.

To stand out among so many competitors, you have to think outside the box. You need to try out different tactics and hacks to boost your PPC performance. One of the best ways to improve the performance of advertising campaigns is to manipulate your product data.

Based on combined knowledge from eCommerce market research and Data Feed Marketing Report 2022, we dive into 5 data optimisation hacks that can help you achieve PPC advertising success.

1. Optimising product listing titles for more impressions and better CTRs

Optimising key product attributes in the data feed is critical to a successful campaign. The area of the feed that is most often taken care of and optimised is the product titles. And it's not without a good reason!

The title is one of the 4 attributes that consumers always see on Google’s results page. When optimised, product tiles have a significant positive impact on the performance of the given ad.

Even so, only 20% of merchants apply extensive optimisations to product attributes - making it an underexplored practice that can put one ahead of the competition.

By adding relevant details to your titles, they work well for searches with high purchase intent. This tactic ensures a better match between the search query and the ad that is displayed. This then results in more impressions and better CTR. Increased conversion rate is another effect of boosting these two metrics.

Out of all online retailers that have manipulated and optimised data in their feeds, most have chosen to enhance product titles. These titles have either been completely rewritten or had several words replaced to adapt to consumer search patterns.

Commonly overwritten feed attributes | Feed Marketing Report 2022

There are industry studies out there that clearly show the benefit behind these practices. Searchengineland selected 136 products to investigate how changing titles can affect campaign results. The entire test lasted six weeks, and titles were changed after three weeks. The performance of the products from the first three weeks was then compared with the performance of the same products in weeks 4-6.

On average, CTR for the entire Google Shopping account decreased slightly by 4%. However, not for products with optimised titles. Products whose titles were optimised and richer in keywords saw a CTR increase of 18%.

In addition, Searchengineland optimised each product title for a very specific and highly relevant search query. When they analysed the CTR lift of the exact query match to the term they added, they saw a CTR increase of 88%.

Source: Searchengineland

Tips for optimisation of product titles:

As a starting point for creating good product titles, you can follow the recommended title structure template for different product categories to meet the standards set by each industry.

Regardless of the results of your PPC campaign, from time to time you should conduct a performance analysis of product titles to find opportunities to improve them.

For further optimisation of product tiles in PPC campaigns, you can check various search term reports. They allow you to identify keywords with high purchase intent that you should include in product titles. Popular tools for researching these are:

• Google Search Terms Report
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush

2. Adding ad extensions to improve CTR

shutterstock/Garsya

When you look at a shopping ad, there are a few components that are always there: title, image, price, and store name. These are attributes that all marketers should definitely focus on when optimising their product data. However, you can also do something extra to improve your ads' CTR: enable ad extensions in Google Shopping ads.

You can add sales, refund/return policies, or shipping annotations to your ads and make them stand out among many others. One of the most popular and most effective additional ad content is also Google Shopping ratings.

These are the stars that often appear at the bottom of a shopping ad. Online shoppers can rate a product on a scale of 1 to 5, and this rating provides a general overview of the product's performance for new users interested in purchasing that item. Good product ratings have been proven to significantly increase CTR.

It is especially important to have visible product reviews in a shopping ad if you sell a similar product that is sold by many other online retailers. 5 stars can convince undecided shoppers to eventually buy from your store.

Google product ratings are not featured by default. You need to meet Google's requirements for displaying ratings, submit a Product Ratings Interes Form and you need to choose the method of gathering ratings for your products: either through Google, Customer Reviews program, third-party review aggregator service, or manually submitting reviews (creating a review feed).

3. Using margin data for bidding and ad spend optimisation

A really successful and much-underrated tactic to improve campaign results is to create profit-based custom labels. By including profit margin data in your product feed and labeling products that have specific levels of profit margin, you can segment and optimise your PPC campaign. You can apply a completely different bidding strategy to low-margin and high-margin products.

In fact, product margin is not a factor that marketers usually use when creating custom labels and optimising bids. Only 1.97% of advertisers use this information to optimise their strategies.

Why? We cannot see any reason why this hack is so underrated. It's a great opportunity to optimise advertising costs and save budget for other marketing activities, for example, generating more traffic from the eCommerce shop.

Product information used for custom_labels | Feed Marketing Report 2022

A nordic advertising agency implemented this tactic for their client. What they did was label high-margin products and prioritise them. They separated these products from the rest and bid higher on them.

After a short period of time, they noticed an overall increase in the performance of the client's shopping campaigns. The client's revenue increased by 85% and transactions by 68%.

Excluding low-priced products

In the worst cases, margin data can help you identify products in your feed that you are not making money on or that are even making a loss.

Let's say you're not happy with your advertising ROI and you're looking for a way to increase it. In this case, you might consider excluding products with low profitability potential, such as low-margin products or products where the CPA exceeds the profit margin.

Price thresholds vary from seller to seller and often depend on the profit margins of the items in question. When it comes to cheap products, advertisers may discover that the cost of the ad exceeds the profit. Therefore, these types of products might qualify for the exclusion.

According to Feed Marketing Report, 90.92% of marketers who exclude items from their feed because of their price do so because the price is too low. In the rest of the cases, the price is too high.

Reasons for product exclusion based on price | Feed Marketing Report 2022

4. Enriching your product feed with data intelligence from multiple sources

The great majority of PPC marketers base their campaigns on a single data source - the primary data feed. Usually, it is a shop data export that contains all basic information about the products. However, at least 1 in 10 advertisers (12.32%) supply extra product information through additional data sources.

Percentage of advertisers who use secondary data source(s) | Feed Marketing Report 2022

There is a reason for enriching feeds with information from additional different sources. Typically marketers do it in order to achieve one of the following goals:

• They want to meet all the requirements of the specific ad platform but some key product data is missing from the original source.
  
  
• They want to increase ad visibility, ad relevance, and thus conversion rate by providing additional context for both ad platform algorithms and online buyers. They can achieve it by adding additional information such as size, pattern or material.
  
  
• They want to Improve PPC campaign performance by including actionable data for campaign segmentation and optimisation. This can be profit margin, store codes, transit time labels, etc.

Secondary data sources can come from inventory management systems, analytics, Google sheets, and others. Despite the fact that additional data can only benefit your overall campaign results, it's still not a very popular tactic.

5. Leveraging additional images to capture more of online shoppers’ attention

27.47% of online shops provide advertising channels with additional images of the items being promoted. The others add only one image per product. On average, there are 2.2 images in one shopping ad.

Usage of additional images for Shopping Ads | Feed Marketing Report 2022

ECommerce has its flaws. Online shoppers cannot touch products but they definitely don’t want to buy a pig in a poke. If you do not present the product in such a way that this product closely resembles itself in reality, you risk having to deal with a lot of returns.

With additional images, you can show your product from different angles, with some staging elements, etc. By including this attribute several times in your data feed you can add 10 additional images. This way you give your potential customers the best possible idea of what they are buying and how it can be used. Over time you will notice an increased conversion rate.

Recently, Google introduced a completely new attribute [lifestyle_image_link]. If you decide to add this field to your feed, you will be able to engage your potential customers with additional images showcasing your products in a natural and authentic setting.

Important tip!

All product ads have an expiration date. Even the most engaging and eye-catching images can start to become less effective over time, especially on social media. To avoid ad fatigue, it is recommended to test different image types (lifestyle vs. regular) and replace the product image in social ads with updated images once in a while.

Summary

If you want to optimise your campaigns for better performance, start with data. Even small data manipulations can significantly increase your ad's visibility and result in more conversions.

The five hacks in this article are proven tactics, but often underrated. If you take advantage of them, you can gain an edge over your competitors.