Case Study: How The PPC Geek Saved Google Shopping With Product Feed Optimization

Note: Business name has been changed. All data is from Google Ads.

Background/Challenge

Kristy’s Beauty is a drugstore beauty brand that has an ecommerce business. In April 2019 their Google Shopping traffic decreased by 88% vs the previous month. Revenue decreased 91%. All products were approved in Google Merchant Center. Resellers were showing ads with similar products at the top of the search result pages for branded keywords. So why did traffic decrease so drastically? Removing negative targeting and increasing bids had minimal impact on traffic, so a feed issue seemed to be the most likely culprit.

Solution

Baumer Digital Marketing performed an audit on Google Shopping campaigns and the product feed. This uncovered an interesting situation. The company had rebranded from “Kristy’s” to a more edgy spelling KRZTEEZ. The feed was pulling the title from the product pages as KRZTEEZ.  KRZTEEZ has much less brand awareness than the traditional spelling. The Baumer Digital team theorized that Google was having trouble connecting the search queries for “Kristy’s” with the title “KRZTEEZ” in the product feed.

The marketing team at Kristy’s did not want to change the titles on the site.  At the same time, losing out on Google Shopping revenue was hurting overall ecommerce revenue. Was there a way to keep the title on the site but change what appeared in the product feed and product listing ads (PLAs)?

Baumer Digital leveraged feed optimization software to change all titles from “KRZTEEZ” in the feed to “Kristy’s”. Titles on the site were able to remain the same to enforce the new brand spelling, while the spelling in the PLAs matched what users were looking for. Once this change was put in place, traffic increased an astounding 926% month over month.

Results

·Impressions and clicks both increased over 900% post feed optimizations once the title of the product matched more closely with the search queries.

· The high average CPC in April is evidence of bidding aggressively to jump start the campaign. Once the title was updated however, Google rewarded the more relevant product with a lower CPC, and average CPC decreased.

· A lower CTR and a lower CVR month over month are healthy signs that the ads are showing more frequently and highly relevant traffic is coming to the site. 

Conclusions

While the change in spelling of the brand name is a unique situation, it certainly proved the power of feed optimization. Google Shopping relies on the data in the product feed to match with user’s search queries, so an unoptimized feed can result in lackluster performance. 

If you’d like to try feed optimization with your business, you can contact me here.