Google Shopping ads, should you set manual cost per click or enhanced cost per click for your
campaign? What's the difference between the two bidding types, and which one will drive
more traffic and more sales for your Shopify store? Let's find out. Hi, I'm Clarice Lin,
The ROI Doctor who helps online store owners to grow and scale up profitable Google Shopping ads.
If you're new to my channel, you want to download my free Shopify Marketing Guide, where I go into
pros and cons of driving free and paid traffic to your store, so you don't totally rely just on
Google. You want to diversify the ways of driving shoppers to your store to should anything happens
to Google, you still can rely on alternative sources to drive shoppers, and sales for your
Shopify store, link in the description and pinned comments. Do check that out. Before we go straight
into the comparisons between the two bidding types. I want to clarify a couple of definitions,
in particular cost per click and what's manual cost per click, enhanced cost per click. So we
will be on the same page. So when I explain to you, you will have a better idea on what's
the best option for your shopping campaign. First up, cost per click, as the name suggests itself,
it's the cost you're going to pay for each click on your ad, leading a shopper or leading a Google
user from your ad to your store. Cost per click is also known as CPC for short. And this is a very
common terminology that's been used for digital marketing campaigns. It's used for Facebook
marketing campaigns, for LinkedIn ads campaign, for Bing ads campaign as well. All of them would
typically use CPC to measure what's the cost to drive that one click or that one visitor to your
store? And why is cost per click important? Why do so many people keep talking about cost
per click? Reason number one, knowing your cost per click allows you to calculate your overall
advertising costs. What would it cost you to run a particular campaign, if you know the cost per
click in advance and how many clicks you want to get so it gives you a better idea of what to set
your budget for this campaign. Reason number two, knowing the cost per click also allows you to know
how much you are bidding for each keyword. When you're running Google Shopping campaigns you are
bidding for each particular keyword. So knowing how much does each keyword costs allows you to
know what is the effectiveness, if there are certain keywords that you may be paying higher,
or if you're paying lower, how likely is each of these clicks that you're paying for? What's the
chances of them turning into a sale, and if that's going to be profitable for your campaign overall.
Reason number three, cost per click is also a way for you to diagnose if there's something
wrong with your campaign, if your cost per click is too high, higher than what you would expect,
there could be something wrong with your campaign, something you need to fix, maybe
you need to exclude certain keywords, or there's some setting that you need to fix and if you're
paying a really high cost per click, but you're not getting any sales at all. That means maybe
you want to optimize your product title or your product descriptions because Google is not showing
your shopping ads to the right people. So you want to fix that. So you can lower your cost per click
and hopefully get that clicks to turn into a sale. If you want to help Google to understand what your
product ads is about. You want to increase the clickability of your shopping ads, you definitely
want to optimize your product title, that is the number one attribute that Google looks at to show
your ads to the right people. If you want to learn more about maximizing the clicks by optimizing
your title, check out one of our videos, link in the top right hand corner of the screen,
how to optimize your product titles to get the most number of Google clicks. And the number two
attribute that Google looks at is your product description. Google wants to know and understand
what your product is about. Who is it for? Who is it going to be best for? Who is most likely going
to buy from you? So you want to make sure you have your keywords in your product description as well,
if you want to help Google to understand what your product is about and show them to
the right people, so there's more chances of them getting clicks and turning into a sale,
you want to check out one of my other videos as well how to optimize your product description,
link in the top right hand corner of the screen. Reason number four, monitoring your cost per click
allows you to see how your cost per click changes over the seasonality if your competitors are also
running ads as well. So if you have a good idea of what is the cost per click over different
seasonality, it also allows you to better budget for what's the right amount to set aside for your
campaigns during different seasons, different times of the year, and helps you to know if
you're going to be profitable during those periods as well. Reason number five, comparing your cost
per click to your total conversion value. Total sales that comes from running your shopping ads
allows you to know whether it's profitable for you to be running shopping ads, whether you
should be putting in more money, if that's really profitable, or how can you get it to become more
profitable. And if it's really profitable, you can also choose to outsource it to someone who
can scale up your shopping ad on a larger scale to drive even higher profitability and higher sales
volume for your store. Knowing your cost per click is critical for managing your Google Shopping
campaign allows you to know if your campaign is doing really well, what's the performance
of your campaign, to diagnose if there are any issues with your shopping campaign, allows you to
set the right budget and manage the cost for your Google Shopping campaign and driving the overall
profitability of your store, just by running this campaign. Knowing your cost per click is critical,
it's a very important metrics that I use very often when I talk to my clients, we discuss
about the cost per click and how is it improving? Or how is it decreasing? And why it is so? And how
does it relate to the overall performance of the campaign? Now that we're on the same page
on what's the definition of the cost per click? And why is it so critical for you to understand
and manage your cost per click, let's go into the specifics. What is manual cost per click?
When you set up a shopping campaign, on the settings, you can decide if you want to set
up a manual cost per click or an enhanced cost per click. Should you decide to set a manual cost per
click, this is what it means. You set an amount, maximum amount of the cost that you're willing to
pay for each click to your store. Google will take this instruction and each time around if they want
to show your ad, they will only bid as high as the maximum amount that you have set. So they will not
go beyond the cost per click that you have set for that shopping campaign. There is advantages
and disadvantages. So the advantage of setting the maximum cost per click is obviously that you have
more control over what Google's going to place on per click for your campaign, or for your ad group
or for each of your items. So it means you have larger control and you make sure that Google does
not go beyond the amount that you have set. It also means that Google will not overspend for each
click they're getting to your store. So it gets more predictability for your campaign. However,
there is a key disadvantage. If your cost per click is set too low, your cap is set to low,
it means that Google will not show your ad to more people, you'll say okay, you've decided you're
only gonna spend that amount per click, we don't want to go beyond. So if there's more competition,
let's say between a very popular time slot, and maybe you set a cost per click of maybe 60 cents.
And then to be able to show in that timeframe, you need to bid for 80 cents. That means your ad will
not show during that particular time, even though that's more likely, customers during that period
will more likely see your ad and click on it. So you will lose out in terms of getting the right
people to store who are very willing to click on the ad and buy straightaway. So you're missing
out on those people. And in this scenario, it also means you have to spend more time monitoring your
campaign to see, okay, you're not getting any clicks, maybe you need to increase your maximum
cost per click during that certain period. So you need to spend more time looking at your campaign
and analyzing your campaign to make sure you're setting the right manual cost per click for your
campaign. So unless you have lots of time to spend analyzing and monitoring your campaign,
I'll usually recommend people to go for the enhanced cost per click, and what's enhanced cost
per click. Enhanced cost per click is an automated bidding strategy for your shopping campaign. By
selecting that, you can choose either to automate your bidding for maximize conversions or maximize
conversion value, which I'll go into more details shortly. By selecting enhanced cost per click,
you are telling Google to use their machine learning capabilities, using their algorithm
to learn who to show your ads to and how much to bid for that. Going back to the example, let's
see if there's a really popular slot between 3 to 4pm, where people are more likely to be browsing
and deciding to buy, when even though it costs a higher cost per click, they are going to bid for
that slot and show your ads during that time. So you're going to spend more higher cost per click,
but then again, those clicks are going to more likely turn into sales. So in this case,
even though you're spending slightly higher, but then you're going to get sales in the end. And as
long as that cost per click that Google is bidding for is still lower than your conversion value,
it's still going to be profitable for you. You are still going to get sales that's going to cover the
costs and give you profits for that click, that it makes it worth your while to use this strategy.
The drawback of using this enhanced cost per click is you have to give this algorithm time to
learn when is the best time to show your ad, when should they bid for more during certain days or
during certain times, or which of your ads they should show up to get the most amount of clicks
for your store. So when I say machine learning, it means that Google needs to collect more data,
collect more information based on how people react or respond to the ads that they have seen. So if
your ads are really good, and then somebody clicks on it, and then they turn into sale,
then Google will know. Right? Okay, it seems like the few clicks that we're getting today. They're
converting into sales. So we should show to more of the same types of people. So this is what I
mean by machine learning. So Google learns from previous performance based on how they
predict certain types of people are more likely to click and turn into a sale. They're going to show
to more of those people. So you need to give the campaign time to learn. So usually after you set
up a campaign, you need to Wait for between seven to 14 days for the campaign to stabilize, to be
able to learn who to show more of your campaigns to, to more likely get the right clicks that turn
into a sale. And when you select enhanced cost per click, you have the option of selecting maximize
conversions or maximize by conversion values. The difference between the two of them is that one is
you're maximizing for a sale. And second one is to maximize the sale value. And some people feel
like they want to maximize the clicks to turn into sale value. But I usually recommend store
owners to select maximize for sales. Because when you maximize for sales, what happens is you're
trying to get as many people as possible to your store who are most likely to buy something from
your store, when you're maximizing for conversion values, it means that you have to set a certain
number to say if someone comes to my store, I want them to spend at least this amount. That
is sometimes a disadvantage as well for the campaign. Because when you say I only want to
get someone who spent a certain amount, that means you are actually restricting and cutting down on
the chances of people who might buy less for the first time, but might buy more subsequently. So as
long as you're getting people who are buying, and if they really enjoy your products, they
really love your product, they are recommending to their friends, they want to buy more of it, then
they're going to come back again and again. So the customer lifetime value of these shoppers is going
to grow exponentially in the long term. However, if you're only targeting people who are buying
the most amount possible for their first purchase, then you're missing out on potential customers are
going to buy more over a longer period of time. So I highly recommend if you decide to go for
enhanced cost per click, which I highly recommend you to do. So go for enhanced conversions instead
of enhanced conversion value. If your campaign is performing well enough, maybe over a longer period
of time, and you know that there's a certain profitability that you want to target, maybe you
can decide to go for maximize conversion value. There's another video that you can watch, where
I talk about how to set the ideal target return on adspend, which focuses on how to maximize your
conversion value, you can check that out, link in the top right hand corner of the screen. But
if you're just running your campaigns between three to six months, I would highly recommend
you to aim for enhanced cost per click, maximize conversions to make sure that you're getting as
many sales as possible in hopes that people who are buying from your store they really like it,
love your products, they're going to become your best advocates and they're going to return again
and again continuously over months and years. And one of the biggest advantage of selecting enhanced
cost per click is you don't have to spend a lot of time monitoring that cost per click unlike the
manual cost per click. Maybe you need to monitor on a more regular basis. Whereas on the enhanced
cost per click you trust that after you set a budget limit, and you have optimized your
product feed, then Google is going to select the automated bidding strategy and select the best
amount to spend for each click, so you're going to get shoppers for your store. Cool. I hope that
gives you a clearer idea of your options for your Google Shopping campaign and help you to decide
what's the best option when you set up your Google Shopping campaign. If you're watching this video,
you would have heard about Google Analytics 4 which is also known as GA4, that's the newest
version of Google Analytics. Previous version was known as Universal Analytics, which is also less
known as GA3. And with Google Analytics 4, it's a whole different tracking system altogether,
the ways to track conversion is also totally different. And if you want to use conversions
to drive your Google Shopping campaigns, you want to set up your conversions correctly,
and send this conversion information to Google Ads account. And Google's algorithm can then use this
information to locate more of the right people to buy more from your store. You have to set up the
Google and YouTube app if you haven't set it up already for your Shopify store. And you have to
set up conversion tracking and make sure that this information is sent to Google ads. If you
want to significantly drive more clicks for your Google Shopping campaigns. Check out my video,
13 ways to drive more clicks for your Google Shopping ads, link in the top right hand corner
of the screen. Go into it. Optimize your campaign to make sure you're getting the
most out of your advertising budgets. If you want to grow and scale up your Google Shopping
campaign to make them more profitable. do get in touch with me, my contact details in the
description and pinned comments. I help Shopify store owners to optimize your shopping campaigns,
optimize your Google ads to make them more profitable to drive highly qualified traffic to
your store that turns into sales. Don't forget to download my free Shopify Marketing Guide,
link in the description and pinned comments where I go into the pros and cons to help you
decide what's the best way to drive more free and paid traffic to your store, so you don't
totally rely on Google. That's all for today. I'm Clarice Lin, The ROI Doctor. Stay profitable.