SARAH: Hi, and welcome back to our webinar
series for comparison shopping services.
As usual, my name is Sarah.
IVAN: And my name is Ivan.
SARAH: And the reason we're sitting here
is because we work as shopping experts
at Google's European head office.
IVAN: Today, we're going to talk about Google Ads
and reporting for shopping campaigns.
Now this is something that a lot of you
have requested information on.
So Sarah, let's just dive into it.
So let's take a quick look at the subjects
that we'll go through today.
Firstly, we'll show how your merchant center feed
health can also appear in your Google Ads account,
as many of you have requested more information
on these features specifically.
Secondly, we'll see how feed attributes
play into your shopping campaigns,
partly following on from our topic in the previous webinar
on the link between Merchant Center and Google Ads.
SARAH: And lastly, we'll take a quick look at the custom
reporting and what you can do with that reports tool.
IVAN: First off, we'll go through how Merchant Center
and Google Ads work together when it comes to feed health.
You might remember from our first webinar
that Merchant Center displays the number of items
that are approved to serve, disapproved,
and therefore ineligible to serve and expiring.
Here we see a breakdown of how this looks in the interface.
The red shows disapproved items and the green
shows items ready to serve.
SARAH: If we go into the items menu on the right hand side,
we can see that it's quite detailed, as it gives
disapproval reasons and you can get a downloadable list
of any affected item.
Disapprovals should be dealt with in Merchant Center,
so this is naturally where you'll find the most
information and details on it.
But it is handy to know the number of items
that are eligible to serve at any given time,
as a lot of disapproved items will have an effect on campaign
performance.
IVAN: Here we see how a typical Google Ads
account could look like.
Now, it's important to note that, for illustration
purposes, we've invented a test campaign here
that targets the US, and therefore, this
serves through Google Shopping.
But of course, this will be exactly the same interface
and functions for accounts on any other CSS, as well.
For now, I'll click into our test campaign here,
and I'll click my way into the product groups menu.
Here we can see that I've segmented my product
groups into different subgroups based on a custom label.
And for now, I'm interested in seeing
how many items in each of my groups
are disapproved to see where I need
to put in some work in my feed.
I go into the columns menu here and click Modify Columns.
And here I have a menu called Shopping.
Here you can see four distinctions,
products submitted, products approved, products active,
and products ready to serve.
I can also tick these boxes to see a percentage
representation, either instead of or alongside
absolute numbers.
And for now, I'll also click the product ready to serve.
I can even rearrange the order in which
these columns are shown here.
Once I click Apply, we'll see the columns shown
in the right hand side here.
Before we move on, let's take a quick look at what these four
categories actually mean.
SARAH: Products Submitted shows the number of submitted
products in your product group.
You simply submit products through your linked Google
Merchant Center account.
IVAN: Products Approved shows the number of, well, approved
products in your product group.
When you submit products through your linked Google Merchant
Center account, they'll be reviewed
to make sure that they meet Google's policy and data
quality requirements.
Products Active shows the number of active products in a product
group.
Now, there are a few reasons why a product can be inactive.
It could be disapproved or it could be in an excluded product
group.
In addition, the campaign or ad group that contains the product
could also be paused or removed.
SARAH: Products Ready to Serve shows the number
of products in your product group
that are ready to serve and eligible for the ad auction.
There are a few reasons to why a product may not
be ready to serve.
It could be out of stock, disapproved,
or in an excluded product group.
As you can see here, the distinction
between Ready to Serve and Active
is whether the item is in or out of stock.
IVAN: If we go back into the account,
we can see the stats for each product grouping
on the right hand side here.
Now this is very useful if we want
to get an overview of how many items in each product group
are OK to serve without any issues.
If I only want to have a look into one specific product group
and I don't want to bother with adding all these columns,
I can do that too by simply scrolling over
the name like this and I'll see the same four states.
If I scroll over any of the numbers in the columns,
I'll have the same interface, but the column I've chosen
is highlighted like this.
You can see it's highlighted there in blue.
You can see here that the menu highlights disapproved products
as well--
that little tiny speck of red on the end there--
so you can see the proportion of disapprovals at a quick glance.
SARAH: Finally, one of the functionalities
I find most useful in Google Ads is
that you can change the graph here to reflect the same four
designations that Ivan just showed,
so you'll have a time representation
of how your products have been performing.
If I go into the shopping menu here and change this
to product submitted, highlighted here in blue,
and switch the event to Products are Ready to Serve,
I can see that on 12th of October
those started to diverge a bit.
If this campaign has had a drop in traffic since then,
then it would also be a likely explanation.
I simply had fewer products to serve than I did before.
Now let's see how feed attributes also
play into Google Ads.
As we've mentioned before, there are six attributes
in a Google feed that can be used
to structure shopping campaigns or break out product groups.
The attributes here in gray use standard and static values,
while product type and custom label
are customizable to your own preference.
All of these can be used to break out campaigns
and products in different ways.
If we go into the products menu here,
we'll see a list of all the items in this campaign.
Much of the information is taken straight from Merchant Center,
like item ID, title, and so on.
If I go into columns and modify columns,
I'll find a shopping menu here as well,
and here I can actually add all the attributes I'd like.
The only one we're missing out of the six attributes
is item ID, as that's actually already present.
So for this example, let's add Category, Product Type,
and Custom Label three and four.
Once I click Apply, these will all
show as separate columns in the interface.
As you can see, we have three category levels here,
product type levels, and custom labels here.
IVAN: This overview is really useful
if you've made significant changes to any
of these attributes in your feed and you'd
like to control check that everything is in order.
Now let's say that I, in this campaign,
had segmented product groups by custom label three
and I'd made some changes in my Merchant Center feed
to that label.
As this is the attribute I've segmented by,
I want to make sure that all the items have a value,
and as you can see here, something must have gone wrong.
Custom Label three is empty, so I'm risking that a lot of items
don't have any product groups to serve through.
This is, by the way, why we always
recommend having an Everything Else product group to ensure
a safety net for products to serve through if something
like this should occur.
In reality though, my product groups in this campaign
are based on Custom Label four, as you can see reflected here.
I can also apply a filter for the items if I just
want to check a subset, rather than dealing with all 400,000
odd products.
For example, I want to check only items with a given custom
label value.
So I'll go in here, I'll add my value I want to check,
and click Apply.
And as you can see, all of these items have now been filtered,
so I only see items with custom label
four value that I have chosen to see.
Now as an added bonus, I can even
add another column if I go in to modify columns here.
In the shopping menu, at the bottom, we see product status.
Now, if I tick that and I want to drag that all the way
up here so I can see it easily, once I click Apply,
we'll see item by item which ones are approved
and which ones have any issues.
So I can get those looked at.
And here we can see that these ones have images
that are too small, and that's good for me to know,
so I can go in and make the necessary changes in my feed.
SARAH: There is one more tool in Google Ads
you can use for shopping ads reporting,
and that's the Reports Menu.
If we go into the reports menu here,
we'll focus on the first two options, predefined reports
and custom reports.
We won't go deeply into what's possible to do with these,
as it's a very big area to cover and opportunities there
are more or less endless, but we'll have a quick glance.
Under Predefined Reports, you'll find a dedicated shopping menu
with a lot of useful breakdowns.
Let's say we want to see the most granular reporting
available, item ID.
We'll just click here, and the report comes already populated.
You can, of course, add or remove any parameters
that you wish.
So let's say we don't really care
about the cost of conversion for now,
but I would like to see the day of the week.
I can also filter, so I want to see only items that have had
at least or one impression and that has had a custom label
four, value 10 to 20.
Once you have this in place, you can also
download any customized report here.
IVAN: For customer reports, the layout for tables
is exactly the same as the one we just saw,
but obviously, you don't have any preset values.
You can add whatever you'd like.
You can also choose what kind of charts
you want for custom reports.
Let's say that for now we want a pie chart for this use.
As for serving for the US, we'd like
to see which states our shopping ads impressions originate from.
So here, I'll add impressions as our base metric,
and as our secondary metric, I'll add region.
And what we'll see here is a breakdown,
on the right hand side here, of which regions
we get the most impressions from.
This is obviously just a quick look
into what the report functions in Google Ads can offer,
and I'm sure we could be building
graphs and tables for hours if we
were to make this exhaustive.
However, we're not going to keep you watching hour long videos
of us building reports.
So for now, I think we'll just say goodbye and see you
next time.
SARAH: See you then.
IVAN: Bye.