1. Google Shopping Guide 2.0: Bidding,
Advanced Segment Tracking, and
CPA Campaigns
cpcstrategy.com/blog
www.cpcstrategy.com

2. The New Google Shopping
Note: If you read our first Google Shopping ebook and already have your campaigns
set up, jump to page 11 of this guide.
Overview
Since its inception Google Shopping has been free to participate in. All an advertiser
had to do get their products listed was to submit a data feed with accurate inventory,
product, and pricing information and they could sit back and watch the traffic roll in.
Beginning in June, these free listings will be combined with the commercial Product
Listing Ads Program, creating a New Google Shopping Experience.
While the new format will certainly present challenges to all retailers, those that
quickly adapt to the new commercialized environment are poised to benefit. This
crash course in the New Google Shopping is intended to get you up to speed so that
you can maintain and gain traffic during and after the transition.
So what exactly is changing and what is
taking its place?
1

3. Google Product Search Ads, those free ad units that we’ve learned to love as free traf-
fic drivers will now become paid for merchants. These ad units tended to be listed in
the middle of search result page with direct links to merchant product pages.
In addition to those, Google Prod-
uct Listing Ads will take on a more
prominent role as well. These ad
units display specific products that
will show up alongside standard Ad-
words listings above organic search
results, but instead of just a short
snippet of text, users gain the ben-
efit of seeing specific product titles,
an image, and price.
The new Google Shopping will be
managed via Adwords and driven
by the data feed submitted to the
Merchant Center. Within Adwords
a merchant can set bids by various
criteria such as product type, brand,
or anything you can include in your
product feed, similar to their regular
Adwords Campaigns.
While both are driven by the same merchant center inventory/data feed Product
Listing Ads are not to be confused with Product Extensions which are an extension
of standard Adwords text ads, where products will be listed alongside an Adword
text listing, with a drop-down option to see products that a merchant is selling that is
related to the search.
2

4. During the Transition
Google plans to complete the transition from free to paid listings some time in Fall.
During the transition period advertisers that use the Product Listings Ads program
to advertise their products will be given a 10% discount on purchased traffic . Those
that sign up before August 15th will receive a $100 credit get started with the new
program as well giving us an idea of the timeline Google is working to complete the
transition.
To sign up for this discount browse over to the following URL to get an automatic
monthly credit of 10%: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/shoppingcoupon/
New Product Type Shopping Ads
We have seen a major change in the Google shopping experience and it’s being rolled
out to the “tents” query. If you head to Google and search “tents” in the web results
you’ll see a brand new shopping snippet that Google hasn’t displayed before.
3

5. Instead of returning individual product results that matched the “tent” query, Google
recognized that “tent” is a broad, overarching term that encompasses multiple prod-
uct types, each with a very specific use, and returned categories of tents that you
can click to continue shopping. Nobody is charged for this particular click from the
organic SERPs even though it’s listed within a “Sponsored” cell.
This is the first time that we’re seeing Google link to its shopping platform via picto-
grams and they kind of resemble something you would see on a street sign.
Clicking any one of the links takes you directly to a Google Shopping with a new UX,
updated faceted nav and many other neat nuances that give it a whole new look
and “feel”. Google now gives shoppers the ability to filter by brand, price, and other
incredibly specific attributes as well as giving users the option to Read On about any
given attribute or filter.
4

6. Google Shopping Buying Guides
Clicking “Read On” for an expanded attribute filter, such as Seasonality, will bring up a
Buying Guide that goes into more detail about why that particular attribute is relevant
and/or important to the purchase decision. The Buying Guide gives you the ability
to do some preliminary product research without having to leave the Google Shop-
ping interface. If you scroll through some of the information in the Tent Buying Guide
you’ll see that it’s pretty comprehensive!
There’s also a link to the Buying Guide in the left navigation as well.
What To Do To Get Started with Prod-
uct Listing Ads
There are four steps you must go through to effectively setup and launch your Prod-
uct Listing Ad Campaigns. They are as follows-
• Setting Up and Sending Your Data Feed
• Connecting Your Google Adwords and Google Merchant Center Accounts
• Setting Up your PLA Campaign within Adwords
• Tracking Results Using Google Analytics
5

7. Setting Up and Sending Your Data
Feed
If you’re already sending a data feed to the Google Merchant Center for the free
Google Shopping program the good news is there is not much you have to do modify
this data feed to prepare it for the product listing ads program.
adwords_grouping - Used to group products in an arbitrary way. It can be used for
Product Filters to limit a campaign to a group of products, or Product Targets to bid
Apart from the standard Google Shopping Columns, you will need to add the follow-
differently for a group of products. This is a required field if the advertiser wants to
ing fields to the data feed to slice and differentiate your inventory for the product
bid differently to different subsets of products in the CPC or CPA % version. It can only
listing ads program.
hold one value.
adwords_labels - Similar to adwords_grouping but used only for CPC ads. You can
also use multiple values here, separated by commas.
adwords_publish- Indicates whether or not you’d like a particular to be used in the
Product Listing Ads and Ad Extension program
adwords_redirect- Used to send traffic from the free Google Shopping Source to
another URL although with the depreciation of the program we can see that this field
probably will no longer be used in the mid to long term.
Check out our example data feed columns for a template of how the header should
look once complete.
6

8. Connecting Your Google Adwords and
Google Merchant Center Accounts
1. In your Merchant Center account, click Settings, then AdWords
2. Enter your AdWords Customer ID and click Add
Setting Up your Product Listing Ad Cam-
paign within Adwords
While you can set up a Product Listing Ad campaign with in an existing text ad cam-
paign, we’ve found that setting up the campaign as standalone campaign gives the
greatest chance for success on the platform.
7

9. To Set Up a Product Listings Ad Campaign
1. ) Log on to adwords and create a new campaign
2.) Name the Campaign Product Listing Ads, set your Geo Locations Target, Bids/Bud-
get and enable Product Extensions
3.) Create an Adgroup that will house your Product Listing Ads by selecting ‘Product
Listing Ad’ under the ‘create an ad’ wizard in the Adgroup menu
8

10. 4.) Set your bids and you’re done! You’ve your created first Product Listing Ads Cam-
paign, Adgroup, and Ad.
Two things to note here:
Promotion - Product Listing Ads allow you to add promotion text to your ads, so if
you have free shipping or any other offer that might entice a customer to buy this is
your chance to promote it.
Auto-Targets - Auto-targets allow you to focus your bidding around particular
groups of products as defined by the following five attributes: product_type, brand,
condition, adwords_grouping, and adwords_labels. A well optimized product list-
ings campaign would have many different segmentation buckets to help optimizing
bids, but for now we can leave the auto-target as ‘all products’ to get you started.
Tracking Performance Using Google
Analytics
Tracking Performance Using Google Analytics requires some manipulation of the data
feed that is sent to the Google Merchant Center, but makes sense unless you want to
be flying blind on the new channel.
9

11. Step 1
To track traffic you’ll have to fill out the ‘adwords_redirect’ field with the full URL to your product
page appending with tracking parameters differentiate Google Shopping traffic from Google
Product Listing Ad traffic.
For example if your product was at the follow URL
www.mysite.com/product1.html
You would populate the ‘adwords_redirect’ field for product1 with a Google Analytics Tracking
Parameter specific to product listing ads, for instance-
www.mysite.com/product1.html?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords
Once you complete this your data feed will look a lot like this:
Now, any traffic coming from product extensions or product listing ads will be tracked under
“googlepepla / adwords” within Google Analytics.
Step 2
So now we can differentiate between free Google Shopping (soon to be depreciated) and
product extensions and product listing ads traffic–now we must figure out a way to differentiate
between product extensions and product listing traffic.
All this requires is another column, called “adwords_queryparam”. Curiously Google has taken
this part off their help pages for whatever reason, but it still seems be active and working for our
clients.
In the example below we fill this column with “utm_content={adtype}”.
10

12. What this column does is allow you to have Google automatically append your URLs with what’s
in the column, and replace {adtype} with “pe” or “pla” depending how a user got to your site.
To backtrack a step–a user going to your site via product extensions or product listing without
this column will end up at:
[yourdomain.com]/page1?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords
With this new column, a user coming from product extensions specifically will end up at:
[yourdomain.com]/page1?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords&utm_
content=pe
And similarly a user coming from product listing ads will end up at:
[yourdomain.com]/page1?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords&utm_
content=pla
Which then allows you to further break down your traffic source between product extension
and product listing ad users in Analytics.
Bidding
[note: BEFORE YOU BID, make sure you check out the section on Down Bidding Products on the
next page]
Take advantage of Google Shopping’s transition bidding by securing the top spots for cheap. Be-
ing able to set the market rate for products in your inventory will give you the advantage to look
at larger data sets than your competitors when diving in to optimize bids at the product level.
A $1 to $1.50 cent bid is good place to start to make sure that your campaign has taken off.
We’ve seen sellers bid around 40 – 50 cents to not get any traffic, but when they bid $1 their av-
erage CPC falls to around 40 – 50 cents. You’ll most likely be paying around that range for traffic.
11

13. Based on a report we recently did with our partners over at EliteSEM, we’ve seen that if you do
have a strong adwords campaign already built out, you can expect to increase ad spend by
around 20%, some more, some less, for this Google Shopping change.
Segmenting
Product segmentation and quick data feed optimization is going to be really important to a
profitable Google Shopping campaign, so if that is difficult for you to do you’ll want to start
looking for resources to help you fill those gaps. CPC Strategy handles all the data feed manage-
ment for it’s clients.
Based on how profitable your campaign is, you’ll want to dive in at the brand, category and
product level. Tagging these with Google Analytics identifiers is a good place to start.
Some good groups to segment include:
• Top Margin Brands
• Top Margin Categories
• Top Margin Products
• Top Performing Products
• Worst Performing Products (you can set up a rule to penny bid these)
Down Bidding Products: One Trick to Re-
member
Instead of having a high all products bid, you should set the all products bid at a penny and
then up bid everything in the feed using some sort of “live” adwords label at 50 cents or 1 dollar.
Then if we wanted to penny-bid a product we’d simply remove that “live” label so it’d be forced
into the All Products target which is set at $0.01.
The same goes for other ad groups as well.
12

14. How to set up brand-level bidding using
multiple values in the same product target:
There’s an easier way to set up brand-level bidding using multiple values in the same product
target. Using this method you won’t have to set up new labels for every brand or category.
1. Create Brand Adgroup targeting Nike (brand=Nike) from within the AdWords login
2. Set default Max CPC to $0.01
3. Within the same adgroup create another target with the following attributes
1. adwords_labels=live
2. brand=Nike
4. Set that bid to $0.50 or whatever
Since Google will look for products where both rules apply, if you simply remove the “live” label
from the product then that product will no longer apply to the product target with the $0.50
bid.
In the next section we’ll look at advanced analaytics techniques to track and dive into these seg-
ments.
Advanced Product-Level Google Shopping
Analytics:
Tracking Product Targets in Google Analytics
You can already access macro performance reports for product targets by going to Advertising
> Adwords > Keywords tab in Google Analytics.
If you have traditional text ad campaigns also running it may be difficult to find the product tar-
gets among all the other keyword-level data in this report so here’s a handy regular expressions
filter that you can use to filter out only the product targets. All you have to do is copy/paste the
following code into the advanced filter, and filter on Keyword:
[=*]
13

15. *Remember to select “Matching RegExp” instead of the default “Contains” otherwise it won’t
work.
This will give you essentially what you’re already able to see in the Adwords account but with
actual revenue per target. This is slightly better but you still don’t have a whole lot to work with.
But what if we were able to see exactly which products were getting clicks/conversions within
each product target? We can do this but it requires a small tweak to the data feed.
The {adwords_producttargetid} Parameter
In your Google Shopping data feed there’s an adwords_redirect column where you can set up
custom tracking parameters for your Google Shopping ads. We can actually track product tar-
get performance on the item-level by adding the {adwords_producttargetid} parameter to the
end of the urls in this column.
If you already have tracking parameters appended to your adwords_redirect url (anything after
the “?” in the url) then all you need to do is add &id={adwords_producttargetid} to the end.
If this is completely new to you and/or you don’t have any tracking parameters you’re going to
have to add ?id={adwords_producttargetid} to the end of the url.
*The difference between the two above is the leading “&” vs the leading “?”.
By adding the {adwords_producttargetid} parameter, you’ll be able to see the Google-generated
ID for the specific product target that triggered your ad.
You can access this report in Google Analytics by going to:
1. Content > Site Content > Landing Pages
2. Choose your Secondary Dimension for Traffic Sources > Campaign.
3. Once you do that, edit the Advanced Filter to include only.
o Campaign containing [your campaign name]
o Landing Page containing “&id=”
14

16. *Remember to select “Matching RegExp” instead of the default “Contains” otherwise it won’t
work.
This will give you essentially what you’re already able to see in the Adwords account but with
actual revenue per target. This is slightly better but you still don’t have a whole lot to work with.
But what if we were able to see exactly which products were getting clicks/conversions within
each product target? We can do this but it requires a small tweak to the data feed.
The {adwords_producttargetid} Parameter
In your Google Shopping data feed there’s an adwords_redirect column where you can set up
custom tracking parameters for your Google Shopping ads. We can actually track product tar-
get performance on the item-level by adding the {adwords_producttargetid} parameter to the
end of the urls in this column.
If you already have tracking parameters appended to your adwords_redirect url (anything after
the “?” in the url) then all you need to do is add &id={adwords_producttargetid} to the end.
If this is completely new to you and/or you don’t have any tracking parameters you’re going to
have to add ?id={adwords_producttargetid} to the end of the url.
*The difference between the two above is the leading “&” vs the leading “?”.
By adding the {adwords_producttargetid} parameter, you’ll be able to see the Google-generated
ID for the specific product target that triggered your ad.
You can access this report in Google Analytics by going to:
1. Content > Site Content > Landing Pages
2. Choose your Secondary Dimension for Traffic Sources > Campaign.
3. Once you do that, edit the Advanced Filter to include only.
o Campaign containing [your campaign name]
o Landing Page containing “&id=”
15

17. Now you have a list of all the landing page urls (aka the Google Shopping ads that are being
clicked) within a Google Shopping campaign. Each ID parameter will tell us exactly which prod-
uct target is rendering our ads.
Segmenting The Analytics Report in Excel
Now let’s head over to Excel and work some magic.
First, download the report by going to the Export tab and selecting your desired file type for
Excel. CSV is usually most compatible with Excel.
16

18. Which will give you a report that should look something like what’s below.
*It’s possible that you’re appending other valueTrack parameters that might be showing up in
this report (like adType=pla) so if you are, just do a Find/Replace to eliminate them, leaving us
only with the landing page url and the ?id= parameter.
Now we can figure out exactly which products are getting clicks/conversions by:
1. Remove all instances of id= in column A.
Find/Replace (CTRL+H) – Find “id=” and Replace with “”
2. Select column A and Text to Columns in Excel.
3. Choose the “delimited” option.
4. Choose “?” as your delimiter
5. Hit “Finish”.
Now you’re going to have a report that gives you clicks BY PRODUCT and is also filterable based
on PRODUCT TARGET.
These IDs correspond to specific targets in our Adwords campaign.
Unfortunately, right now there’s not a way for us to exactly find the corresponding IDs in the
Adwords login but we should be able to figure it out by:
1. Comparing aggregate clicks/product target in Adwords to the aggregate visits/id pa-
rameter in Google Analytics (or Excel). Depending on the nature of your targets this can be
either easy or rather tedious.
17

19. 2. Compare the urls that are getting visits with a specific product target id to their associ-
ated values in the feed. Product targets are based on values in the feed so there should be
some insight here if you’re familiar with navigating your data feed.
If we go back to this specific report in Excel, there are only two possible IDs in our new product
target column and it’s easy to see which one is All Products. (Hint: it’s the one with the most
clicks) So, in this case our product_target IDs are
All Products = 21619610058
adwords_labels=Top Sellers = 39787593978
We can make a note of what these IDs are for future reference because they will not change.
Save it in Evernote or whatever you like to use, just as long as it’s in a safe place so you don’t
have to go through this again and again for the same account.
Using {adwords_producttargetid} To Improve Google Shopping Performance
Macro-level performance for adgroups and campaigns can be extremely valuable, especially
when you’re doing a quick audit on the health of a campaign, but it’s more useful to see actual
product-level data since that’s where you’re going to see the biggest gains in ROI.
Take the following birds-eye view of a Google Shopping campaign that’s the default in Google
Analytics. The Ad Group for “Top Sellers” is converting at above 5% with a per visiti value of
$4.19! The only problem here is how little traffic we’re getting.. so the obvious solution is to
increase our bid for the entire adgroup right?
18

20. Before we do anything rash, let’s head back to our product target report in Excel and and take a
look at exactly what’s going on at the product level.
The Top Sellers adgroup seems to be converting well so far, so we filter on that ID and find that
only one item has been converting in this group. 3 clicks, 2 conversions for $146.60 in revenue.
WHOA. So, I thought that this adgroup was already doing well with the limited # of clicks we
had, but now I just learned that it’s actually all due to one product! Equipped with that knowl-
edge, maybe I should raise the bid for that one product rather than doing it for the entire Top
Sellers adgroup.
This also shows you that /ganocafe-classic.html has made up for about half of the total clicks
for this adgroup without even converting once yet. If I raised the bid for this entire adgroup it’s
likely that that one poor performing item would continue to get the majority of traffic and our
once stellar performance would go waning into the night.
Now that’s some sexy analyzing!
Leveraging Search Queries For More Product-Level Analysis
Another approach that can be coupled with the above analysis is to look at which search que-
ries are triggering your ads to make sure the right products are being included in the right
targets, labels, groupings, etc.
You can see the queries that are triggering specific product targets by going to the Matched
Search Queries tab and selecting Keyword as your Secondary Dimension. Once again, use the
[=*] regex filter to isolate the Google Shopping targets.
19

21. For example, this merchant sells a few “gano cafe” items but his titles/urls can differ based on
whether or not that term is written as one word or separately as two words. As a result, these
search terms are triggering two different sets of ads that perform differently from one another.
Assuming that the url contains either “gano” or “ganocafe” we can go back to the target ID report
we made in Excel earlier and figure out which items are being served in each adgroup. Filtering
on Landing Page, we see the top ads that have “gano” in the url and it’s fairly obvious which ad is
being rendered for each of those two searches above.
This makes me wonder why I’ve got the /ganocafe-classic.html listed in the Top Sellers adgroup
when it’s actually getting less clicks AND converting less than the one in the All Products ad-
group. Even though we know that one is a site-wide best-seller, that may not be the case when
the traffic is coming from the paid Google Shopping real estate.
This level of analysis helps of identify search terms that are better qualified as well as product
ads that convert the best.
Caveat: This analysis was actually performed on a very small data set since this particular cam-
paign hasn’t been active for very long. As our campaigns grow and we collect more data there
should be clearer call to actions from the data and we can make better informed decisions.
But just for the sake of discussion, here are a few actions that we might consider for our example
data set:
20

22. 1. Changing the title for our Top Seller ad to “gano cafe” rather than the single merged
term “ganocafe” This small detail is obviously triggering different ads for their corresponding
.
searches and the search volumes will differ between the slight variations.
2. Removing /ganocafe-classic.html from the Top Sellers adgroup. If conversions don’t
improve for this item (in this target), then we can assume that this ad isn’t going to send us very
qualified traffic and we no longer want to include it in our highest bid adgroup. In our case, this
will require some adjustments to the adwords_labels value.
3. Increasing the bid for /gano-cafe-3-in-1.html. We don’t have enough data on this item just
yet, but if it continues to convert at a high rate and profitable ROI then we may want to increase
our bid here.
Google Shopping CPA
How to Make Google Shopping Work Like Ebay
So you have to pay to play now if you want to list on Google Shopping. It’s rough. If you’re in the
guns & ammunition category it’s rougher. But you can still make Google Shopping work for you
like Ebay or Amazon by setting up a CPA campaign in the Google Shopping login.
That’s right, you can set a percentage of sale to give Google giving you a fixed cost per sale.
In this ebook we share how Google’s CPA program works (in language written for ecommerce
business owners) and how you can set it up.
1: Set up conversion tracking
Go into your Google Adwords account.
Click on the Tools and Analysis section of your Google Adwords top toolbar and click on Conver-
sions from the drop down menu.
21

23. Under the Conversions tab, click the +New conversion button.
Follow the steps through setting up the conversion tracker.
22

24. For the page security level you’ll want to use HTTPS if you’re using a Thank You page for the
conversion tracker.
Note that selecting ‘Add a ‘Google Site stats’ notification to the code generates for my page’ will
put a little image on that page where your conversion tracker is activated. You probably don’t
want to select it so no image shows up when your conversion tracker is activated.
23

25. Since you’re not running a display network campaign, after you click save and continue on this
page you can skip the next page and go grab your code. Select whatever use case applies (I
make the changes to the code or someone else makes changes to the code) and there you go.
The code will look something like this [NOTE - this is an example and will not work with your
webstore]:
<!-- Google Code for Purchase/Sale Conversion Page -->
<script type=”text/javascript”>
/* <![CDATA[ */
var google_conversion_id = VARIABLE;
var google_conversion_language = “en”;
var google_conversion_format = “1”;
var google_conversion_color = “ffffff”;
var google_conversion_label = “VARIABLE”;
var google_conversion_value = PLACEHOLDERHERE;
/* ]]> */
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conver
sion.js”>
</script>
<noscript>
<div style=”display:inline;”>
<img height=”1” width=”1” style=”border-style:none;” alt=”” src=”https://www.googlead
services.com/pagead/conversion/VARIABLE/?value=PLACEHOLDERHERE&amp;label=VA
RIABLEX_Aw&amp;guid=ON&amp;script=0”/>
</div>
</noscript>
Paste this code in the body section of your order confirmation page and save the changes. That’s
it!
If you’re using a dynamic web page, Google lists more ways to insert the code into your web
page, but most of you won’t have to worry about this. If you know you have a dynamic order
confirmation page or script you run, see this page and scroll pretty much down to the bottom to
24

26. Second: Wait
Wait a day or so for the tracking pixel to sync with Google Adwords. It should only take a few hours at
the most but you never know.
Third: Activate Your First Google Shopping CPA Campaign
Set the % of each sale that you want Google to receive and begin your campaign. Watch it closely for
the next few days, gaining traction in terms of impressions and clicks will be crucial. Adjust your % of
sale accordingly, the more you give up the better chance you’ll get higher sales volume as Google
will want your products sourced above sellers in your category that give up less.
Check out the link below for more info:
http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2456107
Conclusion
We know that this transition might be a bit bumpy for a lot of retailers, but at time the change pro-
vides an opportunity for those who rise to the occasion. CPC Strategy is the leader in data feed and
Google Shopping setup and management. Give us a call at 619-677-2453 or shoot as an e-mail at
contact@cpcstrategy.com and we’ll make sure you take full advantage of this new opportunity.
25

27. About CPC Strategy
To date CPC Strategy has covered more news, published more reports, and written more
articles on Comparison Shopping Engine optimization and management than any other
agency. CPC Strategy leads the industry in CSE best practice implementation, data feed
optimization, and product bidding tactics.
Our comparison shopping studies and articles have appeared on blogs and industry
publications such as Internet Retailer, Website Magazine, GetElastic, Amazon Seller Sup-
port, and Auction Bytes.
Long story short: CPC Strategy is the leader in the CSE industry. You can trust that our
knowledge, expertise and management systems will help you outsmart your competi-
tion on the CSEs.
Interested in partnering with us? Contact us today to improve your CSE revenue.