The new organic Shopping listings on Google brought more competition into its Shopping search results. Merchants, in order to get a visibility advantage, can opt to advertise their products on the platform. The owner of ZATO Marketing, Kirk Williams, and Mike Ryan, product management lead at Smarter Ecommerce, shared some bidding strategies for new Google Shopping campaigns during a Google Shopping session of Live with Search Engine Land.
“I always start with manual CPC; I try to just get things going at a certain specific bid, get some data and then we’ll go from there,” Williams said. By managing CPC manually, merchants can allocate more of their budgets to the placements or keywords they’ve found to be most profitable.
“I definitely can recommend ECPC,” Ryan said, adding that ECPC bidding. Merchants are able to regulate bids manually while allowing Google to make automatic adjustments for clicks that seem to potentially lead to a conversion. ECPC bidding uses auction-time signals like location, browser and time of day to optimize bids with respect to the context of each search.
Using maximize click bidding can complement brand campaigns. “That really is a good match for the max click strategy because we’re just saying, ‘Hey set a really high maximum CPC in there, and just go and get me all of the clicks because I want to make sure that we own them’,” Williams said, caveating, “We’ll avoid max clicks usually in a top-of-funnel-type campaign, because who knows what’s going on; we do need ROAS there, but that’s how we look at strategies.”