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Google Smart Shopping taught me a lesson today
Posted by on July 3, 2020 at 3:37 pm**TLDR: Google Smart Shopping campaign single-handedly outperformed FB campaigns on my first Shopify store. How should I move forward?**
Google Smart Shopping taught me a lesson today
Someone advised me before starting my first Shopify store in the fitness equipment niche (high-ticket, around $200 each item). That I should set up Pixel and get going with Google Ads “before messing with FB Ad”. I did that. Set up both Pixel and Google Analytics. And a Smart Shopping campaign via the Google shopify app with $10 daily budget.
I started to do more research on advertisement. Found out a lot of the viral e-commerce/dropshipping gurus are really focusing on FB Ads. One of them is the famous Verum Ecom. I bought the concept of their theories very much. Bought the course, keep studying their FB Ad strategies. All my energies have been pouring into FB Ads (conversion with purchase optimization) since then. Testing different audiences, creating new creatives, putting up new ad copywriting, and such.
Got my first sale from FB Ads on the first day. First sale from Google Ads under 50 clicks. I’m fairly surprised but did not bother much and keep grinding at FB Ads.
Few weeks have passed, I’ve got a few more sales from FB campaigns with very inconsistent results after spending over $1000 in total. Overall they are still slightly profitable. But I’m getting closer to the minimum break-even point. I’m ready to take the whole PPC journey as a learning lesson.
Bam, 4 sales today. 1 from my $100 daily FB campaigns, 3 from the $10 daily Google Smart Shopping campaign.
Up to this point, all the FB campaigns has averaged 2.00 ROAS while Google’s is 4.85. Mind-blown. I start to rewind and reflect my decision on spending most of my effort on FB instead of Google. Indeed FB brings in tons of impressions to the sites and our IG account. At the end of the day, profit is what matters.
Moving forward, I shall shift my focus and budget towards more to Google:
1. Can I just increase the budget of my current Smart Shopping campaign? I’m afraid to screw the already profitable campaign up.
2. Given my current status and almost zero knowledge about Google platform, how can I gain more knowledge?
3. Should I stick with Smart Shopping only or there is other Google Ad service can be added in to complement each other? -
4 Replies
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Odds are you can increase your budget. Smart shopping… and standard shopping campaigns in general… work best with more purchase data. If you can increase the budget and get more sales, then increase the budget.
This year I launched a [Google Shopping Course](https://www.udemy.com/course/google-shopping-course)… covers a lot of what you want to know in 2 hours. A good part of the course is on Google Merchant Center… since that is the heart and soul of shopping campaigns.
You can do remarketing and search ads on Google…all managed from your Google Ads account. remarketing and search ads are the best places to spend money if you are making shopping campaigns work for you.
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Sounds like you are on a journey! Results ebb and flow and are hard to scale sometimes while maintaining profitability. These ad platforms are sort of black boxes so it’s all about trial and error and finding what works and what is sustainable.
I was in a similar place with Facebook ads being breakeven which while not mine blowing at least let me justified continued ad spend. Lately after about two months of consistent results I created a look-alike audience based on Facebook pixel results two or 300 sales… And I have to say the results are quite heartening at least first impression wise.
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This shouldn’t come as mind blowing, but I’ll explain why. I’m super glad you’re making these discoveries and adding 2+2 on your own tho! (Autodidact in making!).
The reason why you’re likely seeing a higher ROAS out of Google Smart Shopping rather than FB ads, is because the visitors from your shopping campaign carry “search intent” aka – they are actively looking for this product you’re offering. Now this may not always be the case, but “in general” paid search traffic is stickier and has a better chance to convert compared to paid social traffic from FB due to this factor (If your google campaigns are set up properly of course).
Now, this search intent is great! By why is paid social great too? Because theres only so much search intent around a given product or service (There’s only so many people googling for fitness equipment per day) so there’s a ceiling there. On the other hand Paid Social acts as driver of search intent, for when people see that fitness equipment on instagram, they’ll be reminded they need to google and buy dumbells later (If they didn’t already from that original IG ad).
In terms of what to try moving forward – Definitely try boosting your smart shopping campaign by little increments per day. Maybe add $2.5/day in ad spend until you start seeing diminishing returns. Just imagine if you could be spending $40/day at a 4.5 ROAS!!
On top of this – you could also leverage traditional search campaigns (non shopping kind), as well as RLSA (remarketing lists for search ads) and finally some form on light display remarketing wouldn’t hurt (I’d also heavily recommend DPA remarketing on Facebook!).
Traditionally, I like to go in this order: Basic Remarketing funnel set up with Google Display, Facebook DPAs and Standard Facebook Remarketing campaigns (Segmentation is up to you, I like Past 30 Day Product Viewers, 14 / 7 day add to carts, top 25% time on site, past 30 days interaction with facebook ads / social pages, 75%+ video viewers and so on).
Once a basic remarketing funnel is in place, then I shift to things like Smart Shopping, Regular Paid Search Ads and Top of Funnel Facebook ads (Interest / lookalike based targeting). This way when you start scaling your top funnel traffic, they have a nice follow up remarketing funnel to flow thru which highly increases your odds of turning a new visitor into a customer!
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How did u make ur sales without no conversion pixel?
also, when u started to google smart shopping did you had days with no sales after ur first sale?
so did you have a lot of ups and downs? when did u start seeig consistent 3 sales per day?
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