Google shopping campaigns are powered by two separate platforms working together – AdWord and Google Merchant Centre. While the Merchant Centre is where everything comes together to form the campaign, AdWords is perhaps the most visible part of it. A Google AdWords Shopping campaign is where the advertising itself lives, along with the insights and optimization needed to continue it for the long term.

While there might be some similarities between Google AdWords campaigns and Google Shopping campaigns, using adverts which are specifically designed for shopping and other forms of selling is somewhat different from creating adverts which are primarily composed of text only. Google Shopping advert management is what determines where the adverts will appear, rather than searches being carried out automatically having the advert automatically appear at the top. Google Shopping manager itself is what decides where Google Shopping adverts appear – they take various things into consideration, such as your overall feed and the content of the adverts, but the end decision of where the adverts appear is up to them.

To gain success with Google Shopping optimization, users should pay attention to three separate areas:

• Feed Creation and Otimization – this is something which covers many aspects of the Google Shopping campaign experience, including data on products, product images, product prices, possible ways in which to buy the product, and so much more.

• Bidding – how to bid is something which is at least as important as feed optimization, as it allows for advertising to be done at less expense, and also keeps things within budget. Different bidding strategies can as much as double the expected advertising return on specific campaigns.

• Monitoring and Optimization – the dashboard of Google Shopping campaigns allows for information about specific advertising campaigns to be gathered and discussed properly. Using this information correctly can mean the difference between a good campaign and a great one.

There are many things which can go wrong during a Google Shopping campaign set up, and the longer a campaign runs, the more potential for problems there are. Below are some of the common problems which can beset a campaign, as well as some possible solutions.

Disapproved Products

Products need to be approved, and if some or all of them are not, sorting out a campaign is going to be difficult. There are any number of reasons why a product could be disproved:

• The person setting up the campaign could send in links to any descriptions or images\videos of the product that might not work.

• The person setting up the campaign could also provide the wrong Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), therefore sending the wrong information in, whether by accident or not.

• Google itself might have mistakes in its system which lead to products being incorrectly identified and therefore disapproved of accidentally.

o There is of course not much to be done if Google gets itself in mess, except to look for advice from Google Shopping help, but disapproved products can be avoided by double- and triple-checking links and GTINs before submission.

Incorrectly Used Negative Terms

As well as positive keywords, any good Google Shopping specialist will utilize negative keywords. Not using negative keywords can mean that money will be wasted on adverts for people who cannot or will not use the service.

• One popular negative keyword used in Google Shopping product listing ads is ‘free’, in order to weed out anybody who might be looking for free products. Unfortunately, this can also have the effect of screening out your own products from the listings if any of them are, for example, ‘gluten-free’.

• If you as a seller have both laminate flooring and the cleaner specifically for laminate flooring, adding negative keywords to each group will prevent the two from being differentiated.

o Negative keywords can be learned about in the same way that positive keywords are; by repetition, by asking for advice when it is needed, by looking around at what other people are doing. It is best to remember that negative words work in opposition to positive ones.

Not enabling Conversion Value Reporting

Conversion value reporting is what tells you how well your adverts are faring, so not having it enabled is a huge mistake.

• Relying purely on basic conversion tracking programs can mean that some of the data is flawed, such as there being a high conversion rate for entirely low-cost items.

• Using larger keywords in a conversion reporting software which only reports conversions rather than numbers can lead to huge conversion ratings for items which would not lead to profitable advertising.

o Conversion Value Reporting is extremely useful in terms of how it’s data and findings can be used. Google Shopping consultants always advise the use of Conversion Value Reporting, as it can help transition to the next level of Google Campaigns.

No Ad Scheduling

Advert scheduling is one of the Google Shopping campaigns best practices, in the same way as it is with other forms of online marketing. Not scheduling adverts to appear at specific times means that you are potentially losing out on a large chunk of your audience.

• Scheduling adverts away from times when most people use the online world to go shopping means that a lot of adverts will be wasted. People might still be online, but they will be looking for different things.

• Different products sell at different times and in different ways. People shop differently when it comes to food than when they shop for clothes, and it is important to be able to distinguish between the two, or the performance of your products will suffer.

o Ad scheduling allows for better control of who sees an advert, and when they see it, which can potentially funnel more traffic to your site. Proper Google Shopping management in this area can lead to increased success with your campaign.

Conclusion

Google Shopping campaigns are very useful to have for people who are selling things online, but there is a lot that can go wrong with them, just as with any other online marketing campaign. As seen in this article, problems can range from using keywords incorrectly to setting adverts up the wrong way, all of which can have a detrimental effect on the marketing campaign as a whole. This is why it is very important to get a Google Shopping expert to help with your campaign, as they will be able to help you avoid some or all of the pitfalls which might otherwise occur, and help you to optimize your products. A Google Shopping campaign, with its mix of two separate platforms, is one of the best ways in which to set up a campaign online, and a Google Shopping agency will be there to help you avoid pitfalls.

What You Need to Know about Online Reputation Management

Building a good online reputation management is an essential component of strategic management. The top priority of any company is to protect its brand image. A good brand name is achieved by years of hard work; however, losing the good name can happen within minutes in the online world. Online reputation management involves measuring, tracking, following and developing the meaningful conversation of a brand over the Internet.

Having acknowledged the importance of maintaining a good brand name, companies focus on building a positive reputation to attract potential customers. Companies strive to offer quality services with more value, giving them a competitive edge hence; customers are willing to pay premium prices. With a good brand reputation, customers are more loyal and can purchase a wide range of products because they believe in the products.

In the situation where 80 percent of the business market value comes from brand equity, the organization is vulnerable to the bad reputation. Personal reputation management accounts for 95 % of business operations, but most companies do not employ effective strategies to manage their online reputation. Companies focus all their energies on handling potential threats only after their reputation has been damaged, this type of management is termed as a crisis management than risk management.

Normal Managing: Steps to Implement

Companies should pay attention to what their stakeholders say about their brand. A strong brand name means customers trust their products. People trust online reviews more than official corporate communication like a press release. Online management involves not just focusing on specific areas but also joining the online conversation and becoming an active online resource. It is important to get high visibility on the Internet; this requires optimizing search results and having a strong social media presence. For other professional and small businesses, managing online reputation would include linking the companies’ online platforms to third party sites for people to access direct feedbacks like Yelp. The most important consideration is to develop business websites, create social media profiles on the social platform like Facebook and LinkedIn, establishing blogs and online forums.

People trust online reviews

Normal online reputation management includes establishing websites that present accurate search results; the search results should pop up the company’s name not other companies with similar names. It is important to place accurate, and quality content combined with active online participation is the key ingredients of maintaining a normal online reputation. Companies need to use a unique online account for anyone to locate the company easily. Blog, Twitter or Facebook are ways of staying active online.

It is important to ensure that company’s name and the brand are mentioned in different sources often through positive article reviews. In most cases, people google to check the company’s reputation. In this way, website reputation management is also an important part for growing client base. Customers search for people’s reviews to understand what others say about the company and which article have published the content and how the company’s name is presented. To maintain your online reputation, it is important to monitor your reputation, track and analyze feedback from consumers constantly. By monitoring what other people say about the brand, the company can get valuable feedback to help them make adjustments.

There are several social platforms, but findings an appropriate tool will enable the company to monitor, compare, and react to the entire online network from one single dashboard. Creating alerts to notify you when the brand is mentioned and receive weekly status reports is a cost-effective way of maintaining a good online reputation. Google alerts are important monitoring tools commonly used to help receive real-time notification especially when the keywords are mentioned on various online platforms.

Review sites like Yelp are the best place to find feedbacks, a larger percentage of consumers make purchases based on online reviews; people might avoid certain brands due to poor reviews. Create an account to encourage review and request customers to write their experience with your brand. Review sites provide a good grasp of what customers think about your brand. Giving interviews and official responses through public relation is the central part of the marketing department. Official responses are meant to minimize the influence of negative online reviews on potential customers.

Recovering: What to Do after Crisis

When a company has a bad reputation, it becomes more difficult to retain customers and other stakeholders, increasing the cost of doing business. Having a bad reputation is costly. Recovering from a bad reputation is not an overnight solution; there are steps a company needs to take to improve their damaged reputation. Before taking any action, the company needs to analyze and understand the reason that caused the bad reputation.

The initial step is to research your current reputation online. Review all the online accounts to identify any embracing content they might further damage your reputation. Assess the impact of the negative feedback. The next step is to react by removing any bad content like photos, in case there are certain embarrassing comments on one of the social media accounts with a similar name, change your screen name to make it unique.

The best online reputation repair when it comes to reviews is to overcome negative reviews with positive reviews and add top-notch content. Since the company response is to be seen by many people, the company can demonstrate its level headed and genuineness. Presenting a top-notch content includes acknowledging the reviewer’s complaints and expressing regrets about the experience. The company should give the customer the opportunity to meet the relevant individuals face to face by providing means to contact them directly to deal with the situation.

The other strategy is to provide links to other review pages with positive comments and invite people to check them out. Support your positive online brand image with photos that present professionalism like news articles where the company’s name has been mentioned positively. Such strategies will outrank any embarrassing comment that might appear on the social media. The company needs to develop active SEO, broaden its concept of the search taking into account the different ways that people search for content on the web. It is important to optimize the SEO so that they appear higher in the search results and ensure that your brand reaches out to many customers.

Conclusion

Online reputation management has become one of the essential elements for businesses; consumers are increasingly relying on the internet to conduct reviews, and analyze products before making choices. Monitoring consumer’s comments and complaints are becoming a priority, with the growth of social networking sites; almost all customers are present on one or more online sites. Companies are concentrating on marketing using online sites to build their brand reputation; such scenarios have made companies be on the edge because customer comments can positively or negatively affect the brand reputation.

Recent Changes in PPC Processes

Companies rely a lot on PPC agencies when it comes to selling their products online. The world of technology has revealed a substantial upgrade and this means that PPC has experienced the same changes. It is now easier to create traffic in websites when advertising for products than it used to be a few years ago due to the development of new and advanced web processes. The most recent change is PPC automation which has made the online advertising process simple.

Among the noticeable changes is a campaign strategy because automation has greatly simplified such processes hence making it easy for the PPC specialists to build and customize goals and strategies. There is an increase in competition when it comes to traffic creation in websites and therefore, advertising companies have customized their PPC marketing services so that they can stay competitive and get as many customers as possible. As a result, this is also contributing to more change because new tools are being discovered as the companies attempt to provide the best and skillful services.

The availability of new tools forces companies and PPC specialists to familiarize themselves with the slightest changes in the world of PPC automation. Using the old tools could be quite irrelevant in today’s technology since companies are aimed at reaching as many people as possible, which can only be made possible through the use of the most recent technology advancements in the world of pay-per-click. Automation has, therefore, become the best way to deal with such technology changes.

Change in PPC Managing Due to Automation

PPC automation has changed the ways of management due to the advanced features that have resulted from the automation. Among the new processes is the availability of ad copy which makes it possible for a website to adapt to customers who are known to search for a specific product or service. As a result, this increases the market share of the website and in turn, makes it easy for them to manage their PPC. Also, it has become easy to manage bids through the availability of algorithmic bid strategies which calculate new bids for every single auction through the use of AdWords. Such calculations depend on the sites goal performance.

Performance makes it possible to sub-divide campaigns automatically and, therefore, eliminating the need to monitor individual product IDs. A good example is adaptive shopping campaigns found in double click searches. Different account management tools such as AD Words scripts aid in the building and customization of automated reports as well as the management of keywords, campaigns, and ad groups. Marketing companies should work their best to ensure that they provide the best PPC management services so that other organization can use their services and hence make reasonable profits. Such companies have the obligation of ensuring that they offer the best Google AdWords management services. This attracts many companies into using their services since there is a guarantee of positive results and less result.

Need for a PPC Agency: Yes or No?

PPC tools have changed in the recent past, making it complex for an organization to sort related issues. Many companies think that they can carry out PPC services on their own in order to save on expenses. However, the complexity of pay-per-click automation presents the need for companies to employ a PPC agency because the work has to be done by professionals in order to achieve the best results. Due to the continued changes in technology, it is very important for an organization to be careful when choosing an advertising specialist. Considerations have to be made to ensure that the specialists are up to date with the latest tools and that they have the necessary skills to handle the PPC automation services for the organization. As a result, the organization will be able to stand at a better position in the competitive edge. Hence, all organizations have a need to hire a PPC expert so that they can provide them with the best AD Words campaign management services. Without a specialist, it can be very challenging for the organization to manage their ad campaigns. Another importance of such an agency is the provision of Google lead-words services which make it easy for individuals to access an advert by simply typing in specific keywords associated with the advertisement.

What to Expect from a PPC Agency?

A pay-per-click expert plays a substantial role in ad campaign management of organizations. A lot is expected from PPC services companies and, therefore, this calls for them to employ PPC specialists to ensure that they offer the best services. Hence, the main expectation that an organization should have from a PPC agency is being in a position to operate on the higher level. The reason to this is the fact that PPC automation enables the specialists to have faster processes that in turn, leads to a low cost-per-click. Therefore, this saves the organization time and money that would have been spent in ad management given the fact that it didn’t have a PPC agency.

Also, the agency should be in a position to incorporate the use of PPC automation in order to come up with the right goals and strategies. On the other hand, the different tools are not in a position to enable an organization to come up with goals and strategies. But, through the use of PPC agencies and the automation process, then it becomes easy to set such goals and strategies. Therefore, the company should expect that the PPC agency is an all round company in PPC automation and that they should have expertise in all the necessary areas. As a result, the chances of poor performance will be very low and this will ensure that the employer makes maximum profits through the use of the PPC agency services.

As well, the PPC agency should be ready to take responsibility for any agreements made between the agency and the employer. This plays a substantial role in ensuring that the PPC agency performs to its best with the fear of paying for any damages caused. On the other hand, such agreement enhances the trust levels between the two companies hence facilitating the effectiveness of their performance. Accepting to take responsibility is a good way to ensure that the PPC agency stays competitive as much as possible. As a result, it leads the agency into having an advantage over the others.

The organization should expect both benefits and risks when choosing to incorporate the services of a PPC agency. Different automation plans can perform poorly despite the fact that they are being executed by a specialist. Therefore, the organizations should carry out an evaluation before deciding to choose an agency that will carry out its PPC automation processes. Risks are characterized by choosing a PPC agency that does not have a very good reputation, and, in turn, end up making losses for the employer. Most of the companies with a good reputation find it easy to get PPC jobs due to the referrals they get from the companies that they have worked with in the past. Therefore, every PPC company should work their level best to ensure that they stay updated with the recent tools.