Google Shopping Audit: 6 Tips to Assess Your Campaigns

A Google Shopping audit will help you to optimise your campaigns and achieve better results. So, you’ll thoroughly assess your campaign structure, product feeds, performance metrics, bid strategies and more.

But this should not be a one-off event. You should regularly assess your campaigns and stay updated with Google’s features to keep your online store competitive in your ecommerce sector.

So, in this article I’ll explore the importance of a Google Shopping audit and guide you through the process of carrying out one for your campaigns.

1. The significance of a Google Shopping Audit

Before carrying out a Google Shopping audit, it’s essential to know why it matters and how it will help your campaigns. It serves as an opportunity to evaluate your Shopping ads to see how they are performing and how they can be improved.

So, you’ll need to decide which features and areas need to be audited to see how the ads are performing. And this includes data feeds, landing pages, shopping policy violations, search queries and more.

This knowledge will equip you with insights into the performance of the Shopping setup to help you achieve a high return on investment (ROI) in the long run.

2. Auditing your campaign structure

Many advertisers ignore the proper structuring of their Shopping campaigns, and this has some implications. This can lead to confusion as your teams manage campaigns which takes up a lot of time and also reduces the potential of the product listings.

It’s important that the campaigns are structured properly according to campaign goals and the type and nature of your products.

And this requires segmenting them in the right campaigns, ad groups and product groups. So, this requires ensuring that your product groups are relevant, and your bids reflect the value of each group’s products accurately.

With better structured shopping campaigns, you have a better chance of achieving good click through rates, clicks and conversions.

3. Evaluating product data feed

The Google Shopping audit should include a complete analysis of your product data feed to ensure all the products are listed correctly. This includes checking that you have all the key attributes like title, price, shipping, condition and others, to make sure that the products are approved and appear correctly.

This directly influences how your products are displayed in search engine results pages as potential customers’ search. And optimising your feed will enhance the visibility of your products and drive more clicks and qualified sales.

4. Analysing performance metrics

A key part of the Google Shopping audit is analysing the metrics to see how the campaigns have performed. This includes reviewing acquisition metrics like clicks, click through rate and conversion metrics like cost per conversion and conversion rate.

However, there are many different types of metrics to assess, and this will depend on your requirements. And with the help of a web analytics solution like Google Analytics, you’ll have a wide range of reports and metrics to check the performance.

This data will help you to allocate your budgets correctly and optimise your overall strategy effectively.

5. Optimising bids and budgets

Bids and budgets are two of the most challenges features for people who are new to Google Shopping ads, and for many seasoned advertisers too. So, as part of the Google Shopping audit, this helps you to assess the effectiveness of your bid strategy in line with your goals and set a budget that helps you get the best results.

The audit will help you to see how your budget has performed and what results you’ve achieved. You can then increase or decrease your budget and test other bid strategies with experiments.

6. Utilising advanced features

There are advanced features in Google Merchant Centre and Google Ads, that you can utilise to improve the performance of your campaigns. So, as part of the Google Shopping audit, check to see how these features will help to improve your campaigns.

One of these is Dynamic Remarketing which helps you to retarget past website visitors who’ve viewed your products.

Conclusion

Conducting a Google Shopping audit regularly is good because it helps you to improve your campaigns. Running product listing ads can be challenging and there are many factors to optimise and manage, so it’s important that you regularly review this to ensure good performance.

As a Google Shopping Ads expert, I have many years’ experience setting up and managing product ads. Contact me today for a Google Shopping audit.