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How Google Shopping Custom Labels Impact Your Campaign Strategy

By Tinuiti Team

Custom Labels, proven to put Shopping campaigns in the best position to succeed – are considered one of the most valuable attributes that marketers can use to reduce COS and increase efficiency. Located with the feed, Google Shopping Custom Labels can be used to subdivide products into specific categories for advanced monitoring, reporting and bidding.

Custom Labels are similar to AdWords Labels and AdWords Grouping, but AdWords Labels are still required in the PLA campaigns and Custom Labels are required for Shopping Campaigns (as seen in the image).

According to Google, merchants can create up to five custom labels, numbered 0 through 4, for each item in their feed.custom-labels-2

Examples of Google Shopping Custom Labels:

How Custom Labels Impact Bid Strategy

Custom labels empower Shopping practitioners to make effective bid changes at scale. Unlocking the ability to have Ad Groups on ‘Best Sellers’, ‘Clearance Items’, ‘Price Buckets’, etc. allows retailers to suppress bids on ‘problem’ products without having to pull them from the channel completely.

jason-bellAccording to Jason Bell, Senior Account Analyst at CPC Strategy, if merchants do not have the ability to manipulate the feed, the ‘Worst Sellers’ or items they want to ‘suppress’ could continue to stay live and ultimately hurt COS.

The ability to manipulate campaigns using Custom Labels also allows merchants to bid lower on those ‘problem’ products rather than just cutting them off of the engine completely.

Custom Labels gives advertisers the freedom to get as creative as they want with their PLA strategy.

“As an analogy, not customizing and manipulating your data feed is equal to using Adobe Photoshop program ONLY to re-size all of your photos,” Bell said.

“Sure, it will get the job done without any issues, but Photoshop also empowers you to have the ability to touch up and customize your photos as much as you want. So why not take advantage and create a spectacular end product?”

For some merchants, not creating these custom ad groups will work fine. They will still be able to create ad groups and custom bids based on brand and product type but in the end, they could be limiting their strategy.

6 Examples of Google Shopping Custom Labels

tien-ngyuenAccording to Tien Nguyen, Director of Technology at CPC Strategy, Custom Labels don’t necessarily improve discoverability, but they will enhanced a marketer’s campaign management skills.

“For example, in AdWords you might create a custom label based off of pricing buckets. You don’t want to bid the same amount on a product that is $100 vs. a product that is only $5. Once you start applying these basic labels, you will discover there are lots of different ways to customize your campaigns.”

Below are 5 examples of how Custom Labels can impact your campaign strategy:

1) Best Sellers: If you’ve already identified what your best selling items are, you may want to segment this into it’s own Custom Label. Since you know these items are likely to covert, we recommending increasing the bid on this category of items.

2) High CTR, Low Conversion: For items that are generating lots of clicks but not necessarily converting at a favorable rate, you may want to segment and bid lower on these products.

3) Push Label: A push label is typically given to a new product or list of new products in your inventory. These are items that you want to gain additional exposure for since they are new to the market. In this situation, you may want to consider bidding up to increase discoverability and drive more CTR.

4) Margin:  Although most retailers do not have the margin (per product) located within their feed, it is possible to build out a custom label for this category and bid higher or lower based off of an item’s margin.

5) Color: You may find certain items sells better in cobalt blue rather than jet black. Custom Labels gives you the opportunity to segment items and bid up on those more popular colors, since you know they are more likely to convert. This concept can also be applied to size, weight, age, gender or any other similar attribute.

6) Brands: Same as color, you may find certain brands sell more than others. For example, Adidas might have a high conversion rate compared to Nike. Same strategy applies here – bid up on the products with the brand most likely to convert.

At the end of the day, retailers should be able to sort through which items perform well and what do not. The goal is to push good traffic in and Custom Labels is just one way to increase conversion rate and bottom line revenue for your Shopping campaigns.

For more information on Google Shopping Custom Labels, email [email protected]

Additional Google Shopping Resources:

How to Optimize Your Product Feed

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