First results in CSS campaigns

As many of you may already know, at the beginning of August our price comparator, our price comparator BestPriceOK came to light. It arose to take advantage of a opportunity that was opening up in the market for all our customers, so we decided to quickly adapt to launch Google Shopping campaigns through our own CSS, and not just host the products in the CSS Merchant Center like traditional comparison sites.

After about a month of managing these strategies for many of our clients, we wanted to bring you some of the first conclusions we have drawn, bearing in mind that we are at an early stage and that the campaigns still have a lot of optimization ahead.

And you may ask, what were those first results in CSS campaigns?

1. We can assure you that it is a bad strategy to shift the investment from traditional Shopping campaigns to the new ones managed through Comparison Shopping Services. We recommend you to use a combined approachIf you give up traditional Shopping campaigns, you will lose visibility within the Google Shopping comparator. The campaigns managed through CSS only have visibility in the SERP or the carousel, where the conversion rate is usually lower than in Google's own price comparator.
2. We have found that in order to start managing Shopping campaigns through CSS, it is best to start with a strategy focused on the following Top selling products of the store or those with the best prices (as long as they have updated information on competitor price tracking).
3. Achieving a reduction of up to 20% in average CPCs is one of the great attractions of CSS management, but if the strategy is not well planned you may find yourself paying higher average CPCs for newly created campaigns. We recommend working with Maximum CPCs similar or lower than those of Shopping campaigns with historical data so as not to encounter such a problem.
4. For advertising accounts with a very restricted budget we recommend you to start exclusively by performing remarketing to advanced lists as we have found that it maintains a very positive return and can help to achieve overall results, allowing the investment to be scalable in the future.
5. Although we have carried over much of the negative listings, CSS campaigns generally trigger generic terms. From Geotelecom we are still investigating and experimenting on this issue, as we understand that more specific terms can become more relevant within the Shopping comparator itself, but nevertheless we believe that at least impressions should appear on the SERP.
6. Another strength of CSS is that most problematic products (mainly due to Google's policies) in Merchant Center in recent months are being able to work through the CSS without problems. This is allowing advertisers of parapharmacy, nutrition, etc. to expand their catalog of offers in Google Shopping.
7. Finally, we would like to comment that the visibility of our products is growing exponentiallyThis will allow you to displace your competitors and you will be able to finish off a large part of that traffic with remarketing strategies a posteriori.
8. In sectors where the reference or the model has an important weight (household appliances, electronics...), remarketing strategies through CSS work particularly well. On the other hand, mixed strategies can be used in sectors where products are sold without comparison or even more compulsive purchases (perfumeries, promotional gifts, parapharmacies, etc.).

We hope these first impressions will be useful if you are in that initial process of planning campaigns through a CSS, and above all we encourage you to contact us without any commitment because we can surely help you. As you already know that we love to share everything with you, during the next month we will be publishing a case of success in the initial management of CSS campaignsso stay tuned!