Tuesday 22 September 2015

Summer Is Ending - Is Your Christmas Ecommerce Plan Ready?

Now that September is here, your minds will surely be turning towards your Christmas Ecommerce Plan (if they haven't already!). Many ecommerce companies make more than half their revenue in the last three months of the year so It's important to make sure you have a clear online marketing plan that will deliver sales.

Here are our top five tips to get ecommerce success this Christmas:

  1. Email & Social Media Plan - In the final hectic weeks before Christmas it's easy to fall behind on email and social media. This can be a costly oversight, so make sure you have all your emails and key posts planned well in advance, so all you have to do is press send and watch the sales come in.
  2. Christmas SEO - It's never to early to launch your Christmas Gifts category and product pages. Give yourself an edge by uploading your categories early, and updating copy on your site to reflect the upcoming season so that Google can index your new products.
  3. Google Shopping - Make sure your products have maximum visibility in Google as people are much more likely to convert in one visit during the festive season. Google Shopping ROI will soar over the next few months.
  4. Brand PPC - Although you might not run PPC throughout the year, running brand PPC at Christmas allows you to tailor your brand copy, landing pages and sitelinks to Christmas traffic, to improve conversion rates.
  5. RLSA - Remarketing Lists For Search Ads allow you to show ads for broad keywords only to previous visitors to your site. Eg. You would never normally bid on 'Christmas Gifts For Men' keywords but with RLSA you can ensure that only users who have visited your site see these adverts in Google. Christmas is the ideal time to experiment with these campaigns.

Get in touch if you would like any help or advice about getting the most out of the festive season.

Tuesday 15 September 2015

The Google Shopping Feed Spec Is Changing Today

Google is changing their Shopping Feed Specification today (15th September). If you run Google Shopping ads, you should check that you don't need to make any changes, and acquaint yourself with the new format.

What is changing?

  • The main changes that may affect you are to the Google Product Taxonomy. Various products have been reclassified or the categories have been simplified. For example you no longer need to add a subcategory for many clothing types like trousers, shorts and shoes.
  • Google Product Categories can now be submitted as numbers, rather than long text strings. e.g. "Animals & Pet Supplies>Pet Supplies>Bird Supplies>Bird Cages>Stands". This should make it easier to update your feed in future.
  • Improved ID accuracy - GTIN numbers and ID Attributes (probably your item SKU) will be tightened up so you will need to make sure that you aren't using invalid character types.
You can read Google's summary of changes here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6231410

What do I need to do?


Many feeds won't be affected by the changes to the GTIN and ID attributes. The changes to the Google Product Categories are a great opportunity to improve the accuracy of your feed, and so improve your Google Shopping performance.

You can download the Google Product Category Taxonomy here to check whether your products need updating.

Shopping Feeds can be complicated and frustrating to get right. If you need a hand, or have any questions, just send us an email and we'd be happy to check your feed for you.