Product data. Perhaps that most important part of any online retail campaign.
With high-quality, optimized product data, potential customers are more likely to have your items show up in their search results. When they click on a product, there’s a better chance that they’ll end up converting. And when they receive it, their satisfaction will probably be higher. Because your product data gave them an accurate idea of what to expect.
Poor product data, in comparison, is a recipe for disaster. Your rankings will be lower. People who do end up finding your listings could end up confused or annoyed because there’s not enough information or they know it’s not correct. And if they end up buying, there’s a greater chance of them experiencing frustration that could lead to the item being returned, giving you a poor review, or worse.
Even beyond these reasons, though, product data impacts you in another huge way: campaign bidding. It can be friend or foe – depending on the quality of the data you provide.
Below are three reasons that your product data impacts your Google Campaigns.
You can quickly create ads.
You can provide your product feed to Google to quickly create dynamic display ads and PLAs.
You don’t have to spend the time manually editing the data for each product. Instead, you can focus your efforts on the overall bidding strategy and ensuring you receive a positive ROI from your campaign.
But that’s true only if you provide high-quality data. If you have low-quality data, you’re more likely to encounter errors and trouble with your submission. That means more time lost due to manual data entry and corrections.
Data impacts your Quality Score.
Every Google AdWords ad gets a Quality Score. According to Google, this 1-10 score gives you “insight into how you’re performing.”
There are several things that impact your Quality Score, but the relevance and accuracy of your ad copy and keywords matter. They are, in fact, central to calculating your score.
If you have poor quality data, your score is almost guaranteed to be low.
For PLAs, there is no formal Quality Score – but the quality of the ad is still tracked somewhere on the backend and impacts the likelihood that it will be shown.
Your Quality Score impacts bidding.
Here’s where this ties into bidding: the lower your Quality Score, the lower your average position (where your ad/listing appears in the results) and the higher your Cost Per Click.
That means if you are feeding Google low-quality data, then you’re likely going to pay a premium for your ads. On top of that, it is less likely that your ad is relevant to the people who see it.
In short: you’ll pay more to show your ad to people who are less likely to convert.
Then there’s the flip side. If you feed Google high-quality data, your Quality Score will likely be higher. Your price will go down. And your ad is more likely to be relevant to those who see it.
In short: you’ll pay less to show your ad to people who are more likely to convert.
Which one sounds better to you?
You Cannot Compensate for Bad Data with Bidding
If you’re starting your campaign with bad data, you’re already at a disadvantage. Any work you do to try to correct it by adjusting bidding is unlikely to be effective.
Instead, you’re more likely to see positive results if you get it right from the beginning. Clean up your data, and you could find that your ROI sees a significant improvement.
