In the first of a series of user tips on managing the Onefeed system I’d like to start with something that is become more and more important: Bidding
Changing bids on Categories.
The category report under Optimise > Reports > Categories shows all the categories in use for each feed. In here you can make changes to all the products within each category. If you change the CPC bid value at a category level the products within the category will now be set to this amount. The CPC value also set here is then the default value for new items that appear in the category. In effect a new product gets added to your feed and it is assigned to this category the CPC bid value will be set to this amount as a default.
There are loads of features in this area and most are geared towards changing / setting bids at the minimum level. Many of the shopping sites have a minimum bid value that we show in the CPC Min column. If you set bids below the minimum one of 2 things happens:
- The site will increase your bid to their minimum and ignore your CPC bid we have supplied in the feed.
- They will treat your bid as a zero and your item will not be live.
For places like Google shopping the minimum bid amount is 1p so you can effectively choose what bid you want based on your traffic levels and conversions.
Product Level Bidding
We don’t usually advise merchants to make wholesale CPC bid changes at a category level as this often just leads to increased costs on items that don’t perform all that well. We much prefer to use the product level reports to change bids and up bids on items that are perfromnig well and could do with more traffic. With each of the reports there is a clever bid increase option that I’m not sure we’ve ever made public before:
Using the above example the system will increase bids by 10% on the items you have selected. Likewise you can lower bids by 10% by just typing “-10%”.
We always suggest looking at the product performance graphs for each product before making large changes to the bid amounts. Likewise it’s always good practice to keep tabs on the effect of these bid changes to see if the traffic has increased or the positive impact has been reached. It is also worth taking notice of the 1p bidded items in your account as Google now pretty much treats 1p bids as product removal. Very rarely do we see 1p bidded items getting any traffic at all now.
An example product performance graph detailing the effect of bid changes, click volumes and sales revenue.
Google Product Listing Ads Bids
As announced to our clients on Friday we have now migrated onto a way of synchronising with the Google PLAs. Using the API we are now able to make product level CPC bid changes directly with Google. It also means that the click counts and costs are directly taken from Google. This obviosuly means the costs are 100% accurate and our reporting will give you total control over what you spend and what you bid.
I will try and send out these tips once a week for the next few weeks. The next topic will be Auto-optimsiation using the Optimiser
