The holidays are upon us. Are you ready to have your best-selling holiday season ever? Let us help. Here’s our countdown list of the top 10 ways to make sure your Google Shopping account is ready for customers.

10. Set Up Promotions Early

Google Shopping promotions are manually reviewed on the actual starting date of the promo. This means that your promos and codes should be submitted early and be ready to go on your website in advance of the start date. Any coupon codes must be active at the time of the Google review or your promotion will be rejected. If you plan on numerous promotions, you can upload a promo feed into Merchant Center rather than upload each individually.

9. Use Analytics

Analytics will help you objectively view performance and can show you specifics, like which categories have the most conversions or what products drive the most purchases. Using this information, you can then make bid and budget adjustments based on whatever segments are performing the best. Make sure your advertising campaign are properly tagged so you can track them in your analytics programs.

8. Confirm Audience Lists

Remember that many people browse for gifts heading into the holidays and don’t necessarily purchase immediately. Because of this, you’ll want to take advantage of shopping traffic with remarketing campaigns at another time.  Segment your site visitors based on previous visits to your website by categories of products or even specific actions. Use remarketing to show your Google Ads to people who have already shown interest in your brand or products well past the holidays too!

7. Review Shipping Settings

Check that your shipping options are configured correctly for both the Merchant Center and data feed overrides. Costs on your website must match those that you submit to Merchant Center, otherwise your products will be disapproved. Confirm that your shipping service settings are accurate, including delivery times, shipping rates, and zones.

6. Enable Automatic Item Updates

Enabling automatic item updates will allow Google to update products in Shopping based on microdata information on your website. Opt into auto updates for price and availability in order to avoid disapprovals based on mismatched data from your website and your Merchant Center product feed.

5. Review Product Suggestions

Use the Merchant Center Product Suggestions report to get a better understanding of what your competition is doing with the same or similar products. You can view “Top Products” to see popular products in your industry on Google that you’re currently not advertising. View “Personalized” product suggestions for insight on your competition’s pricing and traffic estimates. You can then make adjustments to your products as needed.

4. Ensure Contact Information is Updated

Check and double-check your contact information. If there are any problems with your product feed, Google will email the address provided for technical contact, so you want to make sure this email contact is not only up-to-date, but that it is regularly checked for incoming messages. If it’s not, you may miss a critical message regarding your account.

3. Check Merchant Center Often

Regularly check in on your Merchant Center. Here you’ll find any account issues that need to be resolved, including product disapprovals that must be fixed in order to show in Google Shopping. You’ll also want to check your Business Information in the left-side pane to confirm the info is accurate and that your branding is live. Make sure your website is verified and claimed.

2. Get to Know Smart Shopping Campaigns

If you’re not using Google’s new Smart Shopping, you should be. This campaign subtype expands your reach, using a combination of standard Shopping and display remarketing campaigns. Smart Shopping campaigns take your feed and combine it with Google’s machine learning to automatically show various ads across networks, using automated ad placement and bidding for maximum conversion value.

1. Make Sure Stock is Available

You can’t sell what you don’t have, so make sure you have plenty of inventory ready to go. You’ll want to update your Merchant Center feed several times daily so that information remains accurate. Remember, your website information and your Merchant Center feed need to match, otherwise you risk product disapprovals. So update your feed to keep your information updated and your Shopping ads eligible to show.

The post Top 10 Tips to Prepare Your Google Shopping Account for the Holidays appeared first on Vertical Rail.

With the holidays right around the corner, we want to help you have your best-selling holiday season ever! So here’s our countdown list of the top 10 ways to make sure your Amazon Seller Central account is ready for shoppers.

10. Resolve Any Quality Alerts

Quality alerts appear on your inventory page as small triangles with exclamation points in the “Status” column. These alerts indicate that your listing is missing one or more recommended elements, including color, size, image, fabric type, etc. Fix these issues by clicking “Edit” on individual products and adding the missing information. You can also click on “Listing Enhancements” at the top of your inventory page to view a list of products with alerts.

9. Check in on Account Health

You must adhere to performance targets and policies in order to sell on Amazon. Evaluate your account’s health before the holiday season to ensure you’re in compliance. Resolve any customer service performance issues and improve any metrics that are in peril.

8. Review Product Pricing

Keep track of any promotions, coupons, or sales that you’re offering, and review products to ensure that specials are not overlapping. You likely don’t want to offer a sale price on a particular product, and then also have a promotion or coupon code available for it as well.

7. Store Information & Policies

Be sure to have your business information filled out completely. This includes your business profile, shipping, tax info, FAQs, and more. This information is important not only to Amazon, but to customers who want a legitimate company from which purchase products.

6. Check Product Content

Review your product content for accuracy and imagery. You’ll want to confirm that titles and descriptions match the intended products and that no content is jumbled. Images are also key. Confirm that your images are Amazon compliant, and try to use as many as you’re allowed. Upload product videos if applicable.

5. Shipping guidelines and schedule

Double check shipping rules and schedules for the holidays. There are lots of packages out there during the holiday season; make sure your products can be shipped with plenty of time for customers to receive them.

4. Set up Promotions

There are several promotions available on Amazon – including discounts, free shipping, and buy one, get one – to incentivize customers to purchase your products. The holidays are a busy time and important things can slip through the cracks. Set up your promotions early, so Amazon has time to review and approve them. Don’t get caught in the log jam!

3. Check on Stranded Inventory

Resolve any stranded inventory issues before the holiday season rush. Reasons for stranded inventory include expired product, deleted listing, listing errors, and missing information like price or SKU. Stranded inventory is not available for sale on Amazon.

2. Review Ad Budgets

You’ll want to check and make sure your ads are set up with sufficient daily budgets. Budgets are spent as quickly as possible, so if your budget is too small, it may be completely spent in a short time, thus missing potential buyers later in the day.

1. Make Sure Stock is Available

You can’t sell what you don’t have, so make sure you have plenty of inventory ready to go. Send product to FBA centers early so that customers can shop your lightning deals and receive shipments quickly.

The post Top 10 Tips to Prepare Your Amazon Seller Central Account for the Holidays appeared first on Vertical Rail.

Advertisers now have better access to Amazon customers via Sponsored Product Targeting, which is available to both Sellers and Vendors. Similar to Product Display Ads – available only to Vendors – you can target customers by product, using specific ASINs or categories that can be filtered by price, brand, or rating.

Upgraded targeting offers more options to reach shoppers as they browse and filter through similar products. Improved auto-targeting includes the ability to adjust targeting options, as well as negative product advertising that can prevent your ads from showing on specific search results and detail pages.

Product Targeting comes with new reports that can help advertisers create new campaigns based on successful ASINs and categories. This is an improvement over Product Display Ads, which provide no reporting on ASIN or category performance.

Unlike keyword targeting – which allows you to pick search terms to show products during customer searches – with product targeting, advertisers choose products, categories, brands, or other specific product features that are similar to products in their ads.

This new strategy can help customers find your product based on individual products, or product features like price point or star reviews. Targeting products based on individual features allows for a more accurate approach to reaching your target audience.

How to Create a Targeted Sponsored Product Campaign

To create Sponsored Product campaigns using targeting, go to Advertising > Campaign Manager in your advertising dashboard. Click create campaign, and choose a Sponsored Product campaign. Next, give your campaign a name, start date, end date & budget.

Set your targeting option to Manual Targeting. This will open up to more targeting options after you determine your products.

After you name your ad group and pick products to advertise, you can determine your targeting options. Each ad group can be either keyword or product targeting, but not both. Pick Product Targeting to use the new targeting options.

Next up is determining your product targeting. First, we’ll look at targeting Sponsored Product ads by Category.

Amazon provides options for suggested categories to target based on the products in your ad group. You can choose to target any one or all of these suggested categories.

There is the capability to refine categories by Brand, price range, and review star rating. You can refine the category to brands that Amazon suggests, or search for specific brands.

You can also pick categories to target by searching for them within the builder. Amazon provides the entire category tree to see all available categories and find ideas. You can also type in a category if you already have one in mind.

The new targeting capabilities also allow for Sponsored Product targeting by individual products.

Once again, Amazon will provide a suggested list of products related to the items in your ad group. You can target each individually, or choose to target all of your suggestions.

There is also the capability to search for specific product names, ASINs, or SKUs to target.

The final targeting option is to enter a list of ASINs separated by a comma, space, or new line. Capitalization and punctuation does matter here, so be sure to capitalize the “B” at the start of your ASINs.

The new targeting options also include the opportunity to use negative targeting and exclusions to improve performance.

You can exclude by brand name or by specific product/ASIN. Amazon will display any brands that you own for easy exclusion.

After walking through these targeting options, your campaign is ready for launch. Be sure to monitor performance of your newly targeted Sponsored Product Ads by running regular targeting reports.

The post Amazon Launches Sponsored Product Targeting appeared first on Vertical Rail.

When Google announced Smart Shopping Campaigns as a product offering, business owners were excited… while marketers were skeptical. Google met that skepticism with results!

What makes them smart?

Google has enticed marketers that these campaigns require little to no maintenance and are designed to offer top tier results. Google is using Machine Learning in order to manage these campaigns based on advertisers goals. While still using the traditional signals of device, location, and time, Google has added the Machine Learning as well as looking at customer’s intent,  product seasonality, the price of the products vs the cost of the clicks, and where to display the impression. Hmm. Smart.

Shopping Campaign vs. Smart Shopping Campaigns!

Smart Shopping Campaigns are a great addition to Google’s product offering but it doesn’t replace the traditional Shopping Campaign in all cases. Smart Shopping Campaigns give advertisers and marketers alike  little to no control, as the campaigns are completely automated. This is designed to help any advertiser sell their products in the most efficient way Google’s Machine Learning can, however there are still benefits to running traditional shopping campaigns when the goals are based on data outside of what can be imported into Google Ads. A great but simple example is shipping cost. A smart campaign will try to generate sales with limited reservation but marketers can still choose to have greater scrutiny in traditional campaigns.

Are Smart Shopping Campaigns for me?

If you or your client is an online retailer and is looking to reach consumers ready to buy on the following platforms: Google Display Network, YouTube, Google Images and Google Search then A Smart Shopping campaign might be for you. In order to help online retailers generate more sales, Google is partnering with large ecommerce platforms like Shopify to make campaign creation simple. There are also solutions for smaller ecommerce companies as well, designed to make the barrier of entry much simpler than ever before.

How Do You Create A Smart Shopping Campaign?

Setting up a smart campaign can be completed in a few simple steps.

1. First things first click the new campaign button.
   
2. Next up during your shopping campaign creation select Sales as your goal. 

When you select the correct merchant center account you’ll be able to choose the smart campaign option.

      3. From there name your campaign, give it a budget and modify a couple of other minor settings.

     4. Lastly, You’ll need to create an ad with some text and an image. You have a short headline with 25 characters of text, a long headline with 90 characters, a description line with 90 characters, and lastly the image needs to be at least 600 x 314 pixels with a ratio of 1.91:1. This allows the ad to display in various placements on the internet as explained earlier.

If you’re unsure whether or not a smart campaign fits into your marketing objectives or current campaign(s) structure fell free to contact us or leave a comment.

Additional Info:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY-rs8qGDYw

https://www.shopify.com/google-shopping

The post Google Ads Smart Shopping Campaigns Explained appeared first on Vertical Rail.

Google recently announced the launch of Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords, as a way to connect businesses and customers across all channels and partner sites, maximizing efficiency.

The new Google Ads brings together its advertising products across all of its networks under the Google Marketing Platform, a unified marketing and analytics platform.

Google Ads will include a number of new and updated features, including Responsive Search Ads, Cross-device Reporting, and new options for Video and YouTube ads. In addition, new campaigns that use machine learning are available under Google Ads.

• Smart Campaigns are designed for small businesses with automated ads that are created quickly and easily.
• Smart Shopping Campaigns are for ecommerce businesses and include integrations with Shopify, along with new goals: Driving store visits and new customer acquisition.
• Local Campaigns strive to drive foot traffic to retail stores using aggregated data from Google users who are signed in and have location history turned on.
• Hotel Campaigns will group hotels by specific attributes to maximize bookings, ideal for the travel industry.

While some of these Google Ads features are currently available, others will continue to be rolled out in the coming months.

The post Google AdWords is Now Google Ads appeared first on Vertical Rail.

Sellers and vendors take note that September 21 is the 2018 holiday deadline to submit Lightning Deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday in Amazon.

Deals submitted by the application deadline are not guaranteed to run, but Amazon-approved Lightning Deals receive top-notch exposure across the marketplace – and just time time for the holiday shopping season. Amazon chooses Lightning Deals based on what products offer the most value to consumers and that are likely to drive sales.

To submit a Lightning Deal application, choose “Black Friday Week” or “Cyber Monday Week” from the schedule drop-down list. (If it’s not shown as an option, your recommendation is not eligible.) You can check on your deal in the “Upcoming and Active” tab 24 hours after submission. Deal submission will end at midnight on Sep. 21, 2018 PDT.

Lightning Deals that are not chosen to run on Black Friday or Cyber Monday will run on other days of the week.

Contact Vertical Rail for more information.

The post Amazon 2018 Holiday Lightning Deals Submission Deadline is Sept. 21 appeared first on Vertical Rail.

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Family Mediation LLP is one of the top Law Offices in New York offering mediation and legal services for family law. We worked with them to create a new, modern website that offered a simple and bold look that complemented their outstanding reputation in the New York area.

We designed and built a custom WordPress website with a responsive and sleek design, taking special care to choose design details that exemplify a sense of expertise and professionalism.

The colors throughout the website were chosen to make a subtle and profound impact on the user. We chose to use a dark gray color for the text and a muted gold color for an accent, along with a plain white background. This color palate represents a strong sense of expertise that reflects positively on the practice.

Large white spaces make the site appear welcoming and simple to read. A combination of a serif font for headings and a san-serif font for body text adds a sense of clarity and simplicity to the site. The artwork in the site is all based on the New York area, and each image was carefully chosen to communicate a sense of solemnness with a breath of optimism. Altogether, the site communicates that the practice is professional, experienced, and helpful.

The post New Website Launch for Family Mediation LLP appeared first on Vertical Rail.

Google Partners with Local Experts To Share Digital Marketing Strategy 

Santa Cruz, CA – Vertical Rail and Google are hosting a free digital marketing seminar on February 15, 2018 in Santa Cruz to teach businesses about advertising in Google AdWords.

The event will feature three presentations about leveraging the Google AdWords advertising platform. After the presentations, Vertical Rail will host a one-hour round-table Q&A session where guests can pose questions to certified AdWords experts.

Andrew Leonard, Brand Development Manager at Google, will host a presentation about the evolution of marketing in a digital world. Vertical Rail’s Frank Wade, a certified AdWords expert, will present on the role of an AdWords agency.

“This is a perfect opportunity for business owners and their in-house marketers to learn how to make online advertising work for them,” said Andrew Arenson, Owner of Vertical Rail. “Google AdWords is an immensely powerful and dynamic marketing tool.This seminar is intended to shed light on some of the advanced strategies and techniques that agencies use to make their client’s successful.”

The event will be held on February 15th at the Hotel Paradox in Santa Cruz from 8:30 am to 12:00 pm. The event is free and will include continental breakfast, coffee, and refreshments. The event has a maximum seating of 75 people. Google will be providing gift bags and a $75 AdWords credit for new account signees. Vertical Rail will also be offering a free custom AdWords analysis to event attendees.

Attendees can sign up for a post-event 20-minute 1-on-1 session with a certified AdWords expert.  Reserve a 1-on-1 session when you register. Business owners and in-house marketers are encouraged to bring questions about using AdWords to achieve their goals. 

To register for the event, visit our eventbrite page here.

To learn more about the event, visit our event page here.

Based in Aptos, Vertical Rail is a Google AdWords Premier Partner, a designation reserved for AdWords agencies that meet specific certification, training, and performance requirements.

The post Google AdWords Seminar for Santa Cruz Business Owners appeared first on Vertical Rail.

Google has announced it will no longer show review extensions with text ads as of January 2018.

Review extensions – which show a brief quote or paraphrased 3^rd party review at the bottom of a Google text ad – will be deleted, along with related performance data, in February. Sellers who want to save the data can download an extensions report via “Extensions” on the Ads & Extensions page in AdWords.

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