Google Smart Shopping Beta Testing

Win New Customers and Grow Your Business with Google Smart Shopping Beta Testing

Every advertiser and business owner knows the importance of acquiring new customers, whether a company is new or well-established. With competition steadily increasing, and online/offline marketing becoming more strategic and tactical, it can be a challenge to affirm brand loyalty. Current customers and clients will move away, seeking out better prices, or their need for the product or service on offer will cease.

Why should new customer acquisition be at the forefront of your advertising strategy?

While it’s important to retain existing customers, who can be nurtured via Remarketing PPC campaigns and other online marketing channels, new customers help businesses to grow, increase their revenue and upscale their entire venture.

For e-commerce advertisers, Google Shopping has been a great solution for driving new sales and growth. With the more recent addition of Smart Shopping Campaigns (SSC), shopping ads now have much more reach than ever before, eligible to be shown across Search, Display, YouTube and Gmail inventory. SSCs are fully automated and do have some setbacks, such as an aggressive remarketing element that places more emphasis on advertisers’ existing user base as opposed to new customers. New customers have been seen as more of an afterthought or secondary goal up until now.

How do Smart Shopping campaigns focus on new customer acquisition?

Google’s Smart Shopping is now allowing some advertisers to test their new conversion goal beta: New Customer Acquisition (NCA). This new goal type allows advertisers to set Smart Shopping campaigns to specifically optimise towards acquiring new customers. Google wants to allow advertisers to focus on new customers as it understands their potential value, both short-term and long-term. According to Google:

“When a new customer makes a purchase, the new customer value is combined with the purchase value to determine total conversion value (online sales + new customer value). The bidding algorithm understands that new customers help drive more overall value, and factors that into bidding decisions.”

What are the main benefits and capabilities?

Google includes the following as NCAs three main benefits:

Easy implementation: it’s a simple case of checking a box and setting your desired customer value once you have been whitelisted.
Transparent reporting: for new customers using the ‘New Customers’ metric available within the user interface.
Drive new customers: fine-tune your Smart Shopping campaigns to prioritise on or drive more new customers.

Is manual optimisation possible, or is the beta fully automated?

Despite Google’s automation and machine-learning drive, advertisers will still be able to exert some control over how the New Customer Acquisition beta performs. By increasing or decreasing the new customer value, advertisers can inform Google Ads of how much priority they wish to place on new customer focus. Assigning a lower value to new customers will result in SSCs optimising towards online sales over new customers.

Setting up the New Customer Acquisition goal

Google provides 5 easy steps for NCA implementation:

Open settings for the Smart Shopping campaign you want to optimize towards new customers.
Open the ‘Conversion goals’ card.
Select ‘Campaign level conversion goals’.
Check off the ‘New customer acquisition’ box.
Enter your new customer value and press save.

Would your company like to trial this new beta?

Although Google has tried to make their new beta as easy as possible to implement, there are areas of setup and management that many advertisers may struggle with. Trafiki Ecommerce Marketing can advise on all areas of the new NCA and Smart Shopping below: