Whiteboard Wednesday #4: How to save money on Google Shopping with CSS | Clearhaus Learning
Did you know that Google opened up for more third-party providers to appear in the top of the Google search results?
This may not sound important, but it can actually help online shop owners save up to 20% on their Google Shopping ad spend - that’s worth considering!
In this video, Dennis Cassøe from WakeupData talks about the new Comparison Shopping Service and how you can get the same Google Shopping ads as you have now, but for less money.
Hi, and welcome to Whiteboard Wednesday. My name is Dennis Cassøe, and I’m the CEO and co-founder of WakeupData.
Today, I’ll like to tell you a bit about the thing called CSS, which is a new service that Google has launched, that actually stands for Comparison Shopping Service, which is a new way whereupon you can get your ads on top of the Google search results bar.
Why would Google launch a new service when they already have Google Shopping working as well as they have? Well, the reason has been that in the European Union they got fined 2.4 billion last year, by the European Commission, because they have a tendency to show their own ads and thereby removing other comparison services from the search pages.
To be able to deviate that problem, they decided to make it a bit easier to get other companies’ products shown up here from other comparison services, but back in January this year, it was still 99% of all adds that was show on the top of the Google Search page was based on their own engine, the Google Shopping engine.
This wasn’t good enough, and they were forced to find a new way of doing it that would make it easier for more comparison services to get on top of the Google Search bar with those shopping ads. So they launched this CSS. The CSS service means that if you’re a price comparison service, you’ll get around 20% discount on the ads that your merchants are sending up to the Google Shopping site.
What this means is that if you usually go as a merchant and send your products through Google Shopping, it means that if you spend 1 Euro on the ad, they will spend 1 Euro on the ad up here as well.
But if you use a CSS provider, you’ll spend 1 Euro, get the value of 1 Euro, but 20% of that Euro will go to the CSS-providers. This has become a new way of displaying ads, and you might say “why would I want to use a CSS-provider, while I’m already sending my ads up through Google Shopping?”
Well, the main reason is that by using this CSS-provider, you usually get a big chunk of that money back. So by spending 1 Euro for the ad up here, you’ll end up receiving back 20% of that Euro that you can then spend on another ad.
On top of this they launched a bonus scheme that, initially here in the starting phase of the CSS’ life, that gives you up to 20% discount more if you spend more than 500 Euros on your merchant account on the Google Shopping ads.
You might say “what impact does this have on how my ads are displayed and my campaigns?” Well, the main thing is that if you have a Google Shopping campaign running over here, first of all, you’ll have to setup a new one, and this means that you’ll lose the history you have running on the campaigns.
Second part is that on top of these ads, right now it shows “by Google"here, but by using a CSS provider you’ll see their name there.
If you’re using ours, for instance, you’ll see “by BestPricession” So, the main difference is actually just a new change up there and you’ll end up saving a lot of money on your ad spend.
If you haven’t already looked into this topic, you really should spend a bit of time on it, because if you aren’t doing it, you can be pretty sure some of your competitors are, and that means that they’ll get their ads cheaper compared to you and therefore be able to either bit higher or have a better cut on their ad spend compared to you.
Thank you for listening.
