For many ecommerce retailers, Google Ads provides everything they need. For others, they want more reporting capabilities and control over their ad campaigns.
This is where Google Marketing Platform comes in. Formerly known as ‘Google 360 Analytics’, Google Marketing Platform has more features than Google Ads, enabling retailers to inform their campaigns with more data and easily manage their efforts across different channels.
Unlike Google Ads, Google Marketing Platform lets you consolidate all of your ads, Google and non-Google, into one central location. Users can enact changes across all of their channels from one place and track performance.
With cross-channel data integration, retailers can view the customer journey across their different advertising platforms, including Search and programmatic display ads.
Google Ads is free to sign up for, and advertisers only pay when their ads are clicked. Google Marketing Platform, however, has a starting fee of £10,000 a month. The main audience for this platform is enterprise-level businesses that use multiple channels and multiple websites for their advertising.
Why is data an invaluable resource for PPC campaigns?
Like Google Smart Shopping, automated bidding is available in Google Marketing Platform. You can set a target for your campaigns, such as target CPA, target ROAS, or maximum conversions for example.
As with Smart Shopping, users do not receive data from Shopping searches, making it difficult to fully optimise campaigns. Getting as much data as possible from your campaigns is essential to maximize your profitability and reduce wasted ad spend.
Google has retired Smart Shopping campaigns and has replaced them with Performance Max campaigns. Get up-to-date information on Performance Max here.
Ultimately, enterprise-level businesses would use Google Marketing Platform for easier campaign management and to be able to track cross-channel analytics.
Bidnamic’s machine learning technology calculates bids at the individual SKU level, allowing us to find the best bid price and only serve Shopping ads for the most relevant searches. We also have a commitment to transparent data and return all of our granular data to clients for improved optimisation in multi- or omnichannel marketing approaches.
Our technology can be implemented into campaigns set up on Google Marketing Platform as long as automated bidding has been turned off by the client to allow our technology to take over the bidding process.
Our clients can still access their analytics through their Google Marketing Platform, letting them track performance and monitor their campaigns.
If you're interested in maximising your Google Shopping channel, book a demo with one of our specialists.