Google Shopping campaign – how to make a detailed product level performance report

In this article, I will try to give you some ideas on how to create a detailed product level performance report so you can easier identify areas for improvements within your Shopping campaign.

Inspiration for this post came to me during optimizing specific shopping campaign which we inherited from previous agency. Client has over a thousand different products they sell through Magento store. To generate product feed, this site uses Google Shopping Feed extension by Rocketweb.

We weren’t satisfied with inherited shopping campaign’s performance so we wanted to inspect everything in order to make relevant, data driven decision about our next steps. We didn’t want to be limited by currently available AdWords reports so we found our way to extend these reports with additional data we needed. In this post, I am going to explain how we did it.

While trying to get a clearer picture on how each product performed, I got frustrated because it took me too much time while switching the tabs and searching product name and its price by item ID. The problem was that in our case, AdWords itemID matched productID from Magento catalog, which naturally isn’t descriptive enough to show what product is it all about (which may be a problem, especially if you have several thousands of them).

Since we already had one extension that could help us getting the data we needed, I didn’t want to bug our developers with custom export coding. So, in order to create one report where I’ll be able to analyse all the data in one place, I needed to combine data from three reports:

1. Magento product list (System – Import/Export – Dataflow Profiles – Export all products)

In this report, I had all the data I wanted – except productID which I needed to match Magento data with Adwords performance data. Since by default, Magento doesn’t allow you to export product_id through the dataflow wizard, you have to find your way around it. If you have a developer who can custom code this export for you, that would be great, or you could use an extension.

In our case, the site already had Extended Product Grid with Editor extension from Amasty, which allowed me to export products (with productID) right from the grid, so I took that way and exported the second report:

2. Product list from Magento using Amasty extension (Catalog – Manage products, click on “Export to”).

In this report, among other data, I finally got our productID which enabled me to connect Adwords and Magento data.

3. In the end, I downloaded all the data I needed from Dimension tab within Adwords interface.

Now I only needed to band together required data from these three reports in one spreadsheet. I used VLOOKUP function in Excel to match each product with its productID by using SKU that I had in table one and two. After that I added columns with performance data from the third table using the same function.

And there you have it – one final spreadsheet where you can see all the performance data matched with product name and all other attributes you need from Magento.

What this report will help you see?

It will help you to see:

• Basically everything that you previously saw in Dimension tab, but now you can finally understand what product is it all about.
• Since you can add price, purchase price and other data you want, you can see how each product performs in comparison with Adwords cost per item (sum of your cost-per-click), and how much “space” you still have for promoting that same product.
• Low margin/non converting products that “eat” great amount of your budget as well as top performing items.
• How much of the budget gets spent on products that seem to be irrelevant in total cost since they have “only” few dollars in cost. If you have hundreds of them it could be quite large total sum.
• Since you have everything in one place, and you are able to apply different filters, you can identify various possible problems and opportunities in your product feed (example: by comparing your CTR metrics and product name, you can easily identify items which would benefit from modifying product name etc.)

NOTE: if you want to avoid this Magento productID export issue, during setting up your data feed, instead of matching itemID with productID, try matching it for example with SKU+store code.

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Regardless of the fact that AdWords interface gives you lots of reporting options, some of things are not very well covered yet so I hope this advice will help some of you who are struggling with currently available reports and spinning around in circles while trying to figure out what would be optimal approach to see everything you need in order to optimize your campaign.

What are you methods for getting clearer picture of campaign performance on product level? Feel free to write in comments below.