Ann Stanley, Founder & CEO of Anicca Digital, was invited by the team at the Ecommerce Forum to present a webinar on February 6th, 2024, talking about “Product & Profitability Reports to enhance the performance of your shopping and Performance Max ads”.
Ann explained how ecommerce marketers can build their own Looker Studio Dashboard to report on a daily basis:
- stock levels and profit margin of each SKU
- calculate stock values based on RRP or margin
- minimum ROAS bidding for each SKU, required to break-even or make a set level of profit (profit-based bidding)
- your price vs competitor benchmark prices impact sales vs price benchmarks.
Ann then provided examples of how we have used this to:
- use of labels, campaign and asset group structures in shopping to
- minimise Ghosts and Zombies products caused by automated bidding
- create pseudo-profit based bidding (POAS) in Performance Max and other ad campaigns
- provide live feedback on competitor pricing strategy and the impact on sales
- respond to weather trends and help clear seasonal stock
Summary of the project
- It is essential for ecommerce businesses to extract stock and cost data, so in order to calculate profit margins and stock-value (on a daily basis)
- Once you have this data in your website, you can export it via your Merchant feed to:
- Create a series of dynamic Looker Studio reports to help you understand, which SKU’s have the most value (in revenue and profit)
- Create custom labels and campaign structures in shopping ads, to focus on priority products, eliminate “Ghosts” and have buckets of products with similar margins
- Calculate the target ROAS for Smart bidding, to ensure you make the required profit (POAS)
- Server-side tracking is the recommended way to provide conversion data to ads platforms via their conversion APIs (CAPIs) and for use with automated profit-based bidding
- However, if you are unable to implement this yourself, then there are software solutions and workarounds to allow you to implement a pseudo or manual profit-based bidding, by changing the ROAS targets for each campaigns (split by profit margin)
- Using software like Producthero, allows you to benchmark prices from resellers and competitors. You can also benefit from the 20% discounted CPC’s available with CSS. This data can be used to determine the price sensitivity in the market and shows the impact of any price changes.
- Mapping the relationship between weather, search demand and sales is a great way of understanding what triggers sales, so you can put in place procedures, so your team responds quickly to changing demand, e.g. by increasing budgets.
