“With Product Ads, our customers experienced Return on Ad Spend that was almost double what they received for non-trademark text ads. Product Ads proved to be a more efficient way to advertise: the cost-per-click is lower and the conversion rate is higher.”
- Anthony Guarino, Director of hopping Partnerships, Mercent 

When Product Ads were introduced on the Yahoo Bing Network, many of the search advertisers under Mercent’s management were involved in the beta test. By creating and delivering millions of customized ads, Mercent’s proprietary technology helps brand-name retailers such as 1-800-Flowers, the Home Shopping Network, and GUESS? reach online shoppers through both paid search and display advertising campaigns.

Easily create richer ads—directly from your product catalogs

Product Ads include an image, description, and price of a product on the top and right sides of the search engine results page, where they gain maximum attention. Retailers don’t need to write copy or create keywords, because Product Ads automatically pull content from their existing product catalogs. 

Lower cost-per-click, higher conversion

Based on data from the first quarter of 2014, Mercent customers using Product Ads enjoyed lower costs per click, higher conversions, and a better overall return on investment versus non-trademarked text ads on the Yahoo Bing Network:

• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) 98 % higher
• Conversion Rate (CR) 49 % higher
• Cost Per Click (CPC) 29% lower
• Cost Per order (CPO) 52 % lower
  
  

“With Product Ads, our customers experienced Return on Ad Spend that was almost double what they received for non-trademark text ads,” says Anthony Guarino, Director of Shopping Partnerships at Mercent. “Product Ads proved to be a more efficient way to advertise: the cost-per-click is lower and the conversion rate is higher.” 

Tips for optimizing performance

Mercent shared insight into their strategy for getting better results with Product Ads:

• Structure campaigns carefully and accurately. Because Product Ads are built dynamically from product catalog data, ensure that this data is up-to-date and that campaigns use logical combinations of brands, categories, price bands, and other criteria. “We recommend starting broad and gradually building out layers of hierarchy, ensuring that granular product targets—narrowly defined subsets of your catalog—have substantially higher bids than broader groupings to direct traffic to more specific targets,” Guarino says.
• Focus on data quantity as well as quality. “It goes without saying that product data needs to be accurate; you need to know that you have a certain model of blue women’s running shoes in stock before you feature them,” Guarino says. But it’s also important to list more product attributes than less, to help Bing discover your products. If someone is searching for a men’s lightweight trail-running shoe in size 6, you want all those attributes in your Product Ad data feed. You should also update your product feeds at least daily to ensure that prices and inventory status are up-to-date. If pricing or offer data is incorrect, customers will have a bad shopping experience, which erodes brand trust.
• Align Product Ad strategy with overall retail objectives. Retailers should use margin data to inform their campaign structure and bid strategy: keep in mind the brands, categories and individual products that yield high margin and give them additional weight. They can designate product targets based on margin contribution to steer the program toward overall profitability. Additionally, ensure that Product Ad messaging is consistent with other marketing messages. A tool like Mercent Retail can schedule and automate ad copy changes to reflect your promotion calendars.

“Product Ads are continually evolving, and we expect customer returns to only grow stronger,” Guarino says. “Product Ads give retailers an exciting new way to surface their products in a noisy marketing environment.” 

To learn more, contact your Yahoo account representative.

Download this case study.