Since 2017, Google has had to open its shopping services to competition: What opportunities this offers you for your campaigns and how you can achieve up to 20% lower CPCs with Shopstory, we tell you in our article.
It sounds almost too good to be true – if you use a CSS, i.e. a so-called comparison shopping service, you can reduce your shopping click prices by up to 20%. In our blog post, we tell you how these figures are achieved and what is important. It pays to keep at it!
What happened so far …
It all starts in 2017 – the importance of Google Shopping has grown so much in the preceding years that the European Commission takes a closer look at the system and finds that Google favors its own price comparison service Google Shopping over the competition. The U.S. giant thus violates antitrust law and is fined a record competition fine of a whopping 2.42 billion euros. In addition, Google must open up its increasingly popular Google Shopping to other product searches and price comparisons in the future. Probably the biggest change: In order to make competition possible, Google grants the competition a not inconsiderable margin on the CPCs and henceforth bids itself for ad space on the Google search results pages.
What has changed in Google Shopping auctions as well as Performance Max since then?
Not only the way in which Google opens up to CSS systems changes as a result of the ruling – the display of ads on the results pages also undergoes a relaunch. If an ad is not placed by Google itself, but via a CSS, the name of the product comparison site is now also visible in the ads, albeit very small and inconspicuous at the bottom of the ad. However, changes are also taking place behind the scenes as a result of the ruling – namely in the auctions. Because the click price for shopping ads within the European Economic Area will be split into two parts: the actual CPC and a margin. With this step, the search engine magnate Google also wants to encourage other competitors to participate in the shopping auctions. Both provided margin is a percentage of about 20% set by Google.
What sounds complicated at first, quickly becomes clear with a simple example: We assume a bid of 1 €. If you enter this €1 as a bid via Google Shopping, €0.20 of this goes to Google as a margin and €0.80 to the auction. If you decide to use a CSS, on the other hand, you can reduce your bid to 0.80 € right from the start without being at a disadvantage compared to Google’s own ads. With Shopstory’s in-house CSS this is now possible.
Lower your CPC significantly with the CSS from Shop story
The trend towards CSS is not new and has been on the rise since 2017. But did you know that this service is already included in the software license for our customers? This not only allows you to lower your click prices and get more out of your advertising budget, but also saves you a lot of valuable time that you can use for the further development of your store. We will be happy to advise you in detail about our software and the numerous advantages you can enjoy with it.
