British garden retailers are missing out on huge sums of extra revenue by failing to understand – and maximise – their online advertising, a new report has found.
Leading Google Shopping specialists Dream Agility, whose expertise has been confirmed with an invite into an exclusive Google beta trial for the next generation of online shopping adverts, analysed online garden retailer’s year on year performance.
They discovered poorly performing adverts, little optimisation, and a general ignorance about some of the major ways to secure better placed – and potentially cheaper – Google Shopping adverts.
Dream Agility chief executive Elizabeth Clark said: “Garden retailers have got to wake up – they’re throwing away thousands and thousands of pounds in lost revenue through sloppy online advertising.
“In fact, if any garden retailer did get on top of their Google Shopping campaigns, then there’s a substantial opportunity for them to completely dominate gardening shopping online.
“The amount of irrelevant products showing against high-volume search queries shows the size of saving available if retailers had adequate search-term strategies in place – and the uplifts available with the advent of cheaper, more relevant ads, would be magnified even more in the forthcoming months.”
Despite search queries for garden equipment and furniture growing by 14 per cent year-on-year, no single retailer has managed to fully optimise their adverts on the Google Shopping platform.
A lack of understanding around how to title their Google Shopping adverts – known as Product Listing Ads (PLAs) – is seeing most retailers accrue higher costs and lower conversions, while only three out of 53 retailers were running Google promotions on their products, despite this approach typically gaining more sales and more traffic.
Only a quarter of the retailers were making use of every attribute on their PLAs, and ineffective search term strategies are evident for most retailers, leading to increased pay-per-click (PPC) costs and poorer product ranks.
Google Shopping specialists Dream Agility analysed garden retailers year on year. Click here to download the full report.