Get granular: Optimise Google campaigns towards higher margin products

Marketing effectiveness is a constant pursuit and in a pandemic, it has become all the more important. As marketers, we want to appraise our work and demonstrate to budget holders that it is having an impact in a cost-effective manner.  Firstly, to justify our seat at the table and secondly, to lobby to do more.

Under heightened conditions, where every penny counts, we need to look beyond macro-level ROI or CPA targets and get granular around specific campaigns. With sound tracking and data integrity, we can breakdown Search or Media activity more granularly, setting appropriate efficiency metrics (ROAS, ROI, CPL or CPA) aligned to product or service categories, based on their return.

The old adage “revenue is vanity and profit is sanity” sounds a bit like ‘Apprentice-style’ business talk, yet digital marketing still largely focuses on the former. We need to work with clients, helping them delve deeper into their Marketing Intelligence to better understand their cost of sale. 

By using the optional and underutilised “cost of goods sold” parameter in the Google Shopping feed you can, at a product level, add costs of sale figures - which may include labour, overheads, and logistics – into your feed, effectively calculating your gross margin. Armed with this information you can optimise your paid and now free shopping campaigns, to focus on higher margin products which yield more profit. This is especially important for ecommerce stores that sell a range of products. Businesses  would rather sell the same value of higher ticket, higher margin products, than equivalent value of smaller, more costly to fulfil, products – as they generate more profit.

Digital marketers need to go beyond default revenue metrics in analytics platforms, get granular and better align our digital metrics to business metrics to make our work undeniable in the value it provides.