Can Google Shopping Ads Lower Ranking due to Bounce?
-
I am noticing Google Shopping Ads are showing up for really irrelevant keywords on some of my products. This quite predictably causes a high bounce rate when a user comes from these ads. There is very little control over what Google Ads seems to decide are relevant keywords from what I can see. Only control is by viewing search terms and setting as negative keywords, but his doesn't help much. Negative keywords are often ignored or they come up with some other really irrelevant new keyword.
Seems this high bounce rate could hurt ranking? Any experiences shared with Google Shopping ads appreciated!
-
Hey Chris,
I'm going to address your concerns in-line as I think that's the best way for me to clear up any confusion here.
"My assumption is that organic ranking of my landing page will be effected by bounce rate. When a shopping campaign sends a user to my page and they bounce, Google will see that as a poor user experience with no engagement. This is caused by the Google shopping campaign choosing irrelevant keywords that I have no control over. Running a shopping campaign causes the analytics data to have significantly higher bounce rates and therefore I would think hurts organic ranking of the page."
Your organic rankings will NOT be affected. User engagement signals from AdWords will affect your AdWords quality scores, but under no circumstances will they affect your organic rankings. Google states this publicly, like this example, "Running a Google AdWords campaign does not help your SEO rankings, despite some myths and claims.". It does not hurt, it does not help. The data sets are completely separate. Yes, in your data you can see them combined if you wish, but Google Organic does not see your Paid Ad Engagement Metrics.
As far as control over your Google Shopping, while Google does sometimes trigger terms that are outside the norm, their matching is generally pretty good. I would encourage you to review the post I linked above and to read other articles about Google Shopping Structures. Your structure is everything for AdWords, but it's especially true for Google Shopping. If you're having trouble with targeting, especially after reviewing the search query report and adding negatives, something is wrong with your setup. Review some posts and see if you find anything that might prove valuable."So I am paying Google money to lower my rank because of their bad choice of keywords. Google shopping does not allow me to choose the keywords. And the only way to control this is to use negative keywords as you suggest. In my experience this is also not very effective."
I addressed this a bit above, but I think it's worth reiterating here, your paid ads are not lowering your organic rank under any circumstances. Even if they share a landing page, the paid ads will not affect your organic rankings.
"Here is one example. I have a product with the word "Oxy" in the name. Google shopping sent thousands of impressions for queries related to Oxycodone and Oxycotin drugs. My product is an immune support antioxidant supplement for DOGS! Regardless of negative keywords set with adwords support folks on the phone, they continued to send queries for all sorts of variations. Such as "oxycodone 10mg" "buy oxycodone" ad infinitum! Even setting negative keywords to "broad" didn't help. Eventually tapered off after setting many variations as negative keywords. Close to 50 variations.
So of course these clicks seeking oxycodone immediately bounce when they see it is a product for dogs. My question is does that ultimately hurt my organic ranking?"This sounds extremely frustrating and I'm sorry to hear that you're having these issues. I'd encourage you to add "Oxycodone" & "Oxycotin" as negative phrase match terms. That should solve your negative targeting issue as described.
But even if these issues still continue to arise, rest assured that your organic rankings will not be affected.Hope that helps! Let me know if I can be of further assistance.
Best regards,
Trenton -
Hi and thanks for responding. That is still not exactly what I was asking.
My assumption is that organic ranking of my landing page will be effected by bounce rate. When a shopping campaign sends a user to my page and they bounce, Google will see that as a poor user experience with no engagement. This is caused by the Google shopping campaign choosing irrelevant keywords that I have no control over. Running a shopping campaign causes the analytics data to have significantly higher bounce rates and therefore I would think hurts organic ranking of the page.
So I am paying Google money to lower my rank because of their bad choice of keywords. Google shopping does not allow me to choose the keywords. And the only way to control this is to use negative keywords as you suggest. In my experience this is also not very effective.
Here is one example. I have a product with the word "Oxy" in the name. Google shopping sent thousands of impressions for queries related to Oxycodone and Oxycotin drugs. My product is an immune support antioxidant supplement for DOGS! Regardless of negative keywords set with adwords support folks on the phone, they continued to send queries for all sorts of variations. Such as "oxycodone 10mg" "buy oxycodone" ad infinitum! Even setting negative keywords to "broad" didn't help. Eventually tapered off after setting many variations as negative keywords. Close to 50 variations.
So of course these clicks seeking oxycodone immediately bounce when they see it is a product for dogs. My question is does that ultimately hurt my organic ranking?
Thanks!
-
Hey Chris,
There seems to be a bit of confusion in the answers here, so hopefully I can clear that up a bit.
There appears to be two parts to your question, I will address each separately.
- Does Google Shopping having a high bounce rate hurt organic rankings? No. Google is very adamant that these two areas are separate. They use different ranking algorithms and do not share data.
- If you instead meant Does Google Shopping having a high bounce rate affect Google Shopping ad rank, the answer is yes. There are ways to help improve your Google Shopping performance other than adding negative terms, which you absolutely should do weekly, specifically based around account structure. Search Engine Land has a good article on this here.
If you need additional clarification here, please feel free to respond to my post & I'll help you out ASAP!
Best regards!
Trenton -
Hi Chris,
This is very normal for Google Shopping to have a higher bounce rate than Text advertising. As you mentioned that Google Shopping Ads are showing up for really irrelevant keywords on some of my products in that case you need to ensure is that the data supplied in the data feed, essentially matches the data on the landing page.
Second keep adding irrelevant search terms as negative keywords, Google doesn't ignore negative keywords.
Last you can create separte ad group for the products that accruing irrelevant search terms and rewrite products title and description.
Hope it helps!!!
Thanks
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How would you respond to this doctor who demands to see his ads?
I work work for a health care system in the Midwest. We have a doctor in our transplant division who whenever we're in a meeting pulls out his phone and types in "kidney transplant" and ridicules me when our hospital is not on the page. I've long since given up trying to explain search intent to him (all the SERP results are showing information about kidney transplants, not information on where to get a transplant) along with trying to explain all the reasons why our ads don't necessarily show up on his phone despite us having a daily budget for that keyword. Without trying to explain how SEO or advertising online works, what would you do? I've toyed with eliminating advertising from the hospital zipcode so that I can just say we don't advertise in this zipcode at all, so of course our ads wouldn't pop up. I've also toyed with creating more informational content just so perhaps we can show up on the page, even though it's largely irrelevant (but I doubt we'd ever outrank the national brands that have written extensively on this). If someone types in "kidney hospital" or "transplant center" or anything relevant, we're instantly at the top of SERPs. But none of that matters to him. He only cares about showing up for "kidney transplant."
Paid Search Marketing | | Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine1 -
Running Google Ad Grants? How Much Is Your Monthly Spend?
Hi all - here's a question for everyone running Google Ads through the Ad Grant. How much of the $10,000 available to your account per month do you actually end up spending? I'm trying to see if I am in line with others in the industry. Would you mind sharing with me the type of nonprofit and the amount you're able to spend of the grant per month, on average? Thank you!
Paid Search Marketing | | newwhy0 -
Question about audience targeting in Google Ads
I am setting up a test campaign where rather than structuring my campaigns by the normal ad group>keywords with no targeting. I am making duplicates of my ad groups and targeting each duplicate to a different audience so I can target the ads better. But I also want my non targeted ad group to remain to pick up people who are not in my targeted ad groups. In the non targeted ad group, should I exclude all the audiences that I have targeted in the targeted ad groups to avoid any cross over? Thanks
Paid Search Marketing | | pinder3251 -
Do UTM Parameters reflect in Google Analytics
Hi, We have recently enabled auto tagging in our URLs but not sure if tagging is working correctly. Does Google Analytics shows the utm parameters also in URLs in Google Analytics OR Google shows only the base url (after removing utm parameters) in Analytics. For example: Will http://www.abc.com/?utm_source=Indiaweb&utm_medium=Display&utm_campaign=CPC&utm_content=NRI_newprojects&utm_term=US be shown as is in Google Analytics under PAID Tab or only http://www.abc.com/ will be shown and the utm parameters will be removed in Analytics if auto tagging is enabled. Thanks in Advance 🙂 Regards Anirban
Paid Search Marketing | | vivekrathore0 -
Adwords: Brand ads appear bottom of SERPs
Hello, I'm running a sale promotion on a brand only Adwords campaign (I have the only account with trademark authorization) and have noticed that my ads are appearing at the bottom of the first page on Google. This happened last week so I split the campaign into three Adgroups and that fixed the problem but today I'm running brand only and there is no way to separate them. CPC has also increased dramatically. Normally it's less than 10 cents and now it's sitting at between $2-$4. Has anyone else seen this? Any ideas/advice on how to stop this happening? It's playing havoc with my CTR and conversions. Much thanks,
Paid Search Marketing | | Unity
Davinia2 -
Ideas on how to track google display network traffic
Does anyone know of a good way to be able to track traffic from Google's display network to a site since this traffic doesn't show up under paid search traffic in Omniture? Thanks! -Margarita
Paid Search Marketing | | MargaritaS0 -
Google Adwords Book
Does anyone have a suggestion on a very recent Google Adwords book?
Paid Search Marketing | | phogan0 -
PPC + SEO - Both well ranked, which penalty if there's any.
Hello everyone, I have a doubt about the PPC and SEO. For example if i rank at first page ( something like 5th position ) for one specific keyword, and then I decide to add this keyword to my PPC campaign. My 5th rank will be penalized by google if i buy the PPC keyword ? Thanks.
Paid Search Marketing | | augustos0