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
-
Blocking google adwords on google.com?
Is there any chance to block google adwords (not google adsense) firefox/chrome/internet explorer 🙂
Paid Search Marketing | | FCRMediaLietuva0 -
A Call From Google (Not a Question but the Moderators said to Put this Here)
This is not going to be a long post but I wanted to get something out there that a lot of other business owners might not understand. I have several different PPC campaigns that my business partner and I personally run. The campaigns are all doing quite well with a high rate of return. Never has Google contacted me (other than for surveys, which I did wind up receiving 5 blue gym bags with the Google insignia on them) and never did I think they would. The campaign they called me on wasn’t a particularly large campaign. Right now the PPC spend is around 3000/month. I understand this isn’t a little bit of money, but at the same time it’s not in the millions like most of Google’s top sites. The thing that concerned me most was the reason for their call. A nice woman introduced herself and said that the campaigns were nicely run except for a few changes. She went on to tell me of a couple of updates in the PPC realm (this happened to me yesterday – Feb 28). She said within the past few months they were rolling out a new way to target their content network and for most people they were able to save 35% (that was a number she mentioned) with the tactics she was going to suggest. My background lies in mathematics and finance (somewhat related) and I tend to know when I am either being sold or being tricked into being sold. Through the whole list of things she mentioned that would help as she was walking me through she mentioned that it was a good idea to up the bid on the content network. That way we would have more chances of being seen and it would help with out conversions. This by itself seems like decent advice, but our bid for the content network is not cheap. If they are calling every small – medium business and telling them to up their bids, we are going to have a dilemma on our hands. The dilemma being that the AdWords placement is going to cost a heck of a lot more. She said that even if we up our bid, we are not likely to pay the full amount. She wants us to have a repeat conversation on Monday. One side of me was a little upset after the conversation but all they are doing is simply up-selling. They are raising the rates through what I guess are fair business practices. A lot of business owners might just take the advice of a Google representative and not think twice about it. This means we have thousands to hundreds of thousands of people at this very moment upping the bid on their content network. If they can even get a small proportion of people to increase their bids - let's say 10% - the other 90% will start getting less shows and eventually increase their bids. Also, the people that have higher bid amounts in but aren't paying the full amount will start getting closer and closer to the amount they put in as their maximum bid. This wouldn’t be alarming to me but this is the first and only time I have ever heard from a Google representative. I can’t say I didn’t see this coming but at the same time I was definitely taken aback. I am curious to know what the MOZ community has to say.
Paid Search Marketing | | JacobEdward0 -
Ad Rank and Performance for PLA
Hello everyone and happy Friday from London! I have just launched a Product listing Campaign and I can't get to find any information about ad rank and how it's performing. From AdWords all I can see is: 1.number of click 2.CTR 3.Position which is zero Any suggestions? Cheers
Paid Search Marketing | | PremioOscar0 -
Need help regarding to get rank for “Product listing Ads” on perticular keyword
I have one project Canvas Champ and we have been running Google shopping campaign for this project and we are getting good visits from some of the keywords. But our client has sorted out some keywords having high search volumes like “Canvas Prints” Now, We want to show our Product listing Ad for this keyword. Let me make you aware about our past efforts: We have set an auto target in Google Adwords for this particular product and make its bid around $8 and we have reviewed that product in listing for 2 days, but we didn’t see our Product Listing Ad on Google Search Result for this keyword. So Now, My concern is that, How can we show our Product listing Ad on Google SERP for this particular keyword “Canvas Prints”? Let me know if you have any confusion with my question. It would be really appreciated if I would get valuable inputs for the same. Thanks,
Paid Search Marketing | | CommercePundit0 -
Why doesn't exact match appear to be working for me in Google AdWords tool?
Hi guys, I recently read Rand's article here and tried out the exact match symbols on my keywords. However, these don't appear to be working for me as the results aren't showing up as they do in the above SEOmoz article (attached screenshot). What am I doing wrong? Google_AdWords__Keyword_Tool-20130511-115528.jpg.jpg?resizeSmall&width=832
Paid Search Marketing | | featherseo0 -
How can i track keywords of Google Product Listing Ads in Google Analytics
I have thousands of products in my feed to Google Shopping (Google Merchant Center). I have also set utm source, medium and campaign in URL. I have integrated my Google Adwords(With Auto Tagging) with my Google Merchant Center. My Question is, I can see campaign in google analytics but inside campaign i am not able to see keywords (From which those click are being received) I wonder to know that does anyone can help me to track Product Listing Ads keywords in Google Analytics. Thanks,
Paid Search Marketing | | CommercePundit0 -
Same term and landing page, very different bounce paid vs organic
Hi guys, I have an 85% bounce rate on a ppc term and ad, vs a 51% bounce rate for the same term via organic. Same term, same landing page. Any thoughts why? Cheers, Jez
Paid Search Marketing | | jez0000 -
SIte wide links by google display / adsense
hey guys, I had a quick question about my back links that might be coming from adsense. I am trying to help my father our on his site and help him recover from penguin. unfortunately his company hired some shady SEOers to do "SEO". little did my dad know the BLs he were getting might be spammy, thats what I am checking now. When I ran a BL report on him ( i use two tools, SEO spyglass and OSE ) i found that there were many "sitewide" links, but i dont think there were placed there by the webmaster, i think they come from adsense. I know he has a PPC campaign where the daily spend is 3k/ day so I know its very possible that this might be the case. If my tool is picking up BLs from these sites ( which are niche related ) does google count these links for ranking purposes? and might this hurt my rankings if google just sees these as "sitewide links"
Paid Search Marketing | | david3050