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Inventory Driven Search

For years, retailers have struggled to cover the long tail. While ROI is strong and there is potential for increased revenue, creating and managing ads and keywords for all products is time consuming, error-prone and often ends up out of sync with actual inventory. Inventory Driven Search has been developed from the ground-up to empower retailers to create and manage paid search advertising that is product specific, accurate and automatically generate and update.

Prerequisites

 

You should be familiar with the following topics:

Videos: Overview of Inventory Driven Search

Tasks to Complete

 

Setting up your account for Inventory Driven Search (IDS) is a multi-step process that consists of:

  1. Selecting Your Inventory
  2. Configuring Your Campaign Settings
  3. Creating Ads
  4. Synchronizing Your Stock Levels
  5. Activate the Campaign
  6. Monitor the Campaign
  7. Dashboard Reporting

How to Setup Inventory Driven Search (IDS)

To start using Inventory Driven Search for the first time:

  1. Select Paid Search > Products. On your first visit to the page you will begin the setup process.
  2. Select Configure  for either Google or Bing. 

You now have access to the Inventory Driven Search setting pages.  

How to Select Your Inventory

The Select Your Inventory page presents a list of all of your inventory, and a series of filter boxes to reduce the number of products that will be advertised. It is our recommendation that you start with a small subset of products, perhaps 10 or 20, and go through the rest of the setup. After everything has been configured, and the initial set of ad groups have been created, you can come back to this page and expand the number of products. This provides the benefit of letting you see results and make adjustments in the settings quickly. ChannelAdvisor suggest limiting your products in these standard ways:

  • Price: with very inexpensive products, it may be difficult to get a good ROI. Start with products that sell for more than $20. You may also want to set a maximum price to limit the total number of products.
  • Brand: start with one or two brands to limit the total number of products.
  • Category: picking one category will help reduce the number of products.
  • Combination: You can use multiple filters, so combine any of the strategies to reduce the total number of products. Using filters will help you limit the number of SKUs.
To set the inventory filters:
  1. Evaluate each column and add text or values to the boxe to limit inventory. Some columns will have a drop down of options and you can check off the types of products you want. You can change the visible columns by hovering over the filter field, then selecting the drop down arrow to select, or deselect which fields will show as columns.  
  2. Select Search . 
  3. You can continue to filter your products after review. 
  4. Reset allows you to return to the original list of all products.
  5. Save or select Next .
Click to Enlarge
 
Any SKU that is added through the Inventory Driven Search Select Your Inventory wizard is automatically assigned the SearchGoogleFilter and/or SearchBingFilter. This is not a searchable field on the Select Your Inventory view, so although the label appears on the SKUs in the Inventory > All > Products view, you cannot filter using this label. We recommend creating an Attribute call IDS, where the value is yes or no . You can use this attribute to filter on Select Your Inventory page. Being able to filter in this way is helpful if you have parent/child relationships and do not have data populated for the parents or if you have a wide variety of inventory and only certain products will be a good match for Inventory Driven Search.

If you are also listing on marketplaces or comparison shopping engines it is likely your SKUs have long specific item titles to take advantage of character limitations and searchability within the respective marketplace or shopping engine. These same item titles may be too long for Inventory Driven Search where they either go over the Google/Bing character limits, or they create keywords that are too long and will ultimately end up with a low search volume error. ChannelAdvisor recommends creating an Attribute called IDS Title, where the value is a shortened title. This same thing can be accomplished using Business Rule expressions.

You may also want to consider dynamically creating multiple Inventory Driven Search Campaigns with an inventory field (IDS_Brand) but keep in mind that the Merchandiser will create a new campaiagn for every brand pulled into Inventory Driven Search. What does that mean? If you have 5 or 10 brands but more than 10 managing the campaigns is not scalable. The benefit of creating campaigns in this way is for those that have highly varying price points and need more control over campaign budgets. The Merchandiser allows for only one configuration so it would be applied to ALL Inventory Driven Search Campaigns.

 

How to Create a Campaign with Inventory

Inventory Driven Search can automatically create your IDS Campaign based on the Merchandiser template settings and will also create rollover campaigns should any campaign hit the maximum number of ad groups.    
  
The Campaign Settings default page is used to define the settings that ChannelAdvisor will use when creating these campaigns on your behalf. You may not see every setting allowed by the providers, but once the campaigns have been created, the additional settings can be configured using the providers' tools.  

These settings only apply to   new   campaigns and have no impact on campaigns that already exist. To adjust targeting, budget or other campaign level settings for campaigns that have already been created, you can make these changes for the campaigns in the ChannelAdvisor system or using a provider tool. Campaign settings will not be re-adjusted by IDS.  

If this is your first time using Inventory Driven Search, consider using low campaign budgets to control costs initially. 

To review or define the Inventory Driven Search Campaign:

  1. Select Paid Search > Products > Overview > Campaign Settings
  2. Save or click Next .
Click to Enlarge  
 
You may also want to review Creating Search Engine Campaigns . 
 

How to Create Product Ads with a Template

For each campaign you will need to create product ads for your inventory. In the Merchandiser template  you utilize your existing inventory data to create the templates for your IDS Campaigns, Ad Groups, Creatives, and Keywords. You can apply powerful expressions or formulas to transform your inventory data into the format required by search engines. 

To create a map your inventory for a campaing:

  1. Select Paid Search > Products > Overview > Merchandiser
  2. Complete the fields. You may want to review  Mapping Inventory Data for Campaigns  and  Using Business Rules with the Merchandiser .
  3. Save or click Next .

 

How to Synchronize Inventory

On the Stock Level page, you can select when or if to pause ad groups based on stock availability. 

The default is to pause a product's ad group if that product goes out of stock. You can also choose to pause products when quantity drops below a higher threshold. In either case, when stock levels rise again, the product's ad group will be un-paused. 

To create a synchronize your inventory for a campaign:

  1. Select  Paid Search > Products > Overview > Stock Level.
  2. Select the radio button to set your stock level allocation.
  3. Save  or click  Next .
Click to Enlarge 
 

How to Activate the Campaign for Inventory Driven Search Campaigns 

After completing the setup wizard, you must activate the campaign for Inventory Driven Search Campaigns.

To activate the campaign:

  • From Paid Search > Products > Overview >   IDS Sync Status , under either Google or Bing click Paused to activate.

How to Monitor your Inventory Driven Search Campaign

After creating campaigns via Inventory Driven Search you can monitor your ads with an interactive  overview dashboard   and an error resolution  message log

The Message Log page shows errors or issues encountered while trying to manage Inventory Driven Search campaigns. ChannelAdvisor has built an advanced error handling system to make it easy to identify and fix errors. For example, when inserting inventory field data into ads, the text for some products may be too long, contain excessive capitalization, or otherwise violate provider rules for content. After looking at the messages in the Message Log, you should go back to the Merchandiser pages to make updates to correct the errors. After you update and save the changes, ChannelAdvisor will begin to generate updates to your ad groups. Examples of some common errors are:

  • Exceeding Character limitations
  • Excessive capitalization
  • Violating other provider rules for content

After looking at the messages in the Message Log, you should go back to the Merchandiser pages to make updates to correct the errors. Be sure to visit the Writing Paid Search Ads with Business Rules page of the Strategy and Support Center to view some helpful hints on how to utilize business rules to resolve your errors.

To access the Message Log :

  1. From Paid Search > Products > Message Log.  In this view, you will see a high level representation of all errors that are occurring in your account broken down by campaign, ad and keyword. 
  2. Select the link under the count column to view details about each error. In this detailed view, you will be able to alter your display through the use of the sorting feature at the top of the page. You will also be able to export your errors to a spreadsheet and dismiss any errors that have been resolved although, after the changes to the Merchandiser are processed, errors that have been corrected will be automatically removed from the Message Log.
Click to Enlarge the Message Log    
 
 
Click to Enlarge the Detailed Message Log 

 

How to use the Overview Dashboard 

The Dashboard provides an overview of Inventory Driven Search performance, as well as the current status of the system, the number of keywords and ad groups created, and links to the settings pages. This page also highlights the products that are driving the most revenue and cost.There may be times where it is necessary to disable inventory processing. Click on the Google or Bing button to disable processing. No changes or updates will be made to your product ad groups. Processing can be re-enabled at any time.

The Dashboard provides a high level representation of your Inventory Driven Search campaign performance and statistics. From Paid Search > Products > Overview,  you can evaluate the campaign.

  • Performance - View a chart of your campaign performance and metrics over time.
  • Product Performance - View your top 10 performing SKUs based on various performance metrics such as revenue, marketing cost, ERS, TRS and CPO .
  • Activity Monitor - View data on your configured providers such as an overview of your settings, as well as ad group and keyword specific data.
  • Messages - View any messages related to your account.

 

Click to Enlarge
 
View the Inventory Driven Search Dashboard for additional details.
 

Reference

For years, retailers have struggled to cover the long tail. While ROI is strong and there is potential for increased revenue, creating and managing ads and keywords for all products is time consuming, error-prone and often ends up out of sync with actual inventory. Inventory Driven Search has been developed from the ground-up to empower retailers to create and manage paid search advertising that is product specific, accurate and automatically generate and update.

Prerequisites

 

You should be familiar with the following topics:

Videos: Overview of Inventory Driven Search

Tasks to Complete

 

Setting up your account for Inventory Driven Search (IDS) is a multi-step process that consists of:

  1. Selecting Your Inventory
  2. Configuring Your Campaign Settings
  3. Creating Ads
  4. Synchronizing Your Stock Levels
  5. Activate the Campaign
  6. Monitor the Campaign
  7. Dashboard Reporting

How to Setup Inventory Driven Search (IDS)

To start using Inventory Driven Search for the first time:

  1. Select Paid Search > Products. On your first visit to the page you will begin the setup process.
  2. Select Configure  for either Google or Bing. 

You now have access to the Inventory Driven Search setting pages.  

How to Select Your Inventory

The Select Your Inventory page presents a list of all of your inventory, and a series of filter boxes to reduce the number of products that will be advertised. It is our recommendation that you start with a small subset of products, perhaps 10 or 20, and go through the rest of the setup. After everything has been configured, and the initial set of ad groups have been created, you can come back to this page and expand the number of products. This provides the benefit of letting you see results and make adjustments in the settings quickly. ChannelAdvisor suggest limiting your products in these standard ways:

  • Price: with very inexpensive products, it may be difficult to get a good ROI. Start with products that sell for more than $20. You may also want to set a maximum price to limit the total number of products.
  • Brand: start with one or two brands to limit the total number of products.
  • Category: picking one category will help reduce the number of products.
  • Combination: You can use multiple filters, so combine any of the strategies to reduce the total number of products. Using filters will help you limit the number of SKUs.
To set the inventory filters:
  1. Evaluate each column and add text or values to the boxe to limit inventory. Some columns will have a drop down of options and you can check off the types of products you want. You can change the visible columns by hovering over the filter field, then selecting the drop down arrow to select, or deselect which fields will show as columns.  
  2. Select Search . 
  3. You can continue to filter your products after review. 
  4. Reset allows you to return to the original list of all products.
  5. Save or select Next .
Click to Enlarge
 
Any SKU that is added through the Inventory Driven Search Select Your Inventory wizard is automatically assigned the SearchGoogleFilter and/or SearchBingFilter. This is not a searchable field on the Select Your Inventory view, so although the label appears on the SKUs in the Inventory > All > Products view, you cannot filter using this label. We recommend creating an Attribute call IDS, where the value is yes or no . You can use this attribute to filter on Select Your Inventory page. Being able to filter in this way is helpful if you have parent/child relationships and do not have data populated for the parents or if you have a wide variety of inventory and only certain products will be a good match for Inventory Driven Search.

If you are also listing on marketplaces or comparison shopping engines it is likely your SKUs have long specific item titles to take advantage of character limitations and searchability within the respective marketplace or shopping engine. These same item titles may be too long for Inventory Driven Search where they either go over the Google/Bing character limits, or they create keywords that are too long and will ultimately end up with a low search volume error. ChannelAdvisor recommends creating an Attribute called IDS Title, where the value is a shortened title. This same thing can be accomplished using Business Rule expressions.

You may also want to consider dynamically creating multiple Inventory Driven Search Campaigns with an inventory field (IDS_Brand) but keep in mind that the Merchandiser will create a new campaiagn for every brand pulled into Inventory Driven Search. What does that mean? If you have 5 or 10 brands but more than 10 managing the campaigns is not scalable. The benefit of creating campaigns in this way is for those that have highly varying price points and need more control over campaign budgets. The Merchandiser allows for only one configuration so it would be applied to ALL Inventory Driven Search Campaigns.

 

How to Create a Campaign with Inventory

Inventory Driven Search can automatically create your IDS Campaign based on the Merchandiser template settings and will also create rollover campaigns should any campaign hit the maximum number of ad groups.    
  
The Campaign Settings default page is used to define the settings that ChannelAdvisor will use when creating these campaigns on your behalf. You may not see every setting allowed by the providers, but once the campaigns have been created, the additional settings can be configured using the providers' tools.  

These settings only apply to   new   campaigns and have no impact on campaigns that already exist. To adjust targeting, budget or other campaign level settings for campaigns that have already been created, you can make these changes for the campaigns in the ChannelAdvisor system or using a provider tool. Campaign settings will not be re-adjusted by IDS.  

If this is your first time using Inventory Driven Search, consider using low campaign budgets to control costs initially. 

To review or define the Inventory Driven Search Campaign:

  1. Select Paid Search > Products > Overview > Campaign Settings
  2. Save or click Next .
Click to Enlarge  
 
You may also want to review Creating Search Engine Campaigns . 
 

How to Create Product Ads with a Template

For each campaign you will need to create product ads for your inventory. In the Merchandiser template  you utilize your existing inventory data to create the templates for your IDS Campaigns, Ad Groups, Creatives, and Keywords. You can apply powerful expressions or formulas to transform your inventory data into the format required by search engines. 

To create a map your inventory for a campaing:

  1. Select Paid Search > Products > Overview > Merchandiser
  2. Complete the fields. You may want to review  Mapping Inventory Data for Campaigns  and  Using Business Rules with the Merchandiser .
  3. Save or click Next .

 

How to Synchronize Inventory

On the Stock Level page, you can select when or if to pause ad groups based on stock availability. 

The default is to pause a product's ad group if that product goes out of stock. You can also choose to pause products when quantity drops below a higher threshold. In either case, when stock levels rise again, the product's ad group will be un-paused. 

To create a synchronize your inventory for a campaign:

  1. Select  Paid Search > Products > Overview > Stock Level.
  2. Select the radio button to set your stock level allocation.
  3. Save  or click  Next .
Click to Enlarge 
 

How to Activate the Campaign for Inventory Driven Search Campaigns 

After completing the setup wizard, you must activate the campaign for Inventory Driven Search Campaigns.

To activate the campaign:

  • From Paid Search > Products > Overview >   IDS Sync Status , under either Google or Bing click Paused to activate.

How to Monitor your Inventory Driven Search Campaign

After creating campaigns via Inventory Driven Search you can monitor your ads with an interactive  overview dashboard   and an error resolution  message log

The Message Log page shows errors or issues encountered while trying to manage Inventory Driven Search campaigns. ChannelAdvisor has built an advanced error handling system to make it easy to identify and fix errors. For example, when inserting inventory field data into ads, the text for some products may be too long, contain excessive capitalization, or otherwise violate provider rules for content. After looking at the messages in the Message Log, you should go back to the Merchandiser pages to make updates to correct the errors. After you update and save the changes, ChannelAdvisor will begin to generate updates to your ad groups. Examples of some common errors are:

  • Exceeding Character limitations
  • Excessive capitalization
  • Violating other provider rules for content

After looking at the messages in the Message Log, you should go back to the Merchandiser pages to make updates to correct the errors. Be sure to visit the Writing Paid Search Ads with Business Rules page of the Strategy and Support Center to view some helpful hints on how to utilize business rules to resolve your errors.

To access the Message Log :

  1. From Paid Search > Products > Message Log.  In this view, you will see a high level representation of all errors that are occurring in your account broken down by campaign, ad and keyword. 
  2. Select the link under the count column to view details about each error. In this detailed view, you will be able to alter your display through the use of the sorting feature at the top of the page. You will also be able to export your errors to a spreadsheet and dismiss any errors that have been resolved although, after the changes to the Merchandiser are processed, errors that have been corrected will be automatically removed from the Message Log.
Click to Enlarge the Message Log    
 
 
Click to Enlarge the Detailed Message Log 

 

How to use the Overview Dashboard 

The Dashboard provides an overview of Inventory Driven Search performance, as well as the current status of the system, the number of keywords and ad groups created, and links to the settings pages. This page also highlights the products that are driving the most revenue and cost.There may be times where it is necessary to disable inventory processing. Click on the Google or Bing button to disable processing. No changes or updates will be made to your product ad groups. Processing can be re-enabled at any time.

The Dashboard provides a high level representation of your Inventory Driven Search campaign performance and statistics. From Paid Search > Products > Overview,  you can evaluate the campaign.

  • Performance - View a chart of your campaign performance and metrics over time.
  • Product Performance - View your top 10 performing SKUs based on various performance metrics such as revenue, marketing cost, ERS, TRS and CPO .
  • Activity Monitor - View data on your configured providers such as an overview of your settings, as well as ad group and keyword specific data.
  • Messages - View any messages related to your account.

 

Click to Enlarge
 
View the Inventory Driven Search Dashboard for additional details.
 

Reference

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  Page last updated: Mon, 03/04/2013 - 15:40