Best Practices

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For each field in the Merchandiser, we can recommend configurations and options so that you maximize the power of Inventory Driven Search while creating campaigns and ad groups that are consistent, easy to understand, and provide a good ROI. The tips below are just suggestions, and you should use your own knowledge of your products, budgets, and goals to decide what makes the most sense.

• Campaign Name: the Campaign Name field will be used for all of your products, so use something general, like "Products". If you want to divide up your products by category or brand name, consider concatenating "Products" and the Brand or a category attribute. You may need a business rule to do this effectively, for example, to grab just the top level category. Also keep in mind that Google and Microsoft have limits to the number of campaigns you can create, so when expanded to all of your products, be sure that the Campaign Name won't try to create too many campaigns.
• Ad Group Name: The Ad Group name has to be unique, so using the SKU field is a good way to make sure that there are no duplicate names. To make the ad group names more meaningful, consider adding the Brand or Title to the SKU.
• Max CPC: The providers require that you provide a Max CPC, but the keyword bids will determine what you will actually pay. Set the Max CPC to most you would ever want to pay for any keyword, which is often 3-5X your normal keyword bid.
• Ads: Create at least two ads, one that is more general and uses Dynamic Keyword Insertion so that you can be sure that each ad group gets an ad. In some cases, adding a lot of inventory fields may mean that the ad is too long.
  • Headline: You only have 25 characters, so keep it short and simple. The Brand and the SKU work well here, and there may be room left for the product price. 
  • Description: Product titles work well here if they are short enough. Also be sure to include your offer to the buyer, such as "Free Shipping" or "Ships Today".
  • Display URL: In addition to our website URL, consider adding the brand name or category to the end of the URL. No spaces are allowed, so you may need a business rule or lookup list to clean up the text.
  • Destination URL: use the product's URL.
• Keywords:  With Inventory Driven Search, you are buidling a lot of ad groups, so you may not need a lot of keywords in each one. Many users only have 1-3 keywords per ad group.
  • Keyword Text: Keyword text should be unique to each product and not too general. Bad keywords would be just the Brand name. Good keywords would be the Brand & SKU or Brand & MPN. Other good keywords might be made from the product title. NOTE: If you define a keyword as Brand & MPN, but the MPN field is empty for some products, those products will get a keyword of the Brand name only. This can be a costly mistake, so you may need a business rule to check if the MPN is empty before creating the keyword (the Expressions examples below show how to check for this.)
  • Match Type: Because you are building tail keywords, a match type of Broad can work very well. However, some advertisers prefer to create Broad, Phrase, and Exact versions of each keyword.
  • Bid: A fixed bid for all keywords works well for many advertisers, but consider creating bids based on price or margin. For example, you could write a business rule that takes the price and multiples it by .005, which would create a bid of $0.50 for a $100 product.
  • Destination URL: Use the product URL, and you can tracking parameters to the end if you need them by adding additional text or fields to the end of the URL.

Expressions

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There is a lot of power and flexibility available when writing expressions. Pieces of text can be joined together, characters can be stripped out, prices can have the decimal removed, and more. The table below explains some of the things that can be done and provides examples. In the examples, we have used the "$" symbol to indicate that the next word is a field name. 

Goal	Functions	Example	Resulting Text
Change Capitalization	proper(), toupper(), tolower()	proper("WIDGET CO")	"Widget Co"
Combine several pieces of text	concatenate()	concatenate("Buy ", $brand, " Now!")	"Buy Widget Co Now!"
Change parts of text	replace(), regexreplace(), replacewordlist()	replace(“coconut”, “co”, “wing”) replace(“coconut”, “co”, “”)	“wingwingnut” “nut”
Get Top Level Category	getpart()	getpart(“Cameras > DSLRs > Nikon”, 1)	“Cameras”
Change message based on Inventory Details	if()	if($shippingprice="","Free Shipping","Great Service")	"Free Shipping"
Price Based Keyword Bids	* (Multiplication)	$itemretailprice * .001	Bid is 1/10% of price
Shorten Price Field in Ads	formatnumber()	formatnumber($itemretailprice,"F0")	19
Add Tracking Tags to URLs		$producturl?campaign=$classification&adgroup=$itemsku
Remove special characters from title	regexreplace()	regexreplace($itemtitle,"[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]","")	Large Blue Widget
Check MPN and don't create the keyword if it is empty	if(), concatenate()	if($itemmpn="","",concatenate($itembrand," ",$itemmpn))
Extract the first 10 words (useful to reduce the length of a keyword)	regexget()	REGEXGET("one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve","(?:[^\s]+\s*){0,10}")	"one two three four five six seven eight nine ten"
Truncate a text field at the end up of a word and up to 35 characters	regexget()	REGEXGET({{ITEMTITLE}},"^.{1,35}$|^.{1,35}[\s]")