Google Shopping Decline?

We've been on Google Shopping since Froogle, and it's always been a quirky service. Things go fine for months, then some human somewhere does a physical check and finds a product or two out of whack, and the whole feed comes down. Days, or even weeks later, after all is fixed, we're back up and running.

It's definitely not a "good" service, but sadly a necessary one for us. I don't think that shoppers realize that the products are ads, and they're happy to click click click away.

It never occurred to me to brand the photos, but I kind of understand why it's against the rules. If there are two or more stores selling the same product, the watermarked name could appear on a master list of other store names.

Lately we've seemed to find a "sweet spot" that has balanced our spend with our conversions better. Hoping this set up lasts a while, it's a bear to try different price points of clicks, time of day, and geography and not really know what's working or not. All of the so google adwords "gurus" I've tried to hire don't seem to have a grasp, or even care, about Google Shopping.

I'd like to know what you moved away to, if there are other services out there that can replace Google Shopping for you.

We just stopped using it and have not found anything to replace it.

I just refused to upload my photos so other business could just use. We have always branded our photos as it takes a great deal of money to acquire them and compile this data. Whilst we did get business from it the price of serving up our data for competitors to easy get there hands on just too great.

I manage several shopping campaigns.
Here is my list of things to do.

1. Break down the campaign/s by product groups use brands etc. You need to work with what is available in your feed.
This will allow you to monitor your product groups performance individually.

2. Break down the product groups by product id.
This will allow you to monitor your product ids performance individually.

3. In the campaign settings, use the batch location option to break it down by state.
This will allow you to monitor your locations performance individually.

4. In the campaign settings, use the schedule option to break each day into 4 hour segments.
This will allow you to monitor your time & day performance.

5. Download the "All keywords" data from each campaign.
Use a excel program like ablebits to search for certain searches and add the non-performing ones as negative keywords. Yes negative keywords will work on a shopping campaign.
Search for keywords like "cheap", "wholesale" etc . . .

It will take awhile before you have enough data to make product group, product id, schedule, location, neg keyword adjustments. The time frame depends on your volume of activity.

Within the last couple of months I worked on an account and decreased the cost of conversion from +$20.00 to -$10.00 using the above techniques.

All of this was done under 4 hours of billable time.

Later this month, I am going to run a second group of modifications I hope to decrease the cost of conversions another 25%.

Depending on your product type, you should be able to realize reasonable improvements by following the steps above.