Whether you work for an agency or in-house, keeping AdWords Search campaigns up to date with the latest product updates on your website can be a tedious and time-consuming task, in particular for large e-commerce sites.
…In addition, there can also be large budget and opportunity costs if your campaigns are not kept up-to-date
1) Advertising for products that are out of stock, or no longer available, invariably leads to wasted ad spend and annoyed customers.
2) Not advertising for products that are in stock means missing out on potential sales.
In order to address this problem for our clients at AdNudging.com, we created a Product Update Notification Dashboard (the name needs some work).
Notification Dashboard: The Technical Details
The notification dashboard is built around 3 components:
- Product feed: A structured dataset of all the items that are currently in stock, usually in the form of an XML file.
- Database: Used to store previous versions of the product feed for comparison purposes.
- Script: Used to fetch the product feed and generate the dashboard.
and works as follows:
1) The script fetches the product feed from the client’s website, parsing and formatting the data into our desired format. In the image above, the feed has been formatted based on brand & product category, but could just as easily have been formatted based a different combination of properties.
2) The formatted data is then stored in a database. Assuming the script has run before, there will now be two formatted product feeds in the database: one from t1 (the old feed) and one from t2 (the latest feed).
3) Finally, the two versions of the product feed are written to a Google Sheet, generating the actual dashboard. Depending on your needs, the script can be scheduled to run daily/weekly/monthly by setting up a cron job.
As can be seen from the image above, the dashboard provides a useful overview of which campaigns need to be added or removed/paused.
Lars Larsen
Head of Google Ads & Partner
AdNudging
