Yes, that data is correct How our Google Shopping numbers exploded from Q to Q By Gaby Galiani, Account Manager

3Q Digital Google Shopping Report – Q Introduction Digital marketers know that Google Shopping (formerly PLAs) are critical to ecommerce. But just how much are they growing, both in competition and performance? We compared year-over-year Q4 data (2013 vs. 2014) in three ecommerce accounts across mobile, desktops, and tablets. That Revenue graph on the right? We’ll come back to it, but it should hint at the story to come. Three accounts does not an industry-wide report make, but we think our numbers – and the context behind them – are illustrative of the arc of Google Shopping. Let’s dive in.

3Q Digital Google Shopping and the 2014 Holiday Season Impressions A lot of ecommerce brands got more aggressive with Shopping ads in 2014, and our clients were no exception. Among the three accounts studied, one had been very slow to adopt Shopping and devoted a lot of new budget in The other two had established healthy spend in 2013, but because Shopping optimization trends are fairly quick to emerge, ROAS crept steadily upward and justified more and more spend over the course of the year. Device-wise, the data’s not surprising: desktops had much more early adoption than tablets and mobile, and the latter two had more room to grow year over year.

3Q Digital Google Shopping and the 2014 Holiday Season Clicks and CTR Of course, with more impressions comes more clicks – but, as evidenced in the CTR graph, the clicks didn’t keep up with pace of growth. Across devices, the year-over-year CTR drops ranged between 36-46%, showing the effects of an increasingly competitive landscape across devices.

3Q Digital Google Shopping and the 2014 Holiday Season CPC These numbers, frankly, surprised us, with only desktop (+1%) showing any kind of year-over-year CPC increase. Mobile CPC dropped by a whopping 32%, with tablet CPCs down 17%. Possible explanations for this: - Enhanced campaigns and the mobile modifier bid have been fully adopted and optimized (which was not necessarily the case in Q4 2013). - The clients studied benefited from the Alpha/Beta process, which optimized top-performing queries and refined mobile bids and query/product relevancy.

3Q Digital Google Shopping and the 2014 Holiday Season Cost and Revenue Even with surprisingly suppressed CPCs, the increase in clicks means advertisers spent a lot more money in Q on Shopping ads: 182% more on mobile, 165% more on tablets, and 73% more on desktop. But our three accounts more than justified the spend with year-over-year revenue gains: a whopping 1694% more on mobile, 593% more on tablet, and 224% more on desktop.

3Q Digital Google Shopping and the 2014 Holiday Season Conversion rate This is where we start talking about optimization – how we increased conversion rate year over year (by 134% on mobile, 64% on desktop, and 48% on tablets). Generally, Shopping ads convert better than traditional non-brand ads, which means advertisers get conversion data faster and optimize faster. The linear nature of the feed means that as long as it’s set up right, with no inventory issues, it's easy to determine which products are working well and optimize accordingly (bid up winners and prune losers). We began applying our proprietary Alpha-Beta process to Shopping ads in 2014, isolating top-performing products in an Alpha Shopping campaign and targeting all products in a Beta Shopping campaign. We set campaign priority to High on Alpha products to force queries to those winners, and we optimized bidding on each high-performing product as well.

3Q Digital Google Shopping and the 2014 Holiday Season ROAS Combine higher conversion rates, flat-to-lower CPCs, and a healthy increase in AOV (graph not shown), and we have some truly stunning year-over-year ROAS increases (536% for mobile, 87% for desktop, 161% for tablets). While we stress that these results are not typical across the industry, and instead reflect the intersection of increased client spending with the application of optimization techniques, they do reveal a few morsels for digital marketers: -Mobile is still relatively underdeveloped -The optimization cycle for Shopping ads is faster than traditional non-brand ads -Marketers should strive for query and bidding control of proven winners

3Q Digital Google Shopping and the 2014 Holiday Season Conclusion Google Shopping will only continue to grow. Back in 2012 and early 2013, getting a feed up and running for our clients was often a completely new initiative for them. Now, nearly every ecommerce brand has one, and smart companies are figuring out ways to tweak and manage the feeds to get more out of them. Why? Google Shopping campaigns work! They nearly always perform better than non-brand search. Any late adopters should push to get in on Shopping now, and brands currently running on it need to keep pushing it. More and more advertisers are getting more sophisticated with their feed management with regards to optimizing titles and descriptions, and best practices for Shopping structure is evolving as more advertisers adopt 3 rd -party tools to help with optimization and test new campaign organization. The set-it-and-forget-it days of Google Shopping are gone – what’s more, Shopping data is being leveraged more and more in traditional search, and vice versa. And, as always, mobile will keep growing – especially as attribution tracking gets better and better and advertisers buy into the idea that users might look up on their phone first, then buy on desktop. And more advertisers have optimized the mobile experience and are finding increased success, which means budgets will continue to increase.