Post by OpenCart_Support » Mon Oct 08, 2018 8:53 pm

We are preparing to launch one of the most exciting new features in the history of the OpenCart project - Google Smart Shopping, allowing merchants to take advantage of the paid advertising tools Google offers by promoting your inventory across multiple platforms.

Before the main release we are doing a pilot launch for merchants who are using OpenCart 3.0+. Merchants who are interested in this new feature and would like to provide feedback can submit details via our Google form here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1i_OAop ... ested=true

What is Google Smart Shopping?

Google allows retail merchants to advertise products across their ad network in many ways, Smart Shopping Campaigns https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7674739 focuses on driving optimised traffic direct to your own store using your own product data to generate the adverts. By including this valuable marketing tool directly into your OpenCart administration it will give merchants the ability to setup campaigns quickly and easily - no longer requiring manual feeds or even the need to log into Google to manage your campaigns! Reports are also available from within the admin so you can track the progress & success of each campaign and product.

Who is allowed to test the pilot?

Any merchant who is using OpenCart 3.0+ is welcome to register their interest. Google has restrictions on what products can be advertised (https://support.google.com/merchants/an ... 9970?hl=en) please ensure you meet their criteria.

Experienced and well established stores are also required - you must be already actively selling on your live store. You will also be required to pay for your own advertising spend.

What will be expected of me to test?

As one of the successful pilot testers your feedback will help to improve the feature for when we make it available to everyone. We will contact you with feedback forms where you can rate your experience with each section, report any bugs and also share any ideas you have - such as making it more friendly to use, new features or general improvements to any part of the tool.

We are only looking for a small number of pilot testers so be sure to apply as soon as possible, we will contact our pilot testers by email within 7 days.

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Post by uksitebuilder » Tue Oct 09, 2018 5:10 pm

Interesting

Some more info on Google Smart Shopping

Before you can start with Google Smart Shopping Campaigns, you have to make sure you meet the following requirements:
  • You must have a Google Ads account
  • You must have a Google Merchant Center Account
  • You must have a product data feed uploaded and approved on your Merchant Center account
  • You must have a conversion tracking tag installed on your website
  • You must be tracking transaction-specific conversion values (this requires you to manually edit your conversion tag)
  • You must have a remarketing global site tag on your website
  • You must have tagged your site for dynamic remarketing
  • You must have at least 20 conversions over the last 45 days across existing Shopping campaigns
  • You must have at least an audience list with more than 100 users
Last, but not least...
  • Make sure you meet the general requirements for Shopping Campaigns
  • Make sure you follow the Shopping Ads Policies
  • Make sure you follow the policy on Personalized Advertising (this policy is about the remarketing side of Smart Shopping Campaigns)
Smart Shopping Campaigns: Drawbacks

Although Smart Shopping Campaigns seem really great at a first glance, there are many targeting limitations you need to be aware of before starting:
  • Negative keywords are not available
  • Location targeting is not available. In fact, all you can do is set the country of sale, but you can't target a specific region or exclude a city.
  • Ad Schedule is not available
  • Device targeting and bid adjustments is not available
  • Audience targeting is not available. Although, as said before, you must have at least one audience list with 100 users, you can't decide which audience to use as a targeting. Google will choose automatically based on its machine learning algorithm
Reporting-wise, a few important columns are not available (yet):
  • Search Impression Share
  • Search Abs Top IS
  • Click Share
  • Search Lost (Budget)
  • Search Lost (Rank)
This is because Smart Shopping ads run on multiple networks, not only search. Therefore, those data would be inaccurate as would refer to search only.

This brings me to what I reckon is the biggest drawback of Smart Shopping Campaigns: you can't report performance on the Display Network separately from Shopping, YouTube and Gmail.

Ads on those networks usually perform in very different ways. Display ads have generally a low CTR and low conversion rate, while ads on Gmail and Search usually perform much better in that regards.

Therefore, you might notice a worse performance than your existing regular Shopping campaigns. This is just because the reporting is affected by ads on all networks. It is very important that both you and your boss are aware of that. On the other hand, you might see a performance improvement when comparing your Smart Shopping Campaign to all your existing Shopping and Dynamic Remarketing campaigns.

Also, other limitations include:
  • Shared budgets are not available
  • As of now, Smart Shopping Campaigns are not supported by Google AdWords Editor. This is pretty annoying for account managers who work on large accounts.
  • With Smart Shopping Campaigns your are losing manual control over your shopping campaigns, putting the Google AI on the driver's seat. Whether you can trust the Google automation or not is something you have to find out by yourself testing and reporting.

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Post by davidbfranks » Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:35 am

I don't understand, why do we need OpenCart to set this up for us?

Any merchant can setup a Smart Shopping campaign themselves within Adwords - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7674740

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Post by iSenseLabs » Fri Oct 12, 2018 4:04 pm

davidbfranks wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:35 am
I don't understand, why do we need OpenCart to set this up for us?

Any merchant can setup a Smart Shopping campaign themselves within Adwords - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7674740
This is an integrated implementation of Smart Shopping campaigns in OpenCart, so merchants can easily start and run Smart Shopping campaigns from their store back office. Other benefits are automatic sync of products, specials, stats, campaign management, enable/disable specific products, automatic updates of the advertised product data, and much more.

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Post by iSenseLabs » Fri Oct 12, 2018 4:24 pm

uksitebuilder wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 5:10 pm
Interesting

Some more info on Google Smart Shopping

Before you can start with Google Smart Shopping Campaigns, you have to make sure you meet the following requirements:
  • You must have a Google Ads account
  • You must have a Google Merchant Center Account
  • You must have a product data feed uploaded and approved on your Merchant Center account
  • You must have a conversion tracking tag installed on your website
  • You must be tracking transaction-specific conversion values (this requires you to manually edit your conversion tag)
  • You must have a remarketing global site tag on your website
  • You must have tagged your site for dynamic remarketing
  • You must have at least 20 conversions over the last 45 days across existing Shopping campaigns
  • You must have at least an audience list with more than 100 users
Last, but not least...
  • Make sure you meet the general requirements for Shopping Campaigns
  • Make sure you follow the Shopping Ads Policies
  • Make sure you follow the policy on Personalized Advertising (this policy is about the remarketing side of Smart Shopping Campaigns)
Smart Shopping Campaigns: Drawbacks

Although Smart Shopping Campaigns seem really great at a first glance, there are many targeting limitations you need to be aware of before starting:
  • Negative keywords are not available
  • Location targeting is not available. In fact, all you can do is set the country of sale, but you can't target a specific region or exclude a city.
  • Ad Schedule is not available
  • Device targeting and bid adjustments is not available
  • Audience targeting is not available. Although, as said before, you must have at least one audience list with 100 users, you can't decide which audience to use as a targeting. Google will choose automatically based on its machine learning algorithm
Reporting-wise, a few important columns are not available (yet):
  • Search Impression Share
  • Search Abs Top IS
  • Click Share
  • Search Lost (Budget)
  • Search Lost (Rank)
This is because Smart Shopping ads run on multiple networks, not only search. Therefore, those data would be inaccurate as would refer to search only.

This brings me to what I reckon is the biggest drawback of Smart Shopping Campaigns: you can't report performance on the Display Network separately from Shopping, YouTube and Gmail.

Ads on those networks usually perform in very different ways. Display ads have generally a low CTR and low conversion rate, while ads on Gmail and Search usually perform much better in that regards.

Therefore, you might notice a worse performance than your existing regular Shopping campaigns. This is just because the reporting is affected by ads on all networks. It is very important that both you and your boss are aware of that. On the other hand, you might see a performance improvement when comparing your Smart Shopping Campaign to all your existing Shopping and Dynamic Remarketing campaigns.

Also, other limitations include:
  • Shared budgets are not available
  • As of now, Smart Shopping Campaigns are not supported by Google AdWords Editor. This is pretty annoying for account managers who work on large accounts.
  • With Smart Shopping Campaigns your are losing manual control over your shopping campaigns, putting the Google AI on the driver's seat. Whether you can trust the Google automation or not is something you have to find out by yourself testing and reporting.
Thank you for sharing this resource — we've seen it before, as it was part of one online review, not related to Google Smart Shopping Campaigns integration in OpenCart.

We would like to actually clarify the focus here.

This is an integration of Google Merchant Center and Smart Shopping campaign. Some fair points have been raised and we’d like to clarify the value behind this upcoming release.

Speed: Setting up a Merchant Center account requires an average user days, if not weeks to complete. The steps include verifying and claiming your website, syncing your products, and addressing product or account issues, etc. Our solution will automate many of these steps, as well as tag set up, and allow merchants to get up and running considerably faster. Additionally, for merchants that have already set up their Merchant Center account, they can actually continue to use their existing account with our integration.

Simplicity: Standard Shopping and display campaigns offer many manual controls for audience targeting, network targeting, and bidding adjustments. Smart Shopping campaigns simplifies campaign set up and on-going management. It combines both standard Shopping and display remarketing ads under one campaign type. Smart Shopping campaigns also automatically adjust bids and budgets, taking into account 70 million unique signals in each ad auction.

Through our integration, we’re able to create Smart Shopping campaigns for all merchants, regardless of whether they have existing conversion history or remarketing list. This is great news for advertisers getting started with Google Shopping for the first time.

Performance: Smart Shopping campaigns are focused on driving sales. Based on early Google data, on average, advertisers have seen more than 20% higher conversion value (sales), compared with standard Shopping campaigns at a similar cost. We’re confident that it will also drive sales for OpenCart merchants.

The goal of our Google Shopping integration is to help merchants grow their business. We’re very pleased to be working with Google to offer a fast, simple, and effective marketing solution.

This is a new release for us and we’re eager to hear your feedback. Please sign up to become an early tester here.

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Post by vincent89 » Sun Oct 14, 2018 5:44 am

That would be really nice!

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Post by labeshops » Fri Nov 09, 2018 9:11 pm

This is great news! It makes me want to step up my plans to update to v3 even!

Will it also support feeds for Facebook Marketplace? I have recently been featured in their shops section and am being flooded with orders, but something like this to work with them would be wonderful! The only mods I have found are not up to date with their api and for example, do not properly send additional images and options to facebook.

Lori

Running Opencart v3.0.3.2 with multi-stores and the default template from https://www.labeshops.com which has links to all my stores.


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Post by glolar » Thu Jan 10, 2019 2:20 pm

I am planning on providing feedback on the Google form mentioned in the original post, but I wanted to mention this here, so forum visitors could see it.

I don't know if this bug has been fixed, but in version 3.0.3.1, if you go to Catalog > Products, then select a product (checkbox), then click the Copy button, you get the following error:

Fatal error: Uncaught Exception: Error: Duplicate entry '0' for key 'PRIMARY'<br />Error No: 1062<br />INSERT INTO `oc_product_advertise_google` (`product_id`, `store_id`, `google_product_category`) SELECT p.product_id, p2s.store_id, (SELECT c2gpc.google_product_category FROM `oc_product_to_category` p2c LEFT JOIN `oc_category_path` cp ON (p2c.category_id = cp.category_id) LEFT JOIN `oc_category_to_google_product_category` c2gpc ON (c2gpc.category_id = cp.path_id AND c2gpc.store_id = 0) WHERE p2c.product_id = p.product_id AND c2gpc.google_product_category IS NOT NULL ORDER BY cp.level DESC LIMIT 0,1) as `google_product_category` FROM `oc_product` p LEFT JOIN `oc_product_to_store` p2s ON (p2s.product_id = p.product_id AND p2s.store_id = 0) LEFT JOIN `oc_product_advertise_google` pag ON (pag.product_id = p.product_id AND pag.store_id=p2s.store_id) WHERE pag.product_id IS NULL AND p2s.store_id IS NOT NULL AND p.product_id IN (63) in /home/glolarco/public_html/artstore/system/library/db/mysqli.php:40 Stack trace: #0 /home/glo in /home/glolarco/public_html/artstore/system/library/db/mysqli.php on line 40

Sure looks like this has something to do with the new Google Smart Shopping feature.

Regards!

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Post by OSWorX » Thu Jan 10, 2019 4:30 pm


Full Stack Web Developer :: Dedicated OpenCart Development & Support DACH Region
Contact for Custom Work / Fast Support.


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