Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Can Google Shopping Ads Lower Ranking due to Bounce?
-
I am noticing Google Shopping Ads are showing up for really irrelevant keywords on some of my products. This quite predictably causes a high bounce rate when a user comes from these ads. There is very little control over what Google Ads seems to decide are relevant keywords from what I can see. Only control is by viewing search terms and setting as negative keywords, but his doesn't help much. Negative keywords are often ignored or they come up with some other really irrelevant new keyword.
Seems this high bounce rate could hurt ranking? Any experiences shared with Google Shopping ads appreciated!
-
Hey Chris,
I'm going to address your concerns in-line as I think that's the best way for me to clear up any confusion here.
"My assumption is that organic ranking of my landing page will be effected by bounce rate. When a shopping campaign sends a user to my page and they bounce, Google will see that as a poor user experience with no engagement. This is caused by the Google shopping campaign choosing irrelevant keywords that I have no control over. Running a shopping campaign causes the analytics data to have significantly higher bounce rates and therefore I would think hurts organic ranking of the page."
Your organic rankings will NOT be affected. User engagement signals from AdWords will affect your AdWords quality scores, but under no circumstances will they affect your organic rankings. Google states this publicly, like this example, "Running a Google AdWords campaign does not help your SEO rankings, despite some myths and claims.". It does not hurt, it does not help. The data sets are completely separate. Yes, in your data you can see them combined if you wish, but Google Organic does not see your Paid Ad Engagement Metrics.
As far as control over your Google Shopping, while Google does sometimes trigger terms that are outside the norm, their matching is generally pretty good. I would encourage you to review the post I linked above and to read other articles about Google Shopping Structures. Your structure is everything for AdWords, but it's especially true for Google Shopping. If you're having trouble with targeting, especially after reviewing the search query report and adding negatives, something is wrong with your setup. Review some posts and see if you find anything that might prove valuable."So I am paying Google money to lower my rank because of their bad choice of keywords. Google shopping does not allow me to choose the keywords. And the only way to control this is to use negative keywords as you suggest. In my experience this is also not very effective."
I addressed this a bit above, but I think it's worth reiterating here, your paid ads are not lowering your organic rank under any circumstances. Even if they share a landing page, the paid ads will not affect your organic rankings.
"Here is one example. I have a product with the word "Oxy" in the name. Google shopping sent thousands of impressions for queries related to Oxycodone and Oxycotin drugs. My product is an immune support antioxidant supplement for DOGS! Regardless of negative keywords set with adwords support folks on the phone, they continued to send queries for all sorts of variations. Such as "oxycodone 10mg" "buy oxycodone" ad infinitum! Even setting negative keywords to "broad" didn't help. Eventually tapered off after setting many variations as negative keywords. Close to 50 variations.
So of course these clicks seeking oxycodone immediately bounce when they see it is a product for dogs. My question is does that ultimately hurt my organic ranking?"This sounds extremely frustrating and I'm sorry to hear that you're having these issues. I'd encourage you to add "Oxycodone" & "Oxycotin" as negative phrase match terms. That should solve your negative targeting issue as described.
But even if these issues still continue to arise, rest assured that your organic rankings will not be affected.Hope that helps! Let me know if I can be of further assistance.
Best regards,
Trenton -
Hi and thanks for responding. That is still not exactly what I was asking.
My assumption is that organic ranking of my landing page will be effected by bounce rate. When a shopping campaign sends a user to my page and they bounce, Google will see that as a poor user experience with no engagement. This is caused by the Google shopping campaign choosing irrelevant keywords that I have no control over. Running a shopping campaign causes the analytics data to have significantly higher bounce rates and therefore I would think hurts organic ranking of the page.
So I am paying Google money to lower my rank because of their bad choice of keywords. Google shopping does not allow me to choose the keywords. And the only way to control this is to use negative keywords as you suggest. In my experience this is also not very effective.
Here is one example. I have a product with the word "Oxy" in the name. Google shopping sent thousands of impressions for queries related to Oxycodone and Oxycotin drugs. My product is an immune support antioxidant supplement for DOGS! Regardless of negative keywords set with adwords support folks on the phone, they continued to send queries for all sorts of variations. Such as "oxycodone 10mg" "buy oxycodone" ad infinitum! Even setting negative keywords to "broad" didn't help. Eventually tapered off after setting many variations as negative keywords. Close to 50 variations.
So of course these clicks seeking oxycodone immediately bounce when they see it is a product for dogs. My question is does that ultimately hurt my organic ranking?
Thanks!
-
Hey Chris,
There seems to be a bit of confusion in the answers here, so hopefully I can clear that up a bit.
There appears to be two parts to your question, I will address each separately.
- Does Google Shopping having a high bounce rate hurt organic rankings? No. Google is very adamant that these two areas are separate. They use different ranking algorithms and do not share data.
- If you instead meant Does Google Shopping having a high bounce rate affect Google Shopping ad rank, the answer is yes. There are ways to help improve your Google Shopping performance other than adding negative terms, which you absolutely should do weekly, specifically based around account structure. Search Engine Land has a good article on this here.
If you need additional clarification here, please feel free to respond to my post & I'll help you out ASAP!
Best regards!
Trenton - topic:timeago_earlier,about a month
-
Hi Chris,
This is very normal for Google Shopping to have a higher bounce rate than Text advertising. As you mentioned that Google Shopping Ads are showing up for really irrelevant keywords on some of my products in that case you need to ensure is that the data supplied in the data feed, essentially matches the data on the landing page.
Second keep adding irrelevant search terms as negative keywords, Google doesn't ignore negative keywords.
Last you can create separte ad group for the products that accruing irrelevant search terms and rewrite products title and description.
Hope it helps!!!
Thanks
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved Google Ads Subdomain in sitelinks & Composition Change for Strategy Status
I have a basic query but could not find a definite answer on the internet. I am currently running a campaign for the main website of a big education brand and they also have a secondary learning website on subdomain, and I want to add sitelinks of subdomain to the campaign, but I am not sure whether it is allowed or not. The brand I am running ads for is https://www.rauias.com/ and the secondary website is https://compass.rauias.com/ branded slightly different in a subdomain, so should I add the sitelinks of Compass to the main campaign? Also one more silly question My Max Conversion search campaign gave me this status today. "Learning (composition change): Campaigns have been added to or removed from the bid strategy. Google Ads is now adjusting to optimize bids. 5 days left for learning" What does this mean exactly? And Why does it reenter the learning phase whenever I make a small change?
Paid Search Marketing | Dec 7, 2023, 4:04 AM | rauoff0 -
"Duplicate without user-selected canonical” - impact to Google Ads costs
Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice. Scenario
Paid Search Marketing | Nov 16, 2021, 5:02 PM | Alex_Pisa
We run several websites (www.brandName.com, www.brandName.be, www.brandName.ch, etc..) all in French language . All sites have nearly the same content & structure, only minor text (some headings and phone numbers due to different countries are different). There are many good quality pages, but again they are the same over all domains. Current solution
Currently we don’t use canonicals, instead we use rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default": <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://www.brandName.be/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://www.brandName.ca/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CH" href="https://www.brandName.ch/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://www.brandName.fr/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-LU" href="https://www.brandName.lu/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.brandName.com/" /> Naturally this si reflected in ""Duplicate without user-selected canonical” . Issue
We create the same ad in Google Ads for 2 domains. So the content is mostly identical, ads are identical, target URLs differ only in domain. Yet Google Ads “Quality score” is different (10/10 vs. 6/10) and “Landing page experience” is very different (Above average vs. Average). Some members of our team think lower “Landing page experience” increases the Google Ads costs, which I personally don't believe, but I want to double check. Question: Can “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” issue decrease the “Landing page experience” rating and as result can it cause higher Google ads costs? Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks. Regards.0 -
Top of funnel google ads campaign not hardly converting, why?
Hi, I really hope someone can help me with this. I'm running two search ad campaigns and a google shopping campaign in google ads. The search campaigns are targeting top-of-funnel keywords as the business doesn't have universally known collections which everyone would search for so they are just unique to my business. So the campaigns are driving traffic but really converting whereas google shopping is converting because searchers are looking for particular products so they're lower down the funnel closer to aking a purchase decision. I feel I've optimised the campaign well and for the most part, most keywords have 7/10 quality score. The landing page seems fine. However, our offering wasn't as strong as competitors so we've offered a discount the same as them to compete. Since I started google ads we have nearly doubled our monthly revenue and the product types targeted in campaigns have increased in quantity sold so it seems it's having an effect but the campaigns aren't showing a good performance. Does anyone have any suggestions or input that could help me? I looked at first interaction attribution model and even there it's not performing well which makes this even more difficult to resolve. I'm thinking I should enable USER id feature in Google analytics so i can track signed in users across devices which may then help attribute sales to paid search channel as I saw in search console that the keyword that generates the most traffic to the site is our brand name and we're not a well-known brand so makes me think they may be starting their buyer's journey on a work computer on their mobile and finishing on their computer at home as an example. However, I don't believe this will be the main cause or solution as I would only have data for signed in users which still won't give me the full picture. Also if the campaign is optimised effectively but conversions are minimal could not having many conversions affect quality score? If someone can help or provide me with a different perspective it would be much appreciated. Please let me know if I need to clarify or explain further. I hope I've made myself clear. Thanks, T
Paid Search Marketing | Oct 26, 2020, 11:27 AM | TZ19820 -
304 "If Modified Header" Triggers Error in Google Ads?
We have a client who is launch some Google Ads campaigns, and they recently asked us to fix 304 "Errors" on their website as per this feedback: "When we inspected the website we came across a number of 304 status errors. In order to get the ads running, we will need all of the website domain status codes converted to 200. “ Of course, all of their website pages return a 200 Status, it's just the HTTP headers that additionally clarify with a 304 Response (not an error). Has anyone else ever run into this issue with Google Ads? IMHO it makes no sense to remove this functionality. Google has even recommended in the past to use this it: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2008/11/date-with-googlebot-part-ii-http-status.html Thanks for any tips or feedback!
Paid Search Marketing | Nov 8, 2019, 6:17 PM | mirabile0 -
Clients Keep Googling Themselves
Hi, I have a common problem with my clients where they google their own business name or keywords they want to rank for and freak out when they don't show up on the first page of results. The same is true for my paid search clients. Is there a good way I can explain to them how Googleing themselves is not the best way to know if they are performing well? If there is an article out there that explains it that I can share that would be even better.
Paid Search Marketing | Oct 14, 2017, 12:04 PM | GuardianOwlDigital0 -
301 Redirects and Google Shopping Feeds
I am moving my site from Volusion to Shopify. The domain remains the same but the URL paths are different. With respect to my Google Shopping feed, is it best to send old URLs (with 301 redirects) or to send the new URLs?
Paid Search Marketing | Jan 17, 2017, 6:18 PM | vgusvg0 -
Best practice to separate paid from organic conversions in Google Analytics
I have a PPC campaign for a client with standalone landing pages with a form, not reachable from the website (although in the same domain). I've added the AdWords conversion code to the "thank you" page and I also added a Goal in
Paid Search Marketing | May 23, 2014, 7:32 PM | DoMiSoL
Google Analytics whose counter is increased every time the thank you page is reached. This way I can track conversions with both AdWords and Analytics. Is that correct? Should I import back in AdWords the goals from Analytics, as suggested in the AdWords account? I have another landing page with a form in the website, where I send users coming from
organic search, so I set up a second goal in Analytics for the thank you page of this form. Is this the reason why I am supposed to import in AdWords the analytics' goals, so that I could see both kind of conversions in both accounts? But the most important question is: If I send both PPC/organic visitors to the same landing page is there still a way to separate PPC from Organic conversions? Thank you very much for your advice. DoMiSoL Rossini0 -
Does anybody know of a good bulk import http response checker? The one I was using has disappeared and I can only find checkers that only take one URL at a time.
An example of something I'm looking for but I want to check multiple checkers: http://web-sniffer.net/
Paid Search Marketing | Mar 16, 2015, 1:40 PM | SWKurt0