We are very pleased to announce that Semetis is the first Belgian agency to have launched a Shopping Campaign with Partners with the collaboration of Vanden Borre and Samsung.
However, you may not have heard of this new type of campaign. If this is the case, this article is for you! We will explain what is a Google Campaign with Partners, how it works and what are the benefits.
1. What is a Shopping Campaign with Partners?
Shopping campaigns with Partners allow retailers and manufacturers to work together to promote shared products in a Shopping campaign. For your information, these campaigns are not smart shopping but standard shopping.
In short, a Shopping campaign with Partners allows retailers to boost a specific set of products and stimulate their traffic and sales thanks to an extra budget they receive from manufacturers.
Through these campaigns, manufacturers will partially finance the advertising cost of their own products and allow retailers to get more traffic. In return, manufacturers will receive performance reporting on jointly advertised products.
2. How does it work in practice?
The first thing you need to do to create a Shopping campaign with Partners is to contact Google and ask for whitelisting.
The second step consists in linking the retailer and the manufacturer Google Ads accounts. It doesn't matter which of the partners makes the request but one of the two must initiate it and the other must accept it. To create the request, you should go in your Google Ads account to : Setup > Linked accounts > Advertising partners > Add partners > Send request.
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
A notification will be sent to the other partner to accept it. Account linking is an explicit consent from both parties to share with each other account and performance data on jointly promoted products.
Once the linking is done, it is time to move on to the creation of the campaign.
On the retailer’s side, a Standard Shopping campaign should be created. In the settings, you will see the “Cost Share” option and you should mark it as eligible to receive incremental budgets from a partner. This means that you agree to share data and receive funds.
Choose Standard Shopping
Choose the Share of Cost
Moreover, retailers have to select a minimum contribution expected from the manufacturer, it can be between 1 and 99%. This contribution should be discussed beforehand to agree on the cost-share between the 2 partners.
Then, on the manufacturer’s side, a Shopping Campaign with partners should be created in which you have to specify:
- Budget
- Retailer for the campaign
- The cost-share you’re willing to pay for the jointly promoted products
- Products you wish to promote
- Duration of the campaign
One important thing to know is that the cost-share % set by the manufacturer must be higher or equal to the minimum cost-share % specified by the retailer in order to activate the campaign.
We are coming to the point where you can launch your campaign. You can filter down a selection of products in the campaigns on both sides and Google will only promote products that are present in both feeds. The products will actually match each other thanks to their GTIN code. Therefore, it's always good to check that you have the same GTIN code otherwise you might not get any impressions.
Now that the campaign is launched, each time there is a click on one of the ads, the cost of this click will be divided between the retailer and the manufacturer at the specified rate chosen in the settings. However, you should know that the cost that will be displayed in your campaign will only be the part that you pay. For example, the retailer cost is calculated as total spend - manufacturer cost.
To summarize this part, on the one hand there is the retailer who creates a campaign in which he controls bidding and targeting. On the other hand, there is the manufacturer who has a campaign in which he manages the budget and the promoted products. Moreover, they have to agree together on their share of investment.
3. What are the benefits?
For retailers, the advantage is that they benefit from the manufacturer's investment which will allow them to increase their traffic on ecommerce and therefore also increase the volume of sales. For manufacturers, they will be able to increase the notoriety of their products on Google via the retailer while increasing their sales and keep track of it thanks to the shared report.
Retailers will be able to expand their digital partnerships with new or existing brands quite easily. On the other hand, these campaigns also allow manufacturers to work with their various partners to boost the consideration and sale of a selected set of products.
It's mainly advantageous for the manufacturer who will get access to Google reports that will give him a better understanding of how the investment is driving sales. On top of that, retailers can also easily share performance results with their brand partners.
To conclude this article, Shopping campaigns with Partners have real advantages for both partners who have the same objective of increasing sales. Moreover, the setup is quick and straightforward. These new campaigns are therefore a great opportunity for retailers and manufacturers to collaborate together and to contribute to common campaigns in order to improve their online performance.
Olivia Lohest
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