Only a Fool Would Use This Plugin For Google Shopping Campaigns

  • I managed my first Google AdWords (now Google Ads) campaign in 2006 and the only ‘smart’ thing about Google Ads “Smart” campaigns is that they are a smart way for Google to extract more money from their advertisers.

    This plugin is deceptively described, as if you can get started with a budget as low as $10 a month, yet if you look at the pricing grid the $10 only covers this plugins “automation fees” (more like “idiot tax”).

    To run any ads, you have to allocate at least $150/mo (plus the plugin author’s fees) and all of that will go into “smart” campaigns which not only run shopping ads, but also Display ads, YouTube Ads and Gmail ads. That may not seem like the worst idea but every type of ad other than Shopping Ads has a much worse ROI and they are all totally different so even if you wanted to run all of them, you would want to run each in it’s own campaign so that you could view the statistics from each separately, rather than all intermixed.

    Additionally, you have to grant the plugin maker access to your Google Ads account and therefore all of your data, and who knows what they will do with it.

    For all the reasons outlined above, I strongly discourage anyone from using this plugin for the purposes of enabling Google Shopping Ads.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Plugin Author kliken

    (@sitewit)

    Hey Adam,
    A lot has changed in 15 years since you first used Google Ads. We’re not sure if you’ve used our plugin at this time, as there seems to be some misunderstandings from this review such as granting access to a Google Ads account or not having a breakdown of the different network stats from Smart Shopping, which are both incorrect. Smart Shopping campaigns offered through our plugin have only become available just in the last 2 years for most advertisers. The additional networks you mentioned included in our Smart Shopping ads are used to help serve your ads to the best customers, no matter where they’ll be searching. If certain networks aren’t working such as Youtube, less budget will be allocated to those networks over time until proven otherwise. This is why WooCommerce stores typically see at least 4x return on their investment, or $4 dollars in revenue to every dollar of cost for the ads. Otherwise, running separate campaigns as you mentioned would require significantly more manual management, while you could run one automated campaign that reports on each network, and optimizes towards the best one for your business with our services.

    Our automation fee is anything but an idiot tax as you described. Should you keep track of hours spent on managing 1 Google Ads campaign efficiently, it would be more than $10 a month for an employee to build, create, and manage the one campaign each day. Meanwhile, we take care of creation and day to day management for just that automation fee. The ad spend (starting at $150 a month), goes directly to Google to pay for interested shoppers that are browsing for exactly your products on Google, and we don’t take a cent from that. That’s as little as $5 a day to get started with a Smart Shopping campaign, or even less if you just want to test the waters with Google Free Listings.

    We hope you can consider updating your review to share your experience with one of our Smart Shopping campaigns for your WordPress website or consider removing it if the information above has clarified any misconceptions from our plugin page.

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by kliken.
Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
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