Every pound of your Google Shopping budget should work as hard as possible. CSS is how we make that happen.
What is CSS, and why does it matter for your budget?
Following a 2017 EU ruling, Google was required to open its Shopping ad platform to other Comparison Shopping Services. The ruling addressed a fundamental structural issue: Google’s own CSS had a built-in advantage over every other comparison shopping service competing in the same auction. Opening the programme created a level playing field and, crucially, a real commercial opportunity for ecommerce brands.
CSS partners like Genie Shopping Network don’t charge that margin. Which means when your Shopping ads run through a CSS rather than Google directly, your full budget goes into the auction. That’s an immediate, structural efficiency gain no creative changes, no strategy overhaul required.
For a brand spending £50,000 a month on Google Shopping, that’s potentially £10,000 a month working harder. It’s one of the few genuine free lunches in paid media, and it’s still being missed by a surprising number of brands.
Lyndsay Harrison - Senior Digital Marketing Manager
CSS isn’t just about saving money. Used properly, it’s about winning more of the auction.
There are two distinct ways to use CSS, and most brands only know about one of them.
CSS through the affiliate channel
This is where it gets more interesting, and where a lot of brands are missing a significant opportunity. A CSS can also run as an affiliate partner, bidding in the Shopping auction independently on a pure CPA basis. They pay the click costs themselves and only earn a commission when a sale is made.
The key insight here, and one that Jeremy our Head of PPC writes about regularly, is that no brand can own every Shopping placement for every relevant search term. PMax has a tROAS to optimise to. There are gaps in the auction that your own activity simply won’t fill. A CSS affiliate plugs those gaps and drives incremental sales you would otherwise have missed, at zero risk to your existing activity.
The common objection from PPC teams is that CSS affiliate activity will steal traffic or inflate CPCs. It won’t, if set up correctly. Google’s own policy is clear on this, and the guardrails are straightforward: exclude brand exact terms, set a CPA below your internal cost-of-sale target, ensure your feed includes GTINs, and keep your PPC team in the loop from day one.
Paid Search Marketing FAQ’s
PPC stands for 'pay-per-click', and is one of the most important tools in the performance marketing toolkit to drive an action. PPC advertising has grown from humble beginnings as the little search ads in the sidebar of Google, to providing marketing solutions across the whole funnel, utilising machine learning and bidding technology to optimise effectively to your business objectives. Search Engine Marketing benefits from being a channel which helps users find what they are looking for, so it’s vital that brands leverage these tools effectively to be visible throughout the entire research phase of the buying journey.
Genie Goals offers support across the full range of products in the Google Ads (formerly Adwords) and Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) platforms, including shopping, search, demand gen, video and more.
Auditing your account should be a regular part of your PPC strategy. Best practices change constantly, Google releases new features every other day, and what good looks like today, might not tomorrow. So reviewing how your account structure is laddering up to your overall objective is essential.An audit should answer a very specific challenge, and typically these are;
- A clear lack of understanding of how PPC campaigns should be set up to achieve optimum results
- A strong reluctance to work with AI and adopt smart features like Performance Max or smart bidding
- The account is in a good shape but there is a clear lack of strategic direction with a strong focus on immediate sales at a high return on ad spend (or ROAS).
- An account health check. Many brands out there are doing a great job with their PPC activity and they simply want to make sure they still have their finger on the pulse
If we drill down into the details of the audit, we would focus our attention on;
- Business objectives
- Measurement
- Account Structure
- Use of AI
- Best practices
Performance max is a relatively new campaign type which was introduced to replace the formerly known Smart Shopping campaign. However, the key difference here is that Performance Max - or Pmax - targets multiple placements like Shopping, of course, but also Search, YouTube, Gmail, Discovery, and Maps. Another key factor is that marketers do not have the full visibility over which search terms they are appearing but instead have visibility over Searched Themes - multiple search terms grouped under a similar theme. Because of this Pmax disrupted the industry.
As an agency, we initially A/B tested Pmax versus smart and standard shopping and very quickly realised that the vast majority of our merchants traffic was still going towards the Shopping inventory. Google won’t tell you that but many open Google Ads scripts have been widely shared within the industry.
Aside from inventory monitoring and brand versus non-brand segmentation, Pmax works in a similar way to smart shopping and can only work with the data that you feed the tool with. This means that we would still recommend that you mirror your product categories and reflect that in the number of Pmax campaigns you want to launch. If you are a Fashion retailer think of what’s your bread and butter category and whether it warrants its own Pmax campaign. Everything else might fall under one other campaign. In any case, ensure that you have as many asset groups as possible, again mirroring your product categories.
Of course, as with all feed-driven activity, the quality of the feed is important. Great feed optimisation allows you to segment the campaigns in the most impactful way, and maximises the amount of pertinent information you are feeding into the Google AI.
In the UK, Google holds a 93% market share (December 2024) meaning that our prime focus should always be about driving growth on the platform and maximising spend there. Having said that, Bing still holds a 4% market share which does represent an opportunity for growth. This is typically recommended when retailers have larger budgets and are already able to maximise performance on the Google platform. But launching on Bing will help expand your reach.
If we look beyond the UK, and turn to the US, Bing market share is about 7%, and considering the size of the market there, it is once again a good opportunity to acquire new customers.
In general, CPCs can be cheaper due to the environment being less competitive and the audience tend to be more mature. So some verticals might be performing better than others. In any case, our approach would be to test the platform and see whether it is able to drive the results you’re after.
A comparison shopping service is essentially a website that allows users to compare products from multiple retailers. Think of it as the world’s biggest shopping centre in the palm of your hand.
But let’s rewind and go back to 2017 when The European Commission fined Google €2.42 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. The Commission concluded that Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service.
In other words, Google had the monopoly over the search results with all shopping ads served by Google Comparison Shopping Service.
Following the EU ruling, Google opened its CSS programme giving the opportunity to other Comparison Shopping Services, or CSSs, to enter this ecosystem and place shopping ads on Google, on behalf of merchants.
And that is the important message. Although ads from all retailers will be displayed on Google Shopping Ads, products will be listed with a different Comparison Shopping Service, like the Genie Shopping Network.
It is widely known that before an ad enters the auction, and is being displayed on Google Shopping, Google takes a 20% margin. Let me say it again. Before your ad enters the auction, Google takes a 20% cut, which means that out of a full pound, roughly £80p goes into the auction itself.
So the main benefit for ecom brands is to get more out of their already squeezed marketing budget. By placing their products on Google Shopping Ad, via a CSS other than Google, they know that their full pound goes into the auction. This will automatically give you a competitive advantage over your competitors still placing their ads on the Google CSS.
Not sure if you’re getting the most from your Google Shopping budget?
We’ll look at how your Shopping activity is currently set up, whether CSS is already in play, and where the gaps are. It’s usually a quick conversation with a clear answer at the end of it.
