There’s something comforting and enjoyable about creating a routine where people know you, whether that’s a favorite coffee shop or place to walk or a local beer store where they call your dog by name.
Many businesses can create this personalized shopping experience to convert more browsers into buyers. But, it can be tough to do that online where you can’t look into a customer’s eyes or easily ask what they need as they browse digital shelves. Still, we regularly hear about the need for eCommerce personalization.
To tackle that opportunity, let’s define personalization, the best way to start implementing it, and methods to optimize your efforts.
Defining “personalization” in eCommerce
Personalization and customization can feel like the same thing, but some important distinctions exist. Breaking these out makes it easier to understand personalization and how it can apply in eCommerce operations.
For your website and sales efforts, personalization uses data and customer insights to craft a specific shopping experience for every customer. These efforts may include showing relevant products, serving recommendations, and adjusting content based on the customer’s past behavior.
Companies may also try personalizing service levels or selecting specific pop-ups and overlays based on customer status.
Customization, on the other hand, generally refers to customer-driven choices. These range from the obvious (selection or sorting by size, color, price, etc.) to detailed efforts specific to the individual (a customer chooses not to see certain types of products). When you think of customization as something helmed by the customer, you’ll start identifying ways to use their selections to craft personalized experiences.
How personalization creates a better shopping experience
To create a personalized shopping experience, eCommerce businesses need to invest in audience research. By understanding your customers and what they want, you can create an individualized experience that will convert browsers into buyers.
You’ll want to create as complete a picture of the shopper as possible. Ask core experience questions, including:
What are their needs that you can and can’t address?
What are their wants or things that tip them over the edge to make a purchase?
What motivates them to make this purchase at this time?
Why should they choose you to meet their specific needs and wants?
Once you understand your customers well, you can start creating a shopping experience tailored to them. Take learning about their immediate needs and wants. I
t’s easier to suggest the right products when you know what they’ve recently viewed or what ad they clicked on to get to your site. You’re building based on their tastes and refining suggestions based on what gets that second purchase.
Understanding why someone values your brand can also help you create personalized discounts or special deals that gain shoppers. If you’re known for customer service, you might leverage this for an ad tagline: “World-class customer service meets free shipping on every order over $20.”
It’s more than just a deal; it’s one couched in the language you know they appreciate. Tying it back to shipping and order support also reinforces your brand as one that cares about the customer.
Finally, it is important to ensure the customer feels valued and appreciated. Thank them for their business and promptly take care of any issues they may have. Creating a positive relationship with your customers ensures they keep returning for more.
3 steps to take to get started with personalization
To get started with personalization, businesses need to take three steps: collecting data, analyzing data, and implementing personalization.
1. Collect data
The first step is to collect data about your customers. This could include information such as their demographics, location, what devices they use, what pages they visit on your site, and what products they are interested in. There are a number of ways businesses can collect this data, such as through website cookies, surveys, and customer loyalty programs.
2. Analyze data
Once you have collected data about your customers, it is important to analyze it to understand their needs and preferences. This will help you determine how to best personalize their shopping experience. Several tools are available to help with this analysis, such as analytics software and customer segmentation tools.
3. Implement personalization
The final step is to implement personalization into your eCommerce store. This could include creating a personalized homepage, recommending similar products, using data to segment customers into different groups, or offering discounts. By personalizing the shopping experience, businesses can increase conversion rates and average order value.
The top 5 ways to personalize the shopping experience
Personalization can be an incredibly complex experience or a simpler operation based on your tech stack and the amount of data you use. To get started, there are some core efforts to implement that can start with minimal, current-session data and then move to longer-term tracking and utilization.
1. Use data to recommend products
One of the most effective ways to personalize the shopping experience is to use data to recommend products. This could include data from past purchases, browsing history, and social media activity.
By understanding what customers have bought in the past, businesses can make recommendations for similar or complementary products. This helps customers find what they’re looking for more easily and allows businesses to upsell and cross-sell effectively.
2. Create a personalized homepage
Another way to personalize the shopping experience is to create a personalized homepage. This could include features such as recommended products, recently viewed items, and even a custom welcome message.
By creating a personalized homepage, businesses can make sure that each customer feels valued and that they can easily find what they’re looking for — reinforcing your brand identity as helpful and in-the-know.
Consider tying homepages to traffic and referral sources so that someone looking at your Instagram account hits a page filled with both products and the videos you create. It’s an easy way to start the fruitful process of understanding customer behavior across channels.
3. Use data to create targeted marketing campaigns
Another effective way to personalize the shopping experience is to use data to create targeted marketing campaigns. This involves using customer data to segment customers into different groups and then creating marketing messages that are tailored to each group. This could include offering discounts or special promotions to specific groups of customers.
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Don’t neglect small lifts here. Greet customers directly by name. Adjust messages based on user region. Adapt to local events and other broader experiences that keep your content from feeling too general, even if it isn’t hyper-personalized.
4. Use data to segment your email list
You can also personalize the shopping experience by segmenting your email list. This involves grouping customers together based on their interests, demographics, or purchase history. Most email marketing tools track detailed customer information you can leverage.
For example, monitoring when customers last visited allows you to email people about how “it’s been a while”.
By segmenting your email list, you can send more targeted and relevant messages to each group of customers. This can lead to higher open and click-through rates, as well as increased sales and revenue.
5. Personalized product pages by creating variants
The final way to personalize the shopping experience is to use data to create a personalized product page. Or, at least create a page that feels catered to the individual based on broader context and information.
When you can get very detailed, this involves using customer data such as purchase history and browsing behavior to recommend similar or complementary products. You’ll need a dynamic site that can adapt to their history and habits in real-time.
If you don’t have a robust site, consider building blocks for each section of your landing pages or product pages for each SKU. Then, you can create groupings that feel customized because the pre-existing blocks you use match what people see in broader marketing campaigns. As you get more sophisticated, these blocks can then be what you dynamically insert into different elements as the customer shops around your site.
By creating a personalized product page, businesses can enhance conversion rates and have a better chance for higher order values because of the relevance of up-sell and cross-sell promotions.
The benefits of personalization for businesses
There are many benefits of personalization for businesses. By creating a personalized shopping experience, businesses can increase conversion rates, average order value, and customer loyalty.
Conversion rates improve because customers are more likely to buy from a store that recognizes them and offers products they are interested in. If you’re marketing to the same people, small efforts like using someone’s first name in an email can increase conversion rates.
Companies that personalize offers also tend to see average order values increase in multiple ways. These incentives help push people to make more impulse purchases and reach higher overall orders — a benefit you can compound when making traditional online offers like free shipping on orders of a certain value.
Finally, studies also show that personalization can improve customer loyalty. Studies have found that more than half of people are open to receiving personalized experiences, and 72% who get these end up spending more or buying more often. This is because customers feel appreciated and valued when they are recognized and offered products they look at or follow.
Overall, personalization is a powerful tool that can help businesses improve conversion rates, average order value, and customer loyalty. When used correctly, it can be a key driver of success for eCommerce businesses.
Create an experience you’d enjoy
When it comes to personalizing the shopping experience, businesses must take a few steps to ensure they are doing it correctly.
First and foremost, they need to collect data about their customers so they can understand their needs and preferences. Once they have this data, they need to analyze it to determine how best to personalize the shopping experience for each customer.
Then, they need to implement personalization into their eCommerce store, which could include creating a personalized homepage, recommending similar products, using data to segment customers into different groups, or offering discounts.
The final piece, however, is reviewing the effort and ensuring that it adds value to the shopping experience. Ask if it is something you’d enjoy or if the elements and personalization get in the way. You don’t want to be overly burdensome or overly creepy. The aim is to show people what they want to see without them feeling like you’re crunching a lot of data behind the scenes.
Other brands can copy your style, tone and strategy — but they can’t copy your data.
Your data is your competitive advantage in an environment where enterprises are working to grab market share by designing can’t-miss, always-on customer experiences. Your marketing tech stack enables those experiences.
Join ActionIQ and Snowplow to learn the value of composing your stack – decoupling the data collection and activation layers to drive more intelligent targeting.
Cynthia Ramsaran is director of custom content at Third Door Media, publishers of Search Engine Land and MarTech. A multi-channel storyteller with over two decades of editorial/content marketing experience, Cynthia’s expertise spans the marketing, technology, finance, manufacturing and gaming industries. She was a writer/producer for CNBC.com and produced thought leadership for KPMG. Cynthia hails from Queens, NY and earned her Bachelor’s and MBA from St. John’s University.
In a groundbreaking alliance, Amazon and Hyundai have joined forces to reshape the automotive landscape, promising a revolutionary shift in how we buy, drive, and experience cars.
Imagine browsing for your dream car on Amazon, with the option to seamlessly purchase, pick up, or have it delivered—all within the familiar confines of the world’s largest online marketplace. Buckle up as we explore the potential impact of this monumental partnership and the transformation it heralds for the future of auto retail.
Driving Change Through Amazon’s Auto Revolution
Consider “Josh”, a tech-savvy professional with an affinity for efficiency. Faced with the tedious process of purchasing a new car, he stumbled upon Amazon’s automotive section. Intrigued by the prospect of a one-stop shopping experience, Josh decided to explore the Amazon-Hyundai collaboration.
The result?
A hassle-free online car purchase, personalized to his preferences, and delivered to his doorstep. Josh’s story is just a glimpse into the real-world impact of this game-changing partnership.
Bridging the Gap Between Convenience and Complexity
Traditional car buying is often marred by complexities, from navigating dealership lots to negotiating prices. The disconnect between the convenience consumers seek and the cumbersome process they endure has long been a pain point in the automotive industry. The need for a streamlined, customer-centric solution has never been more pressing.
Ecommerce Partnership Reshaping Auto Retail Dynamics
Enter Amazon and Hyundai’s new strategic partnership coming in 2024—an innovative solution poised to redefine the car-buying experience. The trio of key developments—Amazon becoming a virtual showroom, Hyundai embracing AWS for a digital makeover, and the integration of Alexa into next-gen vehicles—addresses the pain points with a holistic approach.
In 2024, auto dealers for the first time will be able to sell vehicles in Amazon’s U.S. store, and Hyundai will be the first brand available for customers to purchase.
This collaboration promises not just a transaction but a transformation in the way customers interact with, purchase, and engage with their vehicles.
Pedal to the Metal
Seamless Online Purchase:
Complete the entire transaction within the trusted Amazon platform.
Utilize familiar payment and financing options.
Opt for convenient pick-up or doorstep delivery.
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Alexa Integration in Next-Gen Vehicles:
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Access music, podcasts, reminders, and smart home controls effortlessly.
Stay connected with up-to-date traffic and weather information.
Driving into the Future
The Amazon-Hyundai collaboration is not just a partnership; it’s a revolution in motion. As we witness the fusion of e-commerce giant Amazon with automotive prowess of Hyundai, the potential impact on customer behavior is staggering.
The age-old challenges of car buying are met with a forward-thinking, customer-centric solution, paving the way for a new era in auto retail. From the comfort of your home to the driver’s seat, this partnership is set to redefine every step of the journey, promising a future where buying a car is as easy as ordering a package online.
Embrace the change, and witness the evolution of auto retail unfold before your eyes.
It’s no wonder that responsive search ads have steadily grown in popularity in recent years. Through Google’s machine learning capabilities, RSAs provide a powerful way to automate the testing of multiple headlines and descriptions to ensure a closer match to user intent. The benefits are clear: RSAs mean broader reach, better engagement, and improved performance metrics.
However, all these benefits come at a significant (but reasonable) cost – they can be extremely difficult to manage, especially when it comes to updating ad copy to promote limited time offers.
I know this firsthand – I work with several ecommerce clients with promotions that constantly change. Not too long ago, I found myself going through the consistently tedious process of updating a client’s RSA headlines and copy. As I was making the changes, I thought to myself: “There must be a better way to update this ad copy. I shouldn’t have to use find and replace so many times while pausing and enabling my ad campaigns.”
After expressing this to my colleague, Jordan Stambaugh, the two of us agreed there must be a better way. But we’d have to make it happen. A few weeks later, we put that idea into action and created a more efficient process for updating RSA ad copy on a scheduled basis. If you want to try this process for yourself, just keep reading.
Responsive Search Ad Customizers 101: Basic Options & Execution
Before diving into the process of scheduling automatic updates for your RSA customizers, it’s essential to understand some key Responsive Search Ad fundamentals.
First, you can customize three main options within RSAs: the Attribute Name, the Data Type, and the Account Value. Each of these plays a vital role in personalizing your ads:
Attribute Name: This is essentially the identifier for the customizer. It is how you’ll reference the specific piece of information you’re customizing within the ad. For instance, if you’re running a promotion, you might name an attribute “Promotion.”
Data Type: This indicates the kind of data the attribute represents and it determines how the information can be formatted and used within the ad. Common data types include Text (for plain, non-numeric text), Percent (to represent percentage discounts), Price (to denote monetary values), and Number (for any numerical value).
Account Value: This is the default value for the attribute that you set at the account level. It acts as a fallback if more specific values aren’t provided at the campaign or ad group level.
For example, if you wanted to promote a 10% off discount using RSAs, you’d use the “Discount” attribute, a data type of “Percent,” and an account value of “10% off.” Then, when someone is searching for products, Google would test automatically inserting a copy regarding a 10% off promotion into your ad.
Once you’ve set up the right customization options, you can start to format your RSAs with customizers.
Here’s how:
Start by typing in {
Click on Ad Customizer then select your attribute
Google will populate your attributes that are already uploaded
For a simple offer, use the “Default text” attribute as a catch-all. This will ensure your ads run smoothly if Google can’t pull the right messaging from your RSA feed
How to Schedule Your Ad Customizers with a Feed
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s cover how to schedule your ad customizers.
Just follow this three step process:
1. Create the feed
Start by creating two sheets: The Parent sheet, and the Child sheet. The “Parent” sheet will act as the primary data source, while the child sheet will pull data from the parent sheet.
We’ll start by building the parent sheet. After opening the sheet, start by renaming the active tab to “Promotions.” Don’t skip this step, it’s crucial for referencing this range in formulas later on.
In your “Promotions” tab, head to the top row and label columns A, B, and C with the headers of your ad customizer attributes. For example, you might have “BrandSaleHeadline” as your attribute in column A, “text” as the Data Type in column B, and “Shop the Collection” as the Account Value in column C.
Once your headers are in place, move to cell C2. Here, you’ll input the expression =lookup(today(),F:G,E:E). This formula will play a key role in dynamically updating your RSA customizer based on the current date.
Next, go to columns E, F, and G, which will be used to manage your scheduling. In these columns, you’ll list out the different values your chosen attribute might take, alongside their corresponding start and end dates. For example, under the “BrandSaleHeadline” attribute, you might schedule various promotional headlines to appear during different sale periods throughout the year.
Here’s how your sheet might look:
Now look back at the first 3 columns on your sheet. They should look like this:
Now create a second sheet. We’ll call this sheet the Child sheet. It’s going to automatically pull in data from the parent sheet you just created, and will be the one you link to Google Ads later on.
Columns A, B and C will be almost identical to the child sheet, but we will be using a special formula later so we can automatically populate this. So, start by labeling Row 1 Column A “Attribute,” then the next column as “Data type,” then column C as “Account value.”
Then go to C2 and use this expression to populate the right account value from the parent document: =importrange(“[PARENT DOCUMENT URL HERE]”,”Promotions!C2″)
Your sheet should now look like this:
We recommend adding a date range with default text for any days you’re not running a promotion. In the example above, we have “Shop Our Collection” appearing as default text.
2. Input attributes
Once you have your feed created, the next step involves inputting your attributes into the Google Ads platform. This can be done either manually or through a bulk upload.
For the manual approach, navigate to “Tools & Settings” in your Google Ads interface, then go to ‘Setup’ followed by “Business Data.” Here, you’ll find an option for “Ad Customizer Attributes.” Click the plus sign to add your attributes. It’s crucial to use the same attribute names that you’ve established in your Parent Google Sheet template to ensure consistency and proper data synchronization.
Alternatively, if you prefer the bulk upload method, again head to “Tools & Settings.” This time, select “Bulk Actions” and then “Uploads.” For this process, you only need to upload columns A to C from your template.
Be aware that it might take some time for your uploaded attributes to be reflected in the business data section of Google Ads.
3. Set up an automatic schedule
At this point, you’ve almost finished scheduling your ad customizers. Navigate to Tools & Settings, then Bulk Actions, then Uploads, then click the Schedules tab at the top. Select your Child Google Sheet as the data source, and share your Google Sheet with the appropriate email.
And there you have it – Google will automatically pull in the data you populated in the sheets into your RSAs.
Common Challenges When Scheduling RSA Ad Customizers
When we test these sheets with our clients in the wild, we’ve uncovered five common challenges. Be on the lookout for these issues – solving them before they happen can save you a lot of trouble down the line.
Not scheduling your upload when the site changes
The first and most significant hurdle is the mismatch between the scheduled data upload and website content updates. For instance, if the Google Sheet is set to upload at 11 am, but the website changes occur at 3 pm, there’s going to be a discrepancy where the wrong message could be displayed for several hours, or new messaging could appear prematurely. Conversely, if the website updates happen before the scheduled sheet upload, outdated promotions might linger until the new data is imported. Synchronizing these schedules is crucial; it’s best to align them so updates occur simultaneously.
Skipping QA during a message change
Another pitfall is neglecting quality assurance (QA) during message updates. It’s vital to regularly check the business data section to verify that the correct values are in place post-update.
Issues with the IMPORTRANGE function
Then there’s the technical aspect of setting up the IMPORTRANGE function correctly in the Google Sheets template. The ‘child’ template must reliably pull data from the ‘parent’ sheet. If this function isn’t configured correctly, data won’t be imported as needed.
Not sharing access of the Google template for automatic uploads
Pay attention to your access permissions for the Google Sheets template. Google will prompt you with the email address that needs permission to access the ‘child’ sheet for automatic uploads. Overlooking the sharing of your sheet with this address will prevent the system from working.
Having date range gaps in your parent sheet
Lastly, a common oversight is leaving date range gaps in the ‘parent’ sheet. Every single date must be accounted for without overlaps. A practical tip is to have an ‘evergreen’ backup message ready, scheduled to run continuously, ideally through the end of the year, to cover any potential gaps.
Conclusion
Leveraging Google Sheets in conjunction with Google Ads to schedule RSA ad customizers is a game-changer for managing dynamic promotional content. This process not only streamlines your workflows but also ensures that your ads remain relevant and up-to-date, reflecting current promotions without the need for constant manual intervention.
By adopting this method, you’ll save significant time and effort, allowing you to focus more on strategy and less on the minutiae of ad copy updates. Give it a try and experience a more efficient way to manage your RSAs, keeping your campaigns fresh and engaging with minimal hassle.
![How to Schedule Ad Customizers for Google RSAs [2024]](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/How-to-Schedule-Ad-Customizers-for-Google-RSAs-2024.jpg "How to Schedule Ad Customizers for Google RSAs [2024]")
