This is a guest post by Joe Martinez, Director of Paid Media and Community for Granular.

Back in October 2017, I spoke about ad extensions with Bing Ads. I mentioned how I like to follow site structure when setting up my ad extensions for my eCommerce clients.

Eventually, you’ll get deep enough where you’re setting up campaigns for the deepest categorical level before the products show up. We only get a limited amount of space for sitelink and price extensions. So if your site categories have dozens of products, which ones do you show?

This post will help you make that decision.

Time to Head to Google Analytics

If we’re looking for the best products to show in our extensions, Google Analytics has the answers. First head to the Conversions report. Then Ecommerce. Then click on Product Performance.

Here we’ll get a list of all product transactions within the date range you have chosen.

Now what I like to do is to view a variety of secondary dimensions with my products to see what’s already working with my PPC campaigns. Here’s one example of adding the AdWords Ad Group to my view.

This is just one of many ways you can sort your product data. But in the image above I can see which products are selling the best in each ad group.

Now back to the main question: Which products should I use for my ad extensions? Let’s find out.

Products Making You the Most Money

Profitability. Very important in the eCommerce world.

We can sort our product data in Google Analytics by the most revenue, but we don’t get cost data. It’s important to factor in the cost of each product as well as the average costs for how you’re viewing the data within Google Analytics. While your “top selling” product in Google could be showing high quantity numbers, factored-in costs might show the product isn’t great from an ROI standpoint.

Products Giving You the Best Gross Sales

This one is easy to see right away in the Product Performance report. We can easily sort by overall revenue. We can also do advanced searches. In the image below, I added a condition to only show me products who’ve sold at least 10 units within my given date range. This will weed out the rare sales of just one item. Even though the revenue might be good, one-off sales might not be the best route if your focus is on volume.

It’s common to look at pushing volume and overall revenue during popular holidays or annual sales. Look at what’s driving the short-term revenue goals and consider adding those as appropriate ad extensions.

Maybe You Want to Focus on New Products

Sometimes the answers can’t exactly be found in Google Analytics. Your campaign goals might be to push new products, and you have no data to back this up. Right off the bat, I recommend using Google Analytics to find similar products with historical proof of converting. Use those products to guide which new products you might want to test out.

Google Analytics Has the Answers

I can’t tell you what’s the best route to go. That decision will lie solely on your campaign and business goals. What I can tell you is you don’t have to choose one option. Consider testing out multiple sets of sitelink and price extensions to find out which product combination works the best. Eventually, you will find the sweet spot and drive more sales for your eCommerce accounts.

About the Author:

Joe Martinez is the Director of Paid Media and Community for Granular in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is also the current and founding President of MKEsearch. His focus on marketing psychology and user experience help his clients achieve record growths and lifetime customers. While he is hands-on in all aspects of PPC, his true passions lie in Display, Remarketing, and YouTube. He has written for PPC Hero, SEMrush, Leadpages, Optmyzr, and AdStage. He has hosted webinars for SEMrush, Unbounce, and Bing Ads. He has also spoken at SMX, HeroConf, Confluence Conference, The Summit on Content Marketing and more. In 2017, he was named a Top 25 Influential PPC Expert by PPC Hero.