What is Inventory Management in SA360?

SA360 comes with many advanced automation features, one of which is inventory management. This handy tool takes your Google Merchant Center feed and uses it to build items in your account using templates, from campaigns through to ad groups, ads, keywords and sitelinks. The power this provides you with is enormous, especially for larger websites that may have millions of keywords to manage. 

Inventory management uses templates and rules to manipulate your shopping feed and create entities as you see fit. You can then create many combinations with your feed using the different titles, descriptions, and product types etc in order to generate items in your account.

By using inventory management to build your campaigns, you can vastly increase the speed of your builds, potentially creating millions of campaigns (ref) in a matter of minutes. 

How Could You Benefit from Inventory Management?

Inventory management is definitely a feature worth using for large advertisers. Here’s why. 

Speed up Campaign Creation

Using inventory management will vastly speed up your capacity to create new campaigns. From creating a few templates, you can create campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads in hours, not days as it may do for a larger account build. 

However, as it is reliant on feeds for input, you need to ensure high data quality in your feeds. This may take longer to get right depending on your data quality, but get the input right and then you have the template in place for when new products are added to your site, or when they’re removed or out of stock. 

Automate Advertising on In-Stock Products Only

You can set up rules to create, pause, or remove specific campaigns, ad groups and keywords by using specific attributes in your feed. One of the most useful is the stock attribute. 

For example you may have created a rule to generate keywords from [product type 1] + [product type 2], e.g. gender (womens) + clothing type (scarves). If you combine this rule with the stock attribute, when there are no women's scarves left in stock in the feed you can use rules to pause the ad group. Whether you need to pause the ad group, keyword or campaign would depend on how you’ve structured your campaign. 

Maximize Reach with New Keywords 

By inventory management to set up templates from your feed, when new products are added to your website, it will automatically create new entities for you. 

This will ensure Search coverage on new products, without you having to worry about whether they are being advertised on. Again, providing the quality of the template is high enough. 

These new keywords won’t be generated if they would overwrite an existing keyword in the account, therefore potentially providing incremental spend, providing these new keywords can perform for your website. 

Ensure Ad Copy is Relevant and Up to Date

Finally, another important benefit is keeping ad copy relevant based on attributes in your feed. 

Sales

Do your products go on sale, and do you have a sale attribute within your feed? Then you can use this to display sale ad copy using custom formulas. 

For example you could combine static copy with custom formulas to show the saving a user could make on an on sale product, when searching for a product. In this example you would need to use a shortened version of the title for a specific product. 

“Save ([sale price] - [price]) on [title]”

Pricing From and To

Keeping ad copy updated as prices change on your site would be a very manual and time consuming task, though not if you use inventory management

Display the Lowest Price you Sell a Brand for

It may be useful to display the lowest price you sell a [brand] + [product type] for, if you have discounts on particular brands 

For example, someone searching for “kids nike trainers” could see the following ad copy. 

“Kids Nike Trainers From £20” 

Which may look like this in the interface

  [Is_adult] [brand] [product type 5] “From” min([price])

This custom formula would generate the minimum pricing on all entities that matched the formula, generating ad copy

Free Delivery

Do you have some products that you offer free delivery on, and others that you don’t? Then you could display specific ad copy for free delivery products, using a custom formula based on shipping price.