Profit with ADFERENCE CSS

CSS stands for Comparison Shopping Services. In Europe, Google Shopping ads on the main search results page have been run as price comparison ads for quite a while now. Why is that? After the European Commission fined Google in 2017 for discriminating against competing price comparison sites, Google relaunched the Google Shopping ad platform as Google Shopping Europe (GSE). The restructuring of the entire platform to price comparison created a level playing field among stakeholders. Read more about the background in our Ultimate Google Shopping CSS Guide.

 

As an advertiser, you need to know that with the introduction of Google Shopping Europe (GSE), the composition of your bids for Google Shopping Ads has changed. Google now takes ~ 20% of your bids as a margin in order to be able to prove to the EU that GSE is profitable as an independent company. If you advertise your products via another CSS like the ADFERENCE CSS, this margin does not apply. Your bids are included in the auction in full. Your advantage: With a lower bid, you automatically outbid advertisers who still place their ads via GSE.

 

CSS affects every advertiser who places ads via Google Shopping. Therefore, every merchant should carefully evaluate their advantages with a Google CSS partner: Merchants are only able to display Shopping Ads via CSS and the associated, better CPCs in Google Shopping by working with a Google-certified price comparison: a so-called Google CSS Partner such as ADFERENCE. Once the advertising account has been connected to CSS, little will change for the merchant. You can continue to manage your campaigns as usual via the Google Ads interface.

 

A Google CSS Partner is a price comparison site certified by Google as a CSS that must meet certain requirements in order to run Google Shopping Ads for merchants.