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FAQs
About the Google CSS Program
In 2017, Google was fined 2.4 billion EUR by the European Commission for monopolistic behavior. Monopolistic behavior precisely because product advertisements, the so-called Google Shopping Ads are considered to be price comparison listings since the ads contain not only a product image and the name of the product but also its price and the e-shop name. The decision of the European Commission forced Google to give price comparison sites within the EU a chance and the possibility to offer a lower cost per click in Google Shopping/P. Max Ads to their customers. This way, selected price comparators in the EU have the possibility, under certain conditions, to become CSS Partners (Comparison Shopping Service).
Yes exactly. Only selected price comparators that have met Google’s extensive conditions can become providers of advertising space in Google Shopping Ads in the Google Search network and thus provide a significant discount of up to 20% from the normal price per click.
CSS Partners can provide the CSS program currently in 21 countries in the European Economic Area. You can use these services in Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Netherlands, Ireland, Hungary, Germany, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Austria, Romania, Slovakia, United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Italy.
In addition to the fact that CSS Partner must offer you space to display your products on their price comparison site, you can get a discount of up to 20% from the regular cost per click on Google Shopping or P. Max Ads.
Example:
If you are paying 1.00€ for a click now, thanks to CSS Partner you can in certain cases have a price of only around 0.80€ per click. This means that you can either reduce your overall budget or what is more recommended, keep it as you have and you will have more clicks and get more traffic to your e-shop.
The fee for advertising remains with Google. After the trial version of our CSS, you can decide if you want to continue using it or not. Only if you decide that you want to keep our CSS you will pay directly for the service and this is independent of your Google Ads payments.
Absolutely nothing when it comes to Google Ads and Merchant account settings. With any CSS, the main change is the name of the Shopping advertisement CSS provider. By default, your ads are shown “From Google” and after you switch to our CSS your ads will be shown “From Shopping in EU”.
Such a restriction should not exist with any CSS Partner. However, you should always check whether this is really the case, as some CSS Partners expressly limit clients with daily spending (pre-advertised credit). If you use our CSS service (Shopping in EU), you have no limits 🙂
There are over 100 CSS Partners in the EU. You can mostly meet a CSS reseller, which means that the given marketing agency offers the CSS program through someone else to ensure its benefits. The fee for the CSS may vary. Some CSS providers have a fixed fee like us, some a percentage of the turnover, and there are also those that combine these.
Our CSS grew up on the wings of the largest Google Channel Partner in CEE BlueWinston.com and has thousands of clients throughout the EU and wider. But the most important fact is that you can get the CSS service from Shopping in EU absolutely free!
In Shopping in EU, you only pay for the CSS and that’s it. We will list your e-shop on our price comparison site and all the support you require is of course also free.
First of all, we offer the possibility to get a discount on CPC for Shopping/Performance max advertising up to 20%! Last but not least, as a bonus to this service, we offer the possibility to list your products on our product price comparison site at www.shoppingin.eu. We can offer both of these services to any advertiser completely free of charge.
Definitely not. At Winston Bros., we already have access to more than 6000 Google Ads accounts worldwide with a total spend of more than 18 million EUR/month. It is also defined in our terms and conditions that we can’t in any way influence the operation of your advertising, interfere with its settings, and under no circumstances share your internal statistics or spending with third parties.
You can activate our CSS within one day. During that day, you can fill out the form, our specialists will send you an activation protocol to your Merchant Center, which will appear within one hour or less. As soon as you receive and accept it, the CSS will be activated. We will also list your e-shop on our price comparison on that same day and this way you can use the CSS program and draw its benefits from the first day.
It doesn’t happen to us often, but if you would like to switch back to Google CSS or another CSS partner, just let us know and we can arrange the transition very quickly.
The learning phase is the period when the Google algorithm learns how your campaigns are run, how much you spend, and how it could save you on the price per click.
The learning phase will manifest itself in campaigns that have more fundamental changes. One of them is of course the transition to a new CSS partner. Usually, the learning phase starts the day after switching to another CSS service and lasts from 1 to 10 days.
The learning phase occurs when you use a smart bidding strategy, such as Maximize conversion value or target ROAS. The duration can be very short, but it depends on a lot of factors.