Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
The Ultimate Guide To Google Shopping Ads
Whenever an elusive question confronts us, Google is usually the first place we search. The same can also be said when looking for a product, comparing prices or finally making that pay-day purchase.
As innovative as it’s always been, Google’s search engine has consistently evolved and adapted to suit the needs of those using its services.
For instance, Google Shopping is a free-to-use platform that allows potential customers to find, compare, and purchase products from online retail stores. Integrated with Google’s search engine, it displays relevant images, compares product listings, and shows stock availability.
In this ultimate guide, we’ll explore Google Shopping and why it’s a fundamental service for eCommerce retailers and independent merchants looking to build a successful online business.
What Is Google Shopping?
To an everyday online shopper, Google Shopping is just an attribute of Google’s search engine where they can freely browse products sold by established retailers, small eCommerce stores, and independent merchants. It’s an incredibly convenient way to purchase goods.
From a merchant’s standpoint, Google Shopping is powered by Google Ads and Google Merchant Center. These platforms use product data from merchants to provide important information, including pricing, product descriptions, and images to potential customers and targeted demographics, driving organic footfall and conversions.
Google Shopping is a highly intuitive platform that uses location, comparison, and integrated algorithms to provide users with a straightforward shopping experience.
How To Set Up Google Shopping?
Setting yourself up is relatively simple.
The first step for businesses setting up Google Shopping is to create a Google Merchant Center account, where store and product data can be uploaded. Product data such as titles, images, prices, and stock availability should be as detailed and accurate as possible.
The next step is to link your Google Merchant Center account to your Google Ads account to begin creating campaigns. Using Google Ads, you can optimise your campaign budget, plan bidding strategies and pinpoint your target demographic.
Getting Your Products Listed
When listing your products, it’s essential to take a methodical approach and meet Google’s standards. Here’s an easy-to-follow micro-guide to help get your product listings ready and live:
Once your Google Merchant Centre is up and running, you’ll need to prepare your product data. Think of your product data feed as a suitcase filled with important documents. It’s a file that contains all the key details about the products you plan to sell.
Google provides a specific format for product data, usually in XML or .txt format. Before submitting, double-check that your product data is relevant, detailed, and compliant with Google’s standards.
When you’re happy with your product feed, upload it to your Google Merchant Center account. You can schedule and automate uploaded files for larger inventories or manually upload your product data feed–whatever works best.
For your products to become visible to customers, you’ll need to link your Google Merchant Center account to your Google Ads account. This allows you to create, optimise, and manage shopping campaigns.
Creating & Optimising Google Shopping Ad Campaigns
The next step is to create an optimised shopping campaign that includes your budget, bidding strategy, and targeting options. Product data uploaded to your Merchant Center can be used to form product groups and set bids.
By using Google’s reporting tools, you’ll be able to track and measure your product performance.
Creating Google Shopping Campaigns
1. Create Your New Campaign:
In your Google Ads account, click on the New Campaign tab and then the “+” button to create a new campaign. Select “New campaign” and choose the goal for your campaign, such as Sales, Leads, or Website traffic. Select Shopping as the campaign type and choose your linked Merchant Center account. Select your country of sale, which determines where your ad will appear and where your products will be shipped.
2. Campaign Settings:
Give your campaign a suitable name, set up your daily budget and choose a bidding strategy. For a Google Shopping newbie, “Maximise clicks” or “Enhanced CPC” can be quite effective, whereas businesses with larger product datasets could consider using “Target ROAS” for better performance.
3. Start Making Ad Groups:
Use your product data (think categories and brands) to group products and organise your inventory to manage bids more effectively.
Optimising Google Shopping Campaigns
Monitoring your campaigns is vital for market adaptations and performance optimisation. Remember to make decisions based on KPIs and relevant analytical data to reach a wider audience and drive traffic to your eCommerce store.
1. Monitor Your Metrics:
Product performance can be analysed using specific KPIs, allowing you to optimise your campaigns with data-driven decisions. Check-in with Google Ads reports to view click-through rate, cost-per-click, conversion rate, and return on ad spend.
With the data provided, you’ll see which products perform well and which need tweaking, giving you an in-depth overview.
2. Adjust Bids:
If certain products perform well, you might consider increasing bids to reach more customers. On the other hand, if a product is performing poorly, you might choose to stop the ad or reduce the bid to reallocate your budget to more profitable products.
3. Refine Product Data:
Titles, descriptions and images should be relevant to the listed product. Implement fitting keywords into product data to improve overall quality score and relevance.
4. A/B Testing:
Experiment with bidding strategies, campaign settings, and product data to identify what works best for you. Regularly test and compare different approaches to continuously improve your campaign performance.
To Round That Up
By learning how to use and optimise Google Shopping, small businesses and independent retailers can broaden their reach, increase visibility, and target specific demographics to drive traffic and conversion. Well-built and adaptive campaigns, when monitored with precision, can provide sustained growth and profitability.
At The Good Marketer, we understand the power of Google Shopping ads. For small businesses, it presents a platform for competing with well-established eCommerce companies. Partner with our dedicated team today and begin converting browsers with killer Google Shopping campaigns.