Google offers various advertising tools that are designed for certain types of businesses. If you’re marketing an e-commerce business, you can discover lots of useful tools that help you to reach your audience in the right way. Google Shopping is one of the best things that you can use to promote and sell your products online. Setting up a Shopping campaign makes it easier to improve the visibility of your products, but you need to know how to make the most of the available tools if you want to create successful campaigns. Use this guide to find out how to do more with Google Shopping.
What is Google Shopping?
Google Shopping campaigns show image ads instead of text ads, which include product images, pricing, product titles, and store name. As a result, traffic coming from Google Shopping is often more qualified than other sources because searchers can see attributes of the product such as the picture, price, and product title before clicking on the advert.
This allows advertisers to target users who are lower in the funnel, as opposed to those higher up like with traditional text ads. Once a searcher clicks on a product listing ad, they’re usually taken directly to that specific product page rather than being sent to the home page or a category page like what happens with text ads. The product landing page is also lower in your website funnel to match the buyer’s funnel.
No Keywords?
Google Shopping may seem like a regular Search campaign in Google Ads, but don’t be fooled- there are no keywords involved! Instead of using keywords, Google Shopping opts to use a data feed that is generated from your website’s product catalogue.
So Google Shopping relies on product titles, descriptions along with other product attributes. for targeting.
Product Data Feed for Google Merchant Center
So to recap, Shopping ads aren’t based on keywords in the same way that Google’s traditional text ads are. Instead, Google looks at your website to decide which ads are the most relevant to show for any search.
If you want your Shopping Campaigns to be successful, then pay close attention to your data feed. Here are a few key things to remember:
To improve the relevance of your ads, you need to have a strong Google Shopping feed so that Google can see what products you have available and accurately decide when to show them. Essentially, your feed is data in a CSV, JSON XML or spreadsheet format that contains the details of your products.
If you don’t have too many products, using Google Sheets is fine- because you can manually update changes yourself. If you have a lot more products, using a third-party app or service like One PPC’s Google Sheets add-in for Merchant Center makes it easier to manage by updating from your website as changes occur such as price, stock availability, product images and more.
What is Google’s Merchant Center exactly?
Google Merchant Center is the basis behind Shopping Campaigns. This is where your product data feed lives. A product data feed contains a list of all the products you sell, in a format required by Google, with various attributes that describe your products (similar to a spreadsheet). Some key attributes of your product data feed are:
- ID – the unique identifier of the product
- Title – the name of your product; which is also the text shown when your ad is served. The title of your product is the key aspect of targeting and feed optimisation. You may be inclined to try and work in as many keywords as possible, however, that may look spammy and reduce CTR (Click Through Rate). Instead, choose 1-2 relevant keywords for your product title and feature them prominently near the beginning of the title. This is similar to how website pages are titled, so consider optimisation when creating your product titles.
- Description – This text describes your product and will be shown when your ad is clicked. The product description is where you can add some more detail about your product. However, you should avoid going overboard and writing lengthy descriptions. Google will be looking for keywords so it’s a good place to target secondary keywords that aren’t important enough to put in the product title. However, you still need to be careful not to use too many keywords and stuff in your descriptions.
- Product type – defined by you. Product type isn’t a required deal like product category is, but it can still be a useful piece of information to provide for a product. Produce type can be especially helpful for people selling very niche products. Although the GPT features a large number of categories, it only gets so specific. If you want to provide even more information about your products, using the product type option is a must.
- Link to the item’s page on your website. This is your product landing page
- Product Image URL. The visual elements of your product listings are vital to consider properly too. It’s essential for your product images to be professional and look attractive. You should be sure to use photos that give an accurate representation of your products and also draw the eye to convince people to buy. You also have to make sure that you follow the rules set out by Google, including not using any logos, no watermarks and no additional text too.
- Availability status (in stock or out of stock, or pre-order)
- Price
- Sale price
- Google Product category – choose from Google’s predefined categories. Product categories help Google to arrange your products and present them in the right searches. When you create a Google Shopping feed, you need to include a product category. You must choose one of the categories that Google provides in their Google Product Taxonomy (GPT), which you can download. There are over 6,000 categories and subcategories, so there’s no shortage of options. Try to be as targeted as possible so that your product listings are more relevant. You can get pretty specific with the number of subcategories on offer.
How to Create a Google Shopping Campaign?
If you have squared away your product data feed and linked your Google Ads account to Merchant Center, you can start creating Shopping Campaigns. Google Ads make it pretty easy to do this – the main thing you’ll need to decide is which Merchant Center product feed and sales country you want to use. Once your campaign is set up, take some time to consider how you want to organise its Ad Groups:
- Companies with very small product data feed typically create just one ad group.
- Companies with larger product data feed sometimes split ad groups by product type, brand Google category, or other product attributes like custom labels and more.
Google Shopping Tips
Create a Retail Centric Hierarchy
Use product attributes like category, type, brand or custom labels to organize your Shopping campaigns in a way that mirrors your website or products. Subdivide products even further by grouping them based on your website structure, product types or brands. Use Ad Groups for each top level of the hierarchy—for example, product type, brand or Google product category.
For most companies, the best attribute for the hierarchical parent-child structure is product type which matches their website structure.
If you’re selling products from big-name brands like Nike, Adidas, or Puma, use the specific product manufacturer as your top-level category. But if your company’s own brand is more well-known than the individual products you sell, then you can ignore this attribute for organisational purposes.
On the other hand, if you’re selling a lifestyle with products across various categories, then using Google’s product category list is probably your best bet.
Build A Sales Funnel using campaign priority & negative keywords
By using 2-3 Shopping campaigns with priority settings and negative keywords, you can create a sales funnel that will result in the highest volume of sales and profit. To do this, start by creating one campaign, then clone it 1-2 times.
- High-priority campaign — The “top of the funnel” campaign targets searches that are less relevant and have lower bids. The opposite, bottom-of-the-funnel search terms, should be added as negative keywords to this catch-all campaign. Even though it has a low conversion rate, it can still be profitable because of its low bid costs.
- Medium priority campaign — The “Middle funnel” campaign will only show for search terms that are negative keywords within the high-priority top-of-funnel campaign. These bids are set to medium.
- Low-priority campaign —The “Bottom of the funnel” campaign will only show for search terms that are negative keywords within both the high-priority AND medium-priority campaign. This campaign typically has the highest conversion rate and profitability and therefore has the highest bids.
*Note: Automatic target ROAS bidding is a newer development, and it might not be best to split your Shopping campaign into three separate campaigns. If each of those campaigns gets fewer than the minimum 15 conversions in one month, this is especially true. (You could use a shared bid strategy for all Shopping campaigns as an exception to this rule.)
Bidding Tips for Google Shopping
- Make sure revenue tracking is installed.
- Review bidding strategies against your goals
- One approach to bidding for Google Shopping is just to start with manual CPC bidding and then move to target ROAS once the campaign has enough conversions to become eligible to use that bidding strategy.
- For manual bidding, set the bid at the unique product ID instead of by ad group or product group. This will increase return on investment by ensuring the most ad spend is on the best products.
- For manual bidding, use Google Ads Enhanced CPC Let’s Google bid up or down by 30% on individual SKU/product IDs using historical performance data.
- Make sure that the best-selling products have the highest bids and are spending the largest percentage of the budget.
- Make sure that the best-selling products are getting the maximum budget.
- Test automatic machine learning bidding, namely Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) to get the best mix of volume and profit.
- Remember there’s no bidding on keywords when it comes to setting up your shopping campaigns. Instead, you place your bids on the products that you’re selling. You can bid on products in ad groups or product groups and also place bids on individual products so you have plenty of control over what you’re selling.
- While you have the option to put your bids in for large groups of products, it might not always be the best idea. Why? Because different products come with various profit margins or popularity levels. So, a more strategic move would be to bid on them separately.
- This way, you can create smaller groups for your product bidding instead of lumping everything together under one huge umbrella. You can separate your products into different groups using various methods, whether it’s by condition, brand or purpose. You can also use custom labels to focus on individual items. Any products that don’t fit into the other categories you create will go under “Everything Else.”
- If you’re not sure where to start, use the navigation on your website to determine the best way to organise everything. You already have categories and filters that help to organise your products in a useful way.
- If you have too many products to keep track of and bid on them all individually, then it’s wiser to segment them based on factors like profit margins or categories. This way, your ads will still be relevant, but it’ll be much easier for you to manage your bidding..
Targeting Tips
- Make sure the product titles contain the main keywords – as well as other relevant attributes (space permitting).
- Put the important keywords on the left-hand side of the product title (or/and meta title).
- Google Shopping does not have match types, which is the equivalent of broad match keywords. So Use the actual search terms report to refine your targeting with negative keywords, or adjustments to your data feed to make it more keyword rich
- Keep an eye on device bid modifications. Check to see if they have a similar CPA or ROAS, and readjust as necessary.
- Reporting & Optimisation
- The Dimensions Report allows you to see how well each SKU/Product ID, Category, Label and more are doing so that you can make necessary adjustments.
- Compare performance to search campaigns by product category, brand and other relevant product attributes for your business.
- Adverts
- Use clear images on your website/data feed.
- Use quality larger images with high resolution
- Use White Backgrounds
- You don’t have to write text ads for shopping campaigns because they’re created automatically from the data in your feed.
Remarketing
Google Ads Remarketing is a great way to show past site visitors the products they were most engaged with. Display Remarketing relies on your shopping feed to set up Dynamic Remarketing, so it’s easy and efficient.
Use Search Remarketing to bid higher on past website users, or customers. Use RLSA for adjusting bids based on the conversion rate of past visitor audiences. Past website users are lower in the funnel and therefore more qualified and profitable.
Run Text Ads alongside Google Shopping
By utilising both text ads and Shopping ads in your search campaigns, you can increase website traffic significantly. Both types of ads can appear on the same search results page, with text ads often taking up more space than product listing ads. Text ads have the added advantage of being able to display promotional text before a consumer clicks on the ad.
Merchant Store Requirements
- Creating a Google Store is similar in many ways to an Amazon or eBay store. Each marketplace has its own terms and conditions that sellers must adhere to when setting up and maintaining a Google Merchant Store. The emphasis is building transparency and trust to help the buyer be aware of your policies.
- The mandatory requirements for a new store include:
- Business display name: Your company name
- Website URL: The website URL used must meet the requirements of either HTTP:// or https://We recommend using HTTPS for all pages on an e-commerce website.
- Business address: The location where your business is registered.
- Payments Settings: business and tax information.
- Customer service contacts The contact email, URL, and number from your website.
- Delivery: Settings, expected delivery time, rates- service area(county)- Currency, Products can be grouped into different delivery terms.,
- Tax Settings – More focus on the US, and can be left as none for most other countries.
- Google Webmaster: Set up a Google Webmaster account to verify and prove you own the website. Verify and claim your website URL.
- Data feed to take products from your website. This is the most popular way is to use an XML JSON URL which contains your products in text format.
- Link Google Ads: Your Google Ads account should be linked to your Merchant store in order to make the products available within the AdWords interface.
- Tax Settings – US Only. Can select tax by state.
- Optional recommendations- (recommended good practice)
- 1) Website URL Link:
A link to the return & refund policy must be visible in the footer of the page (bottom) of key pages. - 2) Cancellation Period / Timeframe
You will need to explain what the cancellation period is. (15 days, 30 days, unlimited, no offered) - 3) Shipping & Packing Costs
What are your shipping & packing charges?
Which couriers do you use? Do you deliver worldwide? If so what are the costs associated? - 4) Returning Goods return delivery Policy
Cover if the consumer will need to pay for sending goods back to you or if it’s free/return value. Do they need to pay for the initial charge? Do they get a refund for the delivery charge? - 5) Incorrect Goods/ Damaged / Defective
Damaged, defective or incorrect goods can always happen, explain what your policy is. How pays for collection? - 6) Products Returned Exceeding the Cancellation Period
Mention if consumers can return products after the cancellation period.
Explain what the procedure is. Phone, Email, Form, etc… - 7) Terms and Conditions URL Link
From within the Returns Policy, a link to the terms and conditions is recommended - 8) Returns Policy
If a customer no longer wants the goods, do you allow refunds/returns?
If you do accept returns or refunds explain what the procedure is. Phone, Email, Form, etc…
You can refuse refunds on non-damaged goods, however, you do need to clearly state this in the policy.
Explain what the procedure is to receive a refund or to return goods. Phone, Email, Form etc. - Delivery Setup & Policies
- Delivery Settings– service area(county)- Currency
Delivery Time- days- international global or different (range Estimate)
The expected delivery time. This may vary based on the delivery parameters and product types.
Delivery Rates- table (different products can have different rates, fixed rate, percentages, carrier. Here You can create multiple delivery rate tables in this delivery service. You can also assign shipping_label attributes to the delivery rates depending on what kind of product you’re delivering (e.g. oversized, perishable, fragile) and then set up different delivery costs for those groups.
Using your Shopping Feed for other advertising Platforms
Import Google Ads Shopping Campaigns into Microsoft Bing Ads and set up Bing Merchant Center using the same XML feed used by Google Merchant Center. Setup Dynamic Facebook Ads using the same feed as Google Ads.
Summary
Google Shopping is a great tool for e-commerce businesses to use. If you want to make your products more visible, you need to make sure that you know how to get the most out of the platform.
The difficulty of setting up Google Shopping can vary from retailer to retailer. Sometimes certain recommendations included above are not critical but still make improvements, other times these recommendations can make vast improvements. One PPC is an expert Google Ads Partner that can help you get the most out of Google Shopping
