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COVID-19 has evolved into a global event impacting the economy of every country as well as public health. It has had an impact on various sectors, especially businesses, and has caused a considerable drop in advertising spending. For instance, In Europe, ad spends have fallen around 9%, with France and Germany falling by 12% and 7% respectively. But this should not stop businesses from expanding since Google is here to save the day!
People use Google to get the latest updates, news, and needs and this change in consumer behaviors can also be used to change the world of advertising. Businesses are now turning to Google Shopping ads for getting through this tough time and expanding their businesses. Moreover, Google has made it free for merchants to sell their products online on Google in many countries! Learn how to get more online sales using Google Shopping Ads and save your business from the impacts of the pandemic!
What are Google Shopping ads?
These are product based ads that are shown during searches across Google Shopping and Google. It allows retailers to advertise their products in the most appealing way to the searchers.
If a user looks for a product you sell online, Google will show relevant Shopping ads displaying yours and your competitors’ products. When they select your ad, they will be taken straight to your product page.
Why do Google Shopping Ads be used?
If you are still unsure of whether you should use Google Ads, then here are a few benefits that may persuade you:
1. Potential Customer Reach gets higher
When a potential shopper searches for a product you sell, many of your ads are shown by Google to the user. When this happens in one search, your customer reach automatically becomes high and your ad presence will become much broader.
2. High ROAS
When compared to plain search ads, shopping ads show much better performance and is one of the best forms of Google Marketing. When you optimize Google shopping campaigns, your CPCs become lower, and pairing it up with a wider conversion and reach will lead to better ROAS (return on ad spend).
3. Attract Highly-Targeted Traffic
The main purpose of this is to target searchers who are usually looking for products your company sells. Potential customers would click your ads if they are planning on certainly purchasing the product. By including ads that are rich in information and contain high-quality product images, you can help the shopper make a better decision.
4. Optimization and management is easier
People usually find it difficult to come up with the correct keywords for their ads, but fortunately, Google shopping ads do not only depend on the keywords! In order to figure out which ads to show, shopping ads use your product feed data. They match product ads to customers using product attributes, making it easier to optimize and manage ads.
5. Better Reporting tools and Data
Google lets you know the performance of each product with the help of reporting tools and competitive data. The amount of user clicks on each product can be viewed and it also allows you to share your data in order to look for good expansion opportunities. This allows you to benchmark data and evaluates the competitive environment.
Google Shopping- How does it work?
Google shopping ads work very differently when compared to regular search ads. First, the product feed containing all the data about the product is processed by Google’s algorithm, and this data is later used to match the search queries with relevant products.
This way, people will see product ads that are relevant to their searches, and these will contain prices, images, and other information. When someone likes the ad, they click on it and Google will take them to the product’s website. In return, Google charges the retailer for the clicks.
How do you make a Google Shopping campaign that is profitable?
All you need to know are these few tips that will help you make a campaign that is profitable:
1. Check if Product Photos and Listings stand out
It is important to include feeds and create a strong Google shopping campaign. Google uses this to take the product feed data and Google has a clear set of instructions that you must follow while taking the photos.
The photos you upload must not contain watermarks, borders, and logos, and must contain only one product picture in one photo. The backgrounds should not be patterned, dark, or multicolored and the picture of the product should take around 80% of the total space. Also, ensure the photo is clear and bright and the background must be a solid white, grey, or light.
2. Make sure your company complies all Google shopping ads policies and requirements
The store must follow the regulations provided by Google and you should make sure these requirements are met. You can go through the regulations and rules that are present in the Policies option before your campaign goes live.
3. Create and Set up Your own Merchant Centre Account
The next step is to create a Merchant Centre account. This helps in setting up feeds that are well-optimized. Campaign successes depend on this and you can manage all this online.
4. Create your Product Feeds
Make sure the feeds you give for products are optimized because Google may reject them. You may not be using all the parameters that are required in the Google Shopping Feeds. You can skip the products that lack certain parameters using the product feed. By optimizing the feed, you can get the result you are looking for.
If you are planning on optimizing the feed yourself, then you can go through the Google Shopping guide since there is a section that will help you do this.
5. Link Merchant Centre Account to Google Ads
In order to access the Shopping campaign’s product feeds, you will need to link the Merchant Centre and the Google Ads account. This can be done by selecting the Merchant Toolbox and going to the “Linked Account”. Link the Google ads account from the “Google Ads” tab.
6. Google Shopping Campaign Settings
1. Country of Sale
The first step is to choose the countries for the products that are going to be included in the campaign. The products will be sold and shipped to the countries you list. However, note that once you create the Shopping campaign, you cannot edit the country in the “country of sale” later.
2. Inventory Filter
Another key element of a successful campaign is Segmentation. If you are looking to get the most sales for a set budget then simply creating the campaign including all products would not be enough. Searches are generally matched with relevant products using the Merchant Centre Feed and you can use the inventory filter to work around this.
With this, you can adjust and filter the number of products that are being used in the Shopping campaigns. This way, Google will know which of your products should be matched with certain queries. Moreover, you can always edit the inventory filter to see what works best.
3. Bidding
The bidding type you wish to use at a campaign level can also be selected. You could either go for the automatic Smart bidding strategy that includes “target CPA”, “maximize clicks”, and many more or the manual CPC bidding strategy that could be used to set your own maximum CPC.
4. Daily Budget
Google allows you to set a price you are willing to spend a day on each campaign. This way, once the daily budget limit is crossed, it will not serve the ads. You can start small and later optimize the campaign.
5. Campaign Priority
An important part of creating a Shopping campaign is the campaign priority. This will help you know which campaign needs the most and least spending. It makes sure that there is no overlap and you can select accordingly. The three priority options in the campaign include high, medium, and low.
6. Networks and Devices
The Shopping campaign will show Google’s search network, Google Discovery, search partners, Google discover, and YouTube on the Display network. With “any networks” box, you can limit the network placements and the same can be applied for devices as well.
7. Locations & Local Inventory Ads
The last part of the Shopping preferences includes the location and the local inventory ads. Location is usually used to set a limit on where the ads should be shown while Local inventory ads show offline ads and you can choose whether you want the campaign to show products that are being sold in local stores.
7. Success! Your shopping ads on Google are live now!
You have now successfully set up your Google Shopping Ads and can officially start selling your products online!
Top Google Shopping Ads Strategies You Could Use to Get More Sales
The following strategies can increase your sales drastically:
1. Optimize The Titles of the Products
Optimizing the product titles should be the first thing you must do since it is the best place to get the biggest optimization result. Experiments conducted by the Crealytics founder Andreas Reiffen showed that there was little or no shift in performance after different optimizations to the product feed, except changes to the product titles!
When optimizing the product titles, the volume of traffic received and the CTR was 10 times more than usual!
This shows that it is important to spend a decent amount of effort and time ensuring that the titles of the products are as relevant as possible to the search queries. Also, pay attention to the search terms driving the most revenue and the order of the words of the titles.
2. Product Feed Descriptions and Categories Can Be Optimised
The same experiment conducted by Andreas showed there was not much difference in performance when using irrelevant descriptions. But this does not mean that you should not spend time on the product feed descriptions and categories. But if you do not have a lot of time to manage the campaigns then you should concentrate on the titles and other strategies.
3. Optimize the Images of Products
Product images play a very important role in helping you stand out from your competition. Just like a normal text ad, if the image does not sell the product, then it will simply sit there without attracting any clicks. When choosing your product feed images, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind:
- Make sure the image is a clear representation of the product.
- Use high-quality images. When the image is not very appealing, nobody will click on your ads.
- Try out different types of images since different ones can attract a lot more customers.
4. Using Google Shopping Ad Extensions can Help
Ad extensions take your game to a whole new level when it comes to Google Shopping Ads. For Google Shopping, there are two kinds of extensions:
- Merchant Centre Programs: Includes Merchant Promotions, Product Ratings, and Google Customer Review.
- Automated Extensions: Shipping or Tax information shown in a PLA.
These extensions can effectively drive conversion rates and CTR. Automated Extensions depend on the information you give in the Merchant Centre. These make your ad unique and maybe one of the reasons why users are clicking on the ads. There are many ad extensions that can help you increase sales.
Merchant Promotions allows you to add more appealing messages like “special offer”, and when this is clicked, it opens a dialogue window showing the details of the special offer.
5. Include Products Rating and Review
According to a study, around 88 percent of the people shopping online trust a brand or a product based on its ratings and review. This is why you should always feature your product rating or review on the ads and this works just like a personal recommendation.
Ads without ratings look less appealing when it is beside products with ratings. When your products have a large number of reviews, your customer will like it more.
Many people also trust a product based on its low ratings and negative reviews. This is because customers want genuine reviews. So, though a 5-star rating would not hurt, the ideal rating is 4.7 and this product may get more sales. Users also know that products with 5-star ratings have very few reviews.
6. Make use of the Negative Keywords strategy
Negative keywords are very useful to make the products show up for searches that are relevant. Since Google shopping does not require you to add keywords, you will have to trust Google to find the most relevant keywords for user searches.
Even if the ad has a brilliant description and title, imperfections in Google’s algorithms might show your ads to searches that are completely irrelevant. When this happens, users may click on your ad without an intention to buy it, but you will still end up paying for it. But if the ads are not being clicked, then your quality score will drop and the ad will not be shown frequently by Google.
Negative keywords can solve these issues! It will get rid of unwanted clicks and save you a large amount of money. It will also result in the increase of CTR of your ads, further increasing your quality score.
7. Adjust Bids By Device Performance
You will be able to adjust the device bids at the campaign or Ad group level according to its performance. It is always recommended to track your ROAS when you are optimizing your account since this allows you to optimize based on what brings in the biggest return for the company.
8. Optimize the Geo Location
Usually, different conversion rates are seen in each customer location. So, by modifying the bids according to the customers’ location, you can optimize it. The target here is to decrease ad visibility to people that bring in no return for the business and increase visibility for ads to users which makes the most business for you. However, this can only be done at the campaign level.
You can browse the locations tab in the campaign view in order to check your performance by Geo.
9. Increase bids For Products With Higher Performances
If you feel like your product is doing good, then you may want to increase the bids for them. This way, the products would end up selling better since it will be shown to more people online.
10. Make Remarketing Lists for Google Shopping Ads
Remarketing is a strategy that targets people that have already been to the store and specifically deliver the ads to those users. This is a great strategy that no marketer should forget. Through this practice, you can track the shopper’s behaviour and use it to create more audiences for your products.
RSLA (Remarketing Lists for Shopping Ads) is one of the two types of remarketing strategies. In RSLA, instead of creating complete campaigns, you will be able to attach audiences built using Google Ads or Analytics. Ads are delivered to users according to the products they previously searched on Google and viewed on websites.
Conclusion
Google Shopping represents one of the most potentially lucrative digital marketing channels for eCommerce retailers and is considered to be a major asset for them. So, test these strategies given above on your shopping ads and let your business expand during and after the pandemic!
Additional resources
- Beginners Guide to Google Shopping Ads
- How to Troubleshoot your google shopping feed?
- What are the Requirements to google shopping Feed?
- Tips to Optimize Your Google Shopping Feed
- Google Shopping Feed Specifications Guide
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