Google Shopping ads are a type of campaign that allows you to promote products with detailed information before reaching your company’s website. Google Shopping ads are an excellent to promote your product inventory and increase the traffic to your website. Many companies spend a large amount of their advertising budget on Google Shopping ads. For example, retailers on average spend 60% of their paid ads digital marketing budget on Google Shopping ads.
Here is an example of Google Shopping ads:
Google Shopping ads can also be displayed across Google’s Display Network and on price comparison apps (iOS and Android) and website.
In order to utilize Google Shopping ads, you will need to have your products setup with Merchant Center. You will need to create a new Merchant Center account and verify your company’s website. You will then need for someone to create a shopping feed. A shopping feed has all of the data about your products that Google will use to display your ads. Shopping feeds include product images, titles, product identifiers, product attributes, and marketing copy.
There are many different ways of creating a shopping feed for Merchant Center. Many Ecommerce platforms already have a setup that allows for someone to export the product data into a file that can be used to import the product data into Merchant Center. Some Ecommerce platforms have plugins that you can install to obtain the product feed for Merchant Center. To learn more about WordPress plugins, visit Wordpress Plugins: Best and Most Popular WordPress Plugins. If your Ecommerce platform does have that capability, you can create a Google Sheet or Excel file to input the different columns of data needed for Merchant Center. Some of the needed data includes title, description, link, price, image link, Google product category, and shipping cost.
Once you have your products setup with Merchant Center, you will need to have your Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts linked in order that your product data can appear in Google Shopping ads. To link Merchant Center and Google Shopping ads, you will need for someone to log into your Merchant Center and request to link the two accounts. After requesting in Merchant Center, someone will need to log into Google Ads and approve the Merchant Center request. It is possible to link multiple Merchant Center accounts to a single Google Ads account or to link multiple Google Ads accounts to a single Merchant Center account. Campaign statistics will show up in both Merchant Center and Google Ads.
In order to create a successful Google Shopping Ad campaign, it is important to first know what your goals are for the campaign. Most Ecommerce companies carefully monitor the ROAS (return on ad spend). ROAS is the revenue generated from a campaign by the spend on the campaign. For example, if your Google Shopping Ad campaign generated $90,000 of revenue for your company, and the money you spent on the campaign was $10,000, the ROAS measure would be 9:1.
Understanding your profit margins and operating expenses is key to determining what ROAS your company wants to target. Some other metrics to monitor include Average CPC, Conversions, and Cost/Conversion. Watching these metrics either within Google Ads or with a custom dashboard can help you track your campaign performance and can help with optimization.
Some tactics that can be used to optimize your Google Shopping Ads include negative keywords. Negative keywords are words that trigger your ad to be blocked by search results. A couple of examples of words that you will probably want to have blocked are “free,” “2nd hand,” and “job.” Someone searching for these keywords would most probably not be interested in purchasing your products. Having someone analyze the keywords for your campaigns and determine what negative keywords to use can tremendously improve the performance of Google Shopping ads. Think of the times when you have seen an ad that made no sense in response to your query. Those advertisers were completely wasting their advertising dollars, even if you didn’t click their ad as pointless ads hurt their metrics.
Setting up smart bidding is another way to possibly improve the performance of your Google Shopping ads. Smart bidding uses Machine Learning (ML) to make bids for customers who are most likely to purchase your products. Having someone set up conversion tracking is necessary to create a successful campaign. Google Ads is generally the best source of conversion data. Creating remarketing campaigns is also crucial to Google Shopping ads success. One other way to achieve success with Google Shopping ads are to regularly create promotional feeds that highlight sales or offers such as free shipping.
Google shopping ads work so well because visitors have a really good sense of your products before they reach your website. We at https://www.JunoDigitalDevelopment.com have many years of experience with Google Shopping ads. If you’d like to get your Google Shopping ads campaign off to a great start or want us to help optimize your existing campaigns, contact us on our contact page JunoDigitalDevelopment.com Contact Page.