Table of Contents:
- Introduction
- Benefits of Google Shopping for Merchants
- How to Add Products to Google Shopping?
- Create a Google Shopping Campaign
- Google Shopping & Shopify Integration
- Conclusion
Introduction
Google Shopping ad spend has increased by 38%. Plus, Google Shopping Ads now account for 65% of all Google ads clicks, and for as much as 85% of all retail ad clicks! This means that for ecommerce businesses in particular, Shopping ads work far better than normal text PPC ads.
Are you running an e-commerce business? Would you like to increase your online sales? Google Shopping allows consumers to search, compare, review and shop physical products from various retailers who have paid to advertise their products. Also known as a Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE), Google Shopping results appear as thumbnail images that display each product’s name, retailer, and price.
Unlike online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, in Google Shopping the customer comes to you. Google Shopping for merchants allows buyers to view various products from many different brands that are related to the keywords they are searching for. The results appear in a carousel of 2-5 ads depending on whether you are using a desktop, smartphone, or tablet. Google Shopping increases website traffic, boosts sales and helps with lead generation.
Google Shopping, now a branch of Google AdWords, offers retailers and e-commerce businesses a platform to advertise physical products on Google. Google Shopping ads are now displayed based on product data uploaded by Google Shopping merchants rather than based on keywords.
Key Statistics:
- Google Shopping Ads drive almost 76% of online retail ad spend
- 49% of shoppers use Google to discover a new product and shopping listings can help feature your products at the top of those search results
- Shopping Ads currently generate 85.3% of all clicks on AdWords and Google Shopping campaigns combined
- The average CTR of Google Shopping Ads is .86%
- The average cost per click (CPC) of Google Shopping Ads is $0.66
- The average Google Shopping Ads conversion rate is 1.91%
Benefits of Google Shopping for Merchants
Google Shopping for merchants offers various advantages in terms of increasing website traffic and catching the attention of your target audience.
1. Boosts Sales & Conversions
Google Shopping is proven to have 30% higher conversion rates than text ads. So online retailers and advertisers get a better ROI when they advertise with Google Shopping Ads rather than text-based ads. As a result, Google Shopping for merchants serves as a support system for increasing sales and revenue.
2. Drives Traffic
Every month, approximately 6 million people use Google Shopping to compare products from various stores and brands. Your online store will receive a lot of organic or paid unique visitors after you list your product on Google Shopping. As a result of the Google Shopping feeds, traffic from Google will be diverted to your listing, and then to your online store.
3. Improves Branding
You can use Google Shopping Ads to promote your products on Google Search and Google Shopping. Customers can see your Google Shopping Ads in the following places:
- Google Search – Google Shopping allows niche brands to list their products, and online marketplaces allow and assist their sellers to list their products on Google Shopping.
- Display Network – if you select Display Network, your Google Shopping ads reach beyond the search results page and place your visual, image-based ads on a variety of websites all over the internet.
- Gmail – Recently, Google Ads sent out an email to advertisers informing them that Google Shopping Ads will begin appearing in Gmail as well.
- YouTube – When you list and advertise your products on Google Shopping, your product reach increases because Google Shopping Ads allow you to showcase ads on YouTube.
4. Enhances Attention
Google Shopping for merchants enhances the visual appeal of your products in Google search results. As a result, when potential buyers look for your products online, they end up at your online store.
5. Simplifies Product Management
Google Shopping for merchants, like online marketplaces, is a platform where products from your competitors are also available. However, unlike online marketplaces, you won’t have to manually add product images, information, or pricing. Most of the ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, etc. support integrations with Google Shopping.
6. Improves Audience Targeting
You can use “Similar audiences” in Google Shopping Ads to enhance your ad campaign. When you add such audiences to your campaign, you’re telling Google to show ads to people who have already visited your ecommerce store and whose search behavior is similar to theirs. This means you’re attracting new, highly relevant audiences to your e-commerce stores, which helps you acquire more customers.
How to Add Products to Google Shopping?
Let’s take a look at how to list your products on Google Shopping for merchants. Our experts will guide you through the steps to manually set up your account in the sections below.
Step 1: Set up a Google Merchant Account
Sign up for a Google Merchant Center account to have your products appear in Google Shopping results. Google Merchant Center is simple to set up and use, and it essentially serves as your home base for all of your products and information. (Future Google Shopping campaigns will be managed through Google Ads)
Step 2: Optimize your Product Images
Because the imagery used in your Google Shopping listings comes from your website, your product photos must be of high quality. Given that Google Shopping is a visual experience for online shoppers, having low-quality photos will be a major hindrance to your Google Shopping campaigns.
Google performs frequent quality checks on your website and product pages and will suspend your account if your images aren’t up to their standards and policies. Poor product imagery can lead to loss of sales.
To improve your product imagery, take a look at Google’s image guidelines:
- Use a solid, light-colored background
- Make use of clear, even lighting
- Display the product that is being sold in a clear manner
- Display the product at the proper scale (it should take up 75-90 percent of the full image)
- Avoid any blurring or noise, pixelation, fringing, fading out, and other jpeg effects
- Other techniques include displaying clothing on a body, using shadows to add depth, using photos of the product from multiple angles, and including real people wearing it
- The product image guidelines are also helpful if you sell your products on other marketplaces, as they often have similar requirements
Step 3: Create a Product Data Feed
Creating a feed for Google Shopping is relatively easy, but you’ll need to take some steps to make it effective. You’ll need to know what type of data you want to include in your feed, as well as the countries where you’re selling your products. There’s also a limit on the number of products you can have in each feed, which varies between 50,000 and 200,000. It’s important to follow the instructions carefully, and Google can let you know which limits apply to you.
- The first step is to add the data you want to include in the feed
- The sale price attribute tells Google how long to display your product’s sale price
- Ensure the price on the landing page matches the sale price on the product’s listing
- Lastly, make sure your listing’s title includes your keywords using Google keywords planner and Google keywords generator for Google keywords ranking and qualifiers
- The images you use should be in a white background so that they appear as white backgrounds in Google and in listings.
Using Google Sheets is another option. This spreadsheet program is similar to Excel but allows you to use templates in the “Add-ons” section. Once you have the information you need, you can export the spreadsheet to a text file in either Bzip2 compressed text (.bz2) or XML (.xml). You can use a debugging tool to test the feed before submitting it. This will give you a chance to correct any formatting errors you find and adjust your feed before submitting it to Google.
You can find your product feed under Products > Feeds > Primary Feeds now that you’ve created it in the Merchant Center.
Step 4: Link your Google AdWords Account
The Google Shopping results you see on the top when searching for a product are actually advertisements. You have to pay to have your products listed on Google Shopping. While Google Merchant Center is where Google gets your product data, Google AdWords is where consumers see your products via Shopping campaigns.
You’ll need to link your Google AdWords account to get your products in front of shoppers via Google Shopping. Go to Google Merchant Center and sign in. Three vertical dots can be found in the top right corner. To expand the menu, click those, then Account linking.
You can create a Google AdWords account from this screen if you don’t already have one. Otherwise, enter your Google AdWords customer ID by clicking Link account. Your AdWords account should be linked once you’ve finished.
Step 5: Create a Google Shopping Campaign
Google Shopping for merchants is an important marketing strategy for online business that can improve website traffic, generate sales, and help in lead generation. A successful Google Shopping campaign will greatly benefit your strategy for ecommerce. You’ll be able to create a Google Shopping campaign and advertise your products once your Google AdWords account is linked. There are two ways to set up a campaign for Google Shopping.
1. Your Google Merchant Center account is one way to start a Google Shopping campaign. You should be able to access your Google AdWords account from the same location after linking it via the Account linking page. Simply select Create Shopping Campaign from the drop-down menu.
After that, type in the name of the campaign, the country where it will be sold, and the daily budget. After you click Create, you’ll be directed to Google AdWords to continue managing your campaign.
2. Another option is to use Google AdWords to create a Google Shopping campaign. Log in to your AdWords account on Google. Open the left-hand menu’s Campaigns tab, click the blue “+” icon, and select New campaign. Choose a campaign goal first:
- Sales campaigns drive sales online or in person
- Leads campaigns convince customers to complete an online action to gather leads
- Website traffic campaigns drive the right customer to your website
Because Google tailors each campaign to your specific goals, it’s important to pick the right one for your business. After you’ve decided on a campaign goal, select Shopping as the campaign type. Ensure that your Google Merchant Center account is visible (so that Google AdWords knows where to find your product data) and that your country of sale is specified.
Finally, select a campaign subtype. Tip: Conversion tracking is required for Smart Shopping campaigns so AdWords can track when your ads lead to sales on your website.
Step 6: Set Bids on your Google Shopping Campaign
In your Google Shopping settings, you can now choose your bidding strategy and set your campaign budget. Google Shopping for merchants uses an auction-based system, in which retailers must bid the highest amount in order to appear on the carousel, which invites shoppers to click and interact with your ads.
The first step is to figure out what kind of bidding strategy you want to use. You can set your own maximum CPC for your ads and set up an automated bid strategy with manual CPC. Google uses your ads’ conversion rates to set the most efficient bids for your products, so conversion tracking is required for both Target ROAS and Enhanced PPC.
Google Ads management automatically sets your bids to get as many clicks as possible within your budget when you select “Maximize clicks.” To limit your spending on each ad, you can set a maximum CPC bid limit.
After that, decide on a campaign budget. This is how much money you want to spend on a daily basis. Google will manage your budget on a monthly basis, ensuring that you do not exceed your daily budget multiplied by the number of days in each month. You can also choose how your budget is spent:
- Standard spends it evenly over time
- Accelerated spends it more quickly
You can set a campaign priority if you’re running multiple campaigns so Google knows which bid will be used.
Step 7: Schedule & Target your Shopping Campaign
The final section of the Google Shopping campaign settings will assist you in determining your campaign’s target and schedule. This determines who will see your product advertisements and when they will appear. Networks and Devices should not be changed because they determine where your product advertisements will appear.
The next step is to choose the target locations for your ad: only choose locations where you are located or can ship to. To see the Target and Exclude settings, select Location options; it’s best to stick with Google’s defaults. In terms of location, this ensures that you’re marketing to the right people.
Lastly, decide when your shopping campaign will begin and end. If you don’t specify an end date, your ad will continue to run indefinitely.
Step 8: Build Ad Groups for your Shopping Campaign
After you’ve finished configuring your Google Shopping campaign, you’ll be prompted to create ad groups for your campaign. These determine the types of ads you’ll run and how the bidding for those ads will be organized.
There are two types of ad groups that you can use:
- Showcase Shopping ads are a new format that allows you to advertise multiple products as part of a separate mini-campaign that represents your brand or business.
- Product Shopping ads promote a single product, whereas Product Shopping ads promote multiple products as part of a separate mini-campaign that represents your brand or business.
Enter your ad group name and a maximum CPC bid if you choose a Product Shopping ad group. This will combine all of your products into a single large ad group. Create separate ad groups for different categories to further filter your products.
Enter the name of your Showcase Shopping ad group and a maximum CPE (cost per engagement) bid if you choose this option. When someone expands your Showcase Shopping ad and spends at least 10 seconds inside it, that is considered engagement. Finally, decide which products to promote in the Showcase Shopping ad.
Click save and your Google Shopping campaign has been successfully submitted.
Step 9: Google Shopping Campaign Testing
You can conduct A/B tests on Google Shopping ad titles to determine which ones are most effective. Try different versions of your titles, descriptions, or product visuals. Once you’ve determined which ones perform best, change the ad title to the one that produces the highest conversion rate. After testing the two versions of your title, change the value of ab testing from A to B. You should see an increase in conversion rate immediately.
To test the effectiveness of a Google Shopping campaign, you need to create a clear baseline and clear measure of performance. Otherwise, you’ll introduce too many variables and end up muddying the waters. Despite its flaws, price tests are still a viable option for e-commerce marketers. This is largely due to the fact that many retailers are still learning how to maximize Google Shopping. After all, there is a better way to maximize your ROI!
Amazon might be testing Google Shopping. Amazon has thousands of products listed in its Merchant Center, and it promotes other merchants’ products. Having this much competition will require a great deal of attention from the company. The benefits of Google Shopping for merchants will be seen in the results of their testing. Amazon is a potential market for Google Shopping, but the decision will affect all of us, including smaller retailers. So, make sure your feed is optimized for the best results.
Step 10: Google Shopping Campaign Optimization
Optimizing Google shopping campaigns takes a lot of time, and it pays to understand how to optimize them. Among the main factors to optimize are product descriptions, keywords, bids, and feeds. To make your feed as attractive as possible, use the taxonomy Google Shopping. These three elements can help you create the best possible ad copy.
Here are some tips to optimize Google Shopping campaigns. They should be applied to every aspect of your website, from product descriptions to feeds:
- Your product title should be clear, accurate, and to the point
- The product description you write should be relevant to the item you’re selling
- Ensure product images are high-quality and appealing and try to include a photo of the product in use
- Providing product Google reviews for business and ratings can help customers decide whether or not your product is worth purchasing
- Implement a negative keyword strategy to ensure that your product does not appear in searches that are unrelated to it.
- Optimize by geographic location to avoid selling to people outside of your delivery area and wasting money on unnecessary clicks.
- Increase the bids on high-performance products to see if they sell better and appear in front of more people online.
While optimizing Google Shopping campaigns may seem like a difficult task, the results will pay off. When done properly, a well-designed campaign can result in a higher conversion rate and more impressions. If you don’t optimize your campaigns, you’ll be missing out on thousands of potential shoppers. Don’t let that happen to you. Optimizing Google Shopping campaigns is crucial for ecommerce brands to make the best impression on potential buyers.
Google Shopping & Shopify Integration
Integrating Shopify to Google Shopping is a time-consuming and difficult task that requires technical expertise. But not just that, you need to ensure that your Shopify store meets Google-specific requirements, some of which include:
- Activation of Google Merchant Center Account linked with Google Ads Account
- Abiding by Google Shopping Ads policies and Google Ads policies
- Keeping your product data feed up-to-date
PROS is a leading ecommerce, marketing, and technology company with experience of more than 20 years and a brand portfolio like ShopMelissa, AmourPrints, and many more. Our Shopify experts and Google Shopping manager can help you advertise your products on Google Shopping to increase sales, leads, and traffic and integrate it with Shopify. Once the integration of Google Shopping with Shopify is completed, you can reap its various benefits.
Google Shopping for merchants not only saves time for your potential customers but also assists the Shopify store owners in a variety of ways. Take a look at the advantages of Google Shopping ads for Shopify merchants with our Shopify expert:
- Highly Targeted Traffic
If your Google shopping campaign is successful, your store will receive more traffic because this traffic is highly targeted. The keywords used by the shoppers are aligned with the keywords of your Shopify store.
To get the best results, you’ll need to choose from a variety of Keyword match options, including Broad Match, Exact Match, Negative Keywords, Phrase Match, and Broad Match Modifier. You’re on the right track as long as you’re testing, monitoring, and optimizing your campaigns.
- High Potential Customer Reach
You’ll get a lot of clicks on your Shopify e-commerce website if your products are near the top of the SERPs. Most online retailers have reported a doubling of click-through rates (CTR) with Google Shopping Ads, according to one of Google’s studies. You can expect your product ads to reach a wide range of customers if your keyword strategy is efficient. - High ROAS
Cost-effectiveness is a source of concern for most marketers and brands. When a brand spends money on ads, it expects a comparable return. Improved CTRs have already been mentioned above. The more the clicks, the lower is the Cost-per-click. - Better Analytics & Reporting
Ad campaigns must produce results, and those results must be quantifiable. You can measure results more precisely with Google Shopping ads. - Easily Manageable
With Google Shopping Ads, you or your marketer can manage the campaign from start to finish. You can change, tweak, add or remove items, and increase or decrease your budget whenever you want.
Google provides a variety of metrics so that Shopify store owners can create customized reports to analyze the campaign’s success. So much so that you can use features like Benchmark Bidding, which allows you to compare all advertisers’ bids in order to bid appropriately.
Shopify merchants have a distinct advantage. You don’t need to use another platform to create Google Shopping Ads; instead, you can use the Shopify platform to create and manage your campaigns, making your marketing efforts more time and cost-effective.
This is especially true when comparing the management of PPC ad campaigns. When you use Google Shopping for Shopify, there is no need for a separate keyword insertion activity.
Google Shopping by Shopify makes things easier, faster, and more convenient for sellers, allowing them to profit from Google Shopping Ads. Shopify has developed a Google Shopping App that allows for the quick and easy creation of a shopping campaign as well as the free listing of products on the channel. It provides a significant advantage to the vendor who wishes to reach out to his target audience in a timely and convenient manner.
Updating the product feed ensures that the crawler has enough information to rank the ad in the SERP. You don’t have to create separate ad campaigns for each product because creating ad campaigns for multiple products can be done in one go.
Conclusion
Include Google Shopping in your marketing plan if your physical products aren’t being advertised in the Google Shopping results yet. It will not only increase the number of visitors to your website but will also help you with lead generation and boost sales. To get your Google Shopping campaign up and running, follow this guide, and you’ll see how it can greatly benefit your ecommerce strategy.
In addition, by integrating Google Shopping with Shopify, you can reach out to millions of customers who are unaware of your products or brand online. Google Shopping ads are the right tool to use if you want to grow your business online cost-effectively and with a high return on investment. Google Shopping for merchants can be accessed directly from your Shopify store.
Deepak Wadhwani has over 20 years experience in software/wireless technologies. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies including Intuit, ESRI, Qualcomm, Sprint, Verizon, Vodafone, Nortel, Microsoft and Oracle in over 60 countries. Deepak has worked on Internet marketing projects in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange Country, Denver, Nashville, Kansas City, New York, San Francisco and Huntsville. Deepak has been a founder of technology Startups for one of the first Cityguides, yellow pages online and web based enterprise solutions. He is an internet marketing and technology expert & co-founder for a San Diego Internet marketing company.
