What Are Google Shopping Ads?
Google Shopping is part of Google’s search engine and functions as a product comparison service. In Google Shopping, eCommerce retailers advertise products directly on the search engine visually and offer key information of each product to help customers convert easier and more reliably.
For online retailers, Google Shopping offers an automated advertising platform to promote its product to customers with high purchase intent directly when they are searching for products on Google.
Google Shopping ads appear in Google search when a customer searches for a product. Google will show the most relevant products to the search query. When the ad is clicked, the product page of the advertisers will show.
Google shopping lists in the ads the following information: product title, price, image, reviews, and sometimes shipping information.
While Google ads are available in most countries, Google Shopping is available in 94 countries (with some having restrictions or being in beta.) as of now.
Google Shopping ads are an important part of any online store’s growth and digital marketing strategy.
Google Shopping Ads Benefits
Visibility
Google Shopping ads increase your product’s visibility on Google Search. The ads appear first in the searches in a carousel for up to twenty ad positions. Compared to Search Ads, utilizing Google Shopping ads increases the chance of your ads being seen.
There are only two search ad positions for the advertiser in mobile search compared to twenty ad positions in the carousel for Google Shopping ads.
Google Shopping ads, compared to regular Search Ads, are more visually appealing as they include the product images.
Shopping ads targets every relevant keyword your product is relevant for, and sometimes those keywords are completely new for you. The added benefit is you can utilize the keywords in your future products, content, or ad copies.
Shopping ads also appear in image searches to increase their visibility on the search engine.
Visibility and traffic from Shopping ads are customers with high purchase intent. The traffic of this sort can change your online store’s marketing strategy from only creating brand awareness into creating converting customers.
Automation
After Google merchant account and product feeds are created, the ads themselves will be automated by Google.
The automated process updates the necessary product information directly from the product feed. The product feed interacts directly with your online store, and updating products in your online store updates the product feed to have the freshest information about your products.
Google Shopping automatically matches relevant products to relevant keywords to match search queries.
The automation saves you time as you won’t need to create ad copies for the ads themselves. The automation benefits any online store small and large.
Automation makes Shopping ads a very effective advertising tool for online retailers as it lowers the cost of labor compared to regular Search Ads and makes the campaign management easier.
Whether your online store only has a couple of products or thousands of products, the automation makes scaling your advertising campaign on Google, a simple process after it’s has been correctly setup.
Depending on your online store’s platform, there are plugins and apps to create the product feed for you.
For example, in Shopify, the Google Shopping app easily syncs your products to your merchant account, makes it easy to set up a campaign and track your results.
Better Results for eCommerce
Compared to Search Ads, Google Shopping Ads, receive on average higher clickthrough-rates for products.
A higher CTR lowers your ads cost in general and has the opportunity to increase your traffic with the same ad spend.
Clickthrough-rates are high for Google Shopping ads because the ads serve customers that are at the end of the funnel and are most likely ready to purchase your product.
Highly targeted keywords that include color, brand, or product type are search terms that customers are already familiar with, and they might have already done their product research.
Targeting the right customers at the right time can have a positive effect on your return on ad spend and increase your overall return on investments across your business.
Competition benchmarking
While doing your campaigns in Google Shopping, you can benchmark your results against your competitors. The competition analysis provides you valuable data on how to improve your ads against others for improved results.
A thorough insight looks into your real position against your competitors is highly valuable in the advertisement space to keep your business ahead of others.
Google Shopping Improves SEO
By correctly creating a product feed that is used for the shopping ads, you will have to provide structured data for the products. These data points will help your products stand out on the search engine organically as well.
The new keyword data gathered from the advertisements can be utilized in future products, and in content marketing to establish more organic visibility for your online store.
Finding relevant keywords that have the best search volumes is hard at times, and utilizing ads can speed up the process and increase results from your SEO.
Improve your SEO clickthrough-rates with the data from the best ads you’ve created earlier.
Google Shopping Ads Analytics
Inside Google ads, you can see the basic performance metrics for your campaigns such as:
- Clicks
- Impressions
- CTR
- Avg. CPC
- Cost
- Conversions
- Conversion Values
For optimizing ad performance, you have to keep an eye out for your ads CTR, a low CTR, might indicate the following:
- Issues with product titles
- The chosen image isn’t the best
- The product price doesn’t match the competition
- Lack of reviews compared to the competition
- Irrelevant keywords
A low CTR leads to lower sales.
The metrics above are metrics for optimizing your ad performance. Integrating conversions from Google Analytics into Google ads will provide you a glance at your campaign profitability.
To further optimize your campaign, the need for deeper analytics is required. Using Google Analytics is a must.
Google Analytics for Google Shopping
Google Shopping ads performance can be tracked through web analytics, and more specifically, with Google Analytics. For understanding how are your ads performing, Google Analytics is crucial.
Setting up multiple conversions to track your online store’s sales funnel and behavior metrics can make a difference in producing winning campaigns.
Behavior metrics tell you what users are doing in your online store after they have clicked on the ad. These metrics, when analyzed properly, will make your online store better in general and has many use cases outside of advertising.
For example, analyzing data from different product landing pages can tell if some of your products are performing worse than others.
Web analytics will tell you the percentage of Google Shopping traffic and sales compared to your other methods of generating sales and traffic.
Utilizing Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking
Ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics can be found under the Conversion tab after it has been enabled on the site and account.
eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics will show you detailed data such as:
- Product Performance
- Sales Performance
- Product List Performance
- Shopping Behavior
- Multi-Channel Funnels
- Marketing
- Internal promotion
- Order Coupon
- Product Coupon
Utilizing Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking
Negative keywords are used to prevent your ads from being shown for irrelevant keywords that are not profitable for you.
To maximize performance, the use of negative keywords is essential.
Negative keywords can be added before launching a campaign, but to know every negative keyword beforehand is almost impossible.
When more data is acquired about keywords, you can see them through the Search Term report. The search term report quickly tells you what search terms have triggered your ads.
- Look for terms that have a low CTR compared to your best-performing ones.
- Look for terms that aren’t converting, remember to compare to your averages.
- Product categories and niches your not yet selling in.
- Advertising future products or products you’re not listing in your online store is not a great idea. It will make an unnecessary dent in your budget, as you can’t recoup the cost with sales.
- Too broad keywords, while sounding relevant, are not. When users are searching with too generic keywords, there’s a high chance they’re still in research-phase in the sales funnel. Therefore generic keywords can have conversion rates and clickthrough-rates.
- Look for irrelevant keywords.
Google Shopping campaigns will be better and yield higher results, higher CTR, and more sales when optimized with negative keywords.
Google Shopping Ads Custom Labels
In Google shopping campaigns, it’s possible to add up to 5 custom labels to help you organize your products within your campaigns.
A custom label is a value set by you for your products. By creating custom labels with appropriate values and assigning them for each product helps you create more effective shopping campaigns.
A good custom label is relevant to your business and products. Assign values that can help you make better campaigns such as labels for seasonality, profitability, performance, or price.
Each product in Google Shopping ads can be assigned one custom label that fits it.
Google Shopping Insights
Google Shopping Insights is a means to understand popular products and brands.
Google Shopping Insights provides the following features to be used in research:
- Personalized Reports
- Weekly or monthly reports about product trends and categories relevant to your business.
- Daily product search data
- Search data from products, brands, and categories.
- Device search comparisons
- Share of mobile and desktop shares to plan around the campaigns.
- Category-specific search comparisons
- Compare product and brand popularity within a category.
How does Google Shopping Ads Work?
Google utilizes a product feed from the Google Merchant Center Account, which contains your store’s products and their information to create ads based on user queries. Google will choose which products will be advertised, and it produces the ads to match the users’ search intent. The product must be included in the product feed to be used in advertising.
Using high-quality images can separate your ads against the competition when done right. A great benefit with Google Shopping ads is that uploading your image once will do the trick.
The process of Google Shopping ads:
- Creation of the Google Merchant Center Account
- The creation of the product feed and the campaign
- Potential customers search for products that relevant to your business
- Google creates the ads and shows it to the potential customer
- The customer arrives on your page and hopefully converts into a purchase
- You’re charged for the click.
Google Shopping Ads Cost
Google Shopping ads are paid per click, similar to regular search ads. On average, the cost per click for Google Shopping ads are lower than in Search ads for online stores. These being estimates and your results may vary, especially in the beginning, where unoptimized campaigns may result in higher costs than optimized campaigns.
Through data and time, better optimization can be utilized to drive the cost of Google Shopping ads down and to receive better results with it.
An important note to the cost is the cost of labor. Depending on how your online store is set up, it might bring the increased cost of labor.
The initial cost for Google Shopping ads might be higher due to extra labor it requires, but due to automation, the cost of labor decreases and becomes an automatic advertising tool for your online store.
Google Shopping ads allow you to set a max bid, which enables more control over the cost. Setting a max bid too low might affect your results by Google not showing your ad enough.
A good strategy is to start small and keep controlling your budgets more tightly. You can always increase budgets and bids as data keeps coming in for winning campaigns and products.
The key is to track sales conversions to see if your ads are bringing in profits for your business. Traffic alone in Google shopping ads is not enough as there are better ways to bring in general traffic if you’re promoting your brand first.
For an online store, google shopping ads offers a method of online advertising that is harder to fail, especially in lower budgets.
Conclusion
Google Shopping ads are one of the best tools for online marketing for online stores. Google shopping ads benefits are plenty whether you’re looking for increased visibility, improved sales, or an automated advertising tool to boost your business.
By learning what Google Shopping ads are and their benefits to online stores, you can start advertising on the platform.
Like other forms of online advertising, the key is to keep track of spending and results at all times. By being on top of your results and optimizing them, you will achieve profitability with google shopping ads.
At first, Shopping Ads might not bring the wanted results. Time and optimization will make your advertising results better.
Eventually, Shopping ads can become a profitable and automated method to increase sales in your online store.
Engaio Digital is an online marketing agency ready to help your online store’s advertising, to optimize to the best it could be.