Google Shopping Ads Campaigns has been taking the eCommerce world by storm. Ads on mobile and desktop devices have been garnering more clicks and seeing a rising trend when it comes to PPC management. For any brand that is into eCommerce marketing, Google Shopping Ads Campaigns cannot be missed.
The date says they are worth it and the amount you make, you get back more via Return on Ad Spends (ROAS). If you’ve ever wanted to learn what Google Shopping ads are, how to create and optimize them for better performance, then this post will give you a nice walkthrough.
What Are Google Shopping ads?
Google Shopping Ads are popularly referred to as Product Listing Ads (PLAs) in the online marketplace. When someone looks up for a bag or a pair of shoes on the search engine, relevant ads are displayed. The layout of these ads is designed in such a way that they match the users’ purchase intent.
Why Should You Use Google Shopping Ads?
Google Shopping Ads has evolved since the day of its inception and now become the cornerstone of eCommerce marketing. In 2018, businesses spent 76.8% of their retail and ad spends budget on these ads and saw decent returns.
Things have become a lot better and taking advantage of the Google Product Search means more exposure and engagements for eCommerce brands. Google ads let you do that and its algorithm updates are making sure that products appear on both the search engine results and image searches.
How Does Google Shopping Work?
Google Shopping Ads works by launching products and making them go live at the Google Marketplace. The basic workflow is that new business owners have to create a Google AdWords account and link it to the Google Merchant Center. Once that is done, they can open up the dashboard at Merchant Center and launch new campaigns.
The ads are automatically created by Google and put up for display using “Google shopping feeds.” Google shopping feeds make use of attributes from the spreadsheet for designing the ads. The main attributes used for optimizing product data feeds are:
- A Unique ID for locating your product.
- Product title for your ads.
- Product description which contains the details that are displayed when an ad is clicked.
- Product category for defining the type of your products.
- A hyperlink to your website’s landing page for that specific product.
- Availability status (in or out of stock).
- MRP and Sale Price.
Top 10 Google Shopping Campaign strategies
Google Shopping Ad campaigns are filled with competition. Most retailers spend 56% of their marketing budget on these campaigns for more clicks in the U.S. and eCommerce businesses are beginning to catch on to their benefits.
If you’re new to shopping ads, you’ll learn that the strategies you use for optimization are just as important as displaying the ads or launching the campaigns themselves. Here are the basics you need to know and some of the most popular Google Shopping Campaign Strategies below.
1. Optimize Your Product Titles
SearchEngineLand has shown how effective product titles can be in boosting CTR rates when they are optimized right. Your product titles should reflect your customers’ search query. It should have a mix of keywords and attributes your target customers are looking for when they make searches.
Zoobgear’s CTR went up by 250% when they optimized their product titles. You can see how simple yet powerful this is for an eCommerce business. The key attributes to be focused on for optimizing product titles are:
- Brand name.
- Material, form, size, type, and color of the product.
- Pricing info.
- Clean HTML Code.
- Ease of readability and no excessive capitalization.
2. Optimize Your Product Feed Descriptions & Categories
You can base your product categories by taking reference from the Google Product Taxonomy (GPC) database. Once you’ve chosen a category, it’s important that you revisit your product datasheet and review your categories there on a granular level.
The more you niche down your categories, the more visibility you will get on the search engine, and the easier it will be to locate your products online. Pay close attention to this.
Your product feed descriptions will be crucial too. Make sure the details are given and be specific about the features and benefits. Most customers will gloss over the visuals and descriptions. It’s important to make sure you make the product content copy clean.
You will have to look into your AdWords account and run a query on what keywords are trending or popular. Be sure to use keywords with more visibility to improve your products’ rankings on the Google search engine. Using keywords in product titles is also recommended besides the descriptions.
3. Optimizing Your Product Images
High-quality images will result in more conversions and clicks. Your customers’ decision to buy a product will rest on your product image quality. Make sure you take pictures from different angles and take note of the image size. Google doesn’t allow for file sizes larger than 16MB and placeholder images aren’t allowed.
You can pair your products with models for the visuals but make sure your product is clearly visible and doesn’t contain any promotional text.
4. Use Google Shopping Ad Extensions
Imagine a customer is browsing for pizza stores nearby and they find your joint. They want to place an online order quickly but can’t seem to get your contact info online. A sale is lost at that moment but could have been prevented with extensions.
Google Ad extensions are links that appear below your product listing ads (PLAs).
5. Use Products Rating & Review
Google now lets you display product ratings and customer reviews with your ads. These serve as social proof for your products/services and are considered the holy grail of eCommerce marketing. To be eligible for this feature, you will need a minimum of 3 product reviews and ratings. Google will analyze your review data first and authenticate these after making sure they are genuine and not biased, however.
To sign up for the Products Rating feature, users will have to visit this form and fill in the details using their Google Merchant Center account. Google will review the application along with the product data and ratings feed and then decide on the approval.
6. Implement a Negative Keywords strategy
Just like keywords can help your ads show up in SERPs, the wrong keywords sometimes could trigger your ads. For example, if your brand sells cars you don’t want your products showing up when someone looks up “toy cars.”
Negative keywords prevent the wrong keywords from triggering or displaying your ads. AdNabu has a negative keyword tool that you can use for niching down your product searches.
7. Adjust Bids By Device Performance
Bid adjustment modifiers take a look at where your clicks are coming from and adjust them to improve your ROI and performance for clicks. Bid adjustment analytics is a feature included in Google Ads and you can run bid adjustment spends to determine where and when to run your campaigns.
For example, if you find that there are specific times of the week your ads do well, you can use the bid adjustment scheduling features to increase or decrease your bids for your campaigns. You can set your bids based on devices such as tablets and desktops and you can also optimize your shopping ads by having them displayed to people on your remarketing lists (RSLAs).
8. Optimize by Geo-Location.
Geo-location refers to the target region your website traffic is coming from. You may have a .com website based in Dubai, but your audience may be coming from Singapore. There are cultural expectations and customer demand to be taken into account but when you optimize your ads for your target’s geography, you get more sales.
What is meant by this?
For example, if a customer is searching for pizza places in Boston and your site is in Boston, you want to optimize your ads to be displayed in SERPs whenever someone types in the keywords “pizza in Boston.”
You can provide your ads more optimization by playing with the designs and visuals specific for that location.
9. Increase bids For High-Performance Products
In a perfect world, our regular bid adjustment modifiers would give us the results we are looking for. But things don’t work that way. For high-performance products, you want to increase your bids you
You can use target ROAS to maximize your returns on your ad spend and create custom bidding strategies. These will help you adhere to your marketing budget and make sure you are getting more than just what’s worth your money.
Maximize Conversions is another bidding strategy Google offers for those who want to increase conversions. And if you want more clicks within a budget, there is a Maximize Clicks feature under the bidding strategy option. You can also set your bids manually if you don’t want them to be automated.
10. Create a Remarketing Strategy
A remarketing strategy involves showing visitors relevant ads based on their previous visits. The goal of this strategy is to help them finish what they started and convert old leads to new customers. There are different types of remarketing strategies for Google Shopping Ads campaigns.
a. Dynamic Remarketing
Dynamic remarketing takes visitors who have viewed your products/ads before and shows them new or similar products based on their previous searches. These ads scale up with your products/services and Google ads determine the layouts of your shopping ads as well. Netshoes saw a huge growth in their business revenue by using this strategy.
b. Remarketing Lists for Search/Shopping Ads
Remarketing lists for search/shopping ads is a strategy where visitors on your remarketing list are targeted for displaying your ads. This strategy optimizes your conversions and manages your Ad Spends budget efficiently. Since your target audience is more specific, you reduce the risk of losing money by displaying ads using only generic keywords.
Conclusion
These strategies will enable eCommerce businesses to scale up and grow more. Ultimately, getting your niche down and segmenting your search queries using these strategies is what will end up increasing your ROI. The key is to be patient and remember to test out different campaigns using A/B split testing if you have more than one marketing strategy. Optimize your website also for reduced bounce rates and work on the visuals and tonality of your brand. Combined with this, you’ll definitely get better results.
Additional resources
- Beginners Guide to Google Shopping Ads
- How to Troubleshoot your google merchant center data feed?
- What are the Requirements to Google Merchant Center Data Feed?
- Tips to Optimize Your Google Merchant Center Data Feed
Guest Post by AdNabu
AdNabu helps improve sales in Google Ads for eCommerce companies. If you are running the search, google shopping, or display campaigns in Google Ads, This software will be able to increase your sales.
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