Google Shopping for Online Stores

Digital Advertising - Socially Found

Loading

Google Shopping is part of the Google Ads platform, allowing you to showcase your products visually to potential shoppers looking for similar products online.

The performance of your campaign is based on relevance, including search terms and other online activity. The data used to highlight your products is also used to improve the quality of results.

Unlike Google Search, the shopping network utilises information from your campaign settings and product data feed such as product titles & descriptions, as opposed to just specific combinations of keywords. Ad Groups are now known as product groups and the more relevant you are with setting up your campaign, the more success you should be able to achieve.

To help with your success, here are some basic guidelines to follow when first starting out.

GOOGLE SHOPPING CAMPAIGN OPTIMISATION

Google Merchant Center Tweaks

Maintaining and ensuring that your Google Merchant Center is running optimally is extremely important when it comes to Google Shopping campaigns.

You should be looking to regularly go into your account and checking for any issues and addressing them straight away. If you see any errors, whether they’re red or orange error messages, get on to them straight away. For help with these issues, the Google forums are an amazing resource to help you work through them.

By not working through these, it will affect the quality of your feed and have an impact on your overall campaign.

Removing Unwanted Keywords aka Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are going to help you when you are considering unprofitable products. You’ll want to review the terms that your product is being triggered for and determine its relevance. Understanding which keywords are unprofitable will go a long way to maximising your return.

So how do you determine when to add a negative keyword?

Working through the search term report will provide you with the search terms that are triggering your products in the search results. Understanding your niche will help you determine whether a term is a good fit and what should end up on the negative keyword list. Generic terms can also be considered, especially if it is spending far too much with little to no return.

So how much do you spend before adding it to the negative keyword list?

That will depend on your budget. For smaller budgets, you can be quite brutal and start culling terms even after spending $5-$10. On larger budgets, you may want to look at around the $20-$25 mark. There is no hard and fast rule here but again, you should know your niche well and identifying poorly performing keywords should be fairly straight forward.

GOOGLE SHOPPING PRODUCTS OPTIMISATION

The most important areas when it comes to maintaining a better performing product data are:

  • Accuracy
  • Relevance
  • Combination of both in relation to what people are searching for

The better these three areas are, the better the rewards from Google with lower CPC’s. It’s all about what people are searching for and ensuring that your products are accurately presented so that Google can put your product in front of the right person.

High-Quality Images

When it comes to product images, they need to be clear, uncluttered and accurately reflect the product that you are offering for sale. I would suggest a minimum size of 800×800 pixels (even though the requirement is smaller), clear white background and no other logos or pictures. Even though you want your image to stand out from the others, you need to ensure that it showcases the product you are selling.

By following the above, you’ll ensure you are maximising your Click Through Rate.

Product Titles

If you’re looking to get maximum exposure for your products, ensuring that your product titles are optimised will make a huge impact on their success and profitability. To help you understand this better, there are four areas that you need to focus on to make them work better for you:

  • Accurate & Relevant – make sure it is exactly what the user is looking for
  • Follow Google Best Practices – don’t set yourself up for failure, follow the guidelines
  • Format Titles for Performance – use search terms to assist with this

Product Description

Following similar guidelines for titles in the description will go a long way to increasing the performance of your product shopping ads. Working between 500-1000 words, ensure that the descriptions encapsulate the following:

  • Accurate and a true reflection of what the product actually is
  • Ensure that you’re speaking to the customer and not just stuffing words for the sake of it

This may not sound like much of a plan but when you only get one chance to capture that customer, make sure that you are giving them what they are looking for. Remember, once they purchase something from your online store, there’s every chance that they will return for more, or better still, tell others about it.

Rob Sanders

Digital Advertising - Socially Found

For some businesses, the online world can be a bit of an unknown, or they don't have the resources to see how it could help. Our goal is to assist with that transition, generating more awareness around your brand and in the process, more leads and sales.

Our services are ideally suited for new businesses venturing into the digital space, or those that have tried previously with little to no success. Instead of just jumping into something that may not work for your business, we like to have a quick chat so we can get to know each other and get an idea of your expectations and goals. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling a product or service, we just want to make sure we’re going to be a good fit for each other.

Message Rob
You have new message! sociallyfound
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments