Essential Guide to Google Shopping Ads

How do Google Shopping Ads work?

If you have specific products to advertise, Google Shopping Ads are an incredible tool to utilise. They appear right at the top of the SERP, and feature an image of your product, the price, and sometimes reviews and ratings. Although your product will feature alongside competitors’ products, it means that buyers can quickly and easily purchase from your website if they choose to. This is why it’s important to have a good quality image and competitive prices, as these will be deciding factors for which product users click on.

Shopping Ads will also appear in the Shopping tab on Google search, so your products will be targeting customers who are definitely looking to make a purchase.

How much do Google Shopping Ads cost?

Similarly to other paid links, you will be charged for Google Shopping Ads using cost-per-click. When setting up your ads, you’ll be able to choose how much you are willing to pay, but bear in mind that the more you do, the better the position of your ad.

What are the benefits of Google Shopping Ads?

Product visibility

Sometimes, it’s better to show and not tell. As Google Shopping Ads make use of images to grab your customers’ attention, it’s much more clear to see the product you’re selling. For example, it’s way more effective to see a picture of the style of trainers that you want to buy, rather than a text description of ‘black trainers’. Images are more visually stimulating and way more likely to catch the attention of eager buyers.

We all know the importance of ranking highly on Google’s SERP, but Shopping Ads will ensure that you’re actually right at the top of the page. Although organic traffic and content are important, there’s no alternative to Shopping Ads that will ensure your product is the first thing that customers see.

Greater ROI

Investment can be risky, but Google Shopping Ads offer a much more reliable return on investment (ROI). This is because they boast a higher click-through rate than other paid ads when it comes to Shopping related searches – one report found that Google Shopping links made up 63% of Google ad clicks. Customers are more likely to click on Google Shopping Ads than text ads, meaning your money is being spent more efficiently to garner clicks.

As well as bringing clicks to your site, Google Shopping Ads also have a higher conversion rate since they are targeting customers actively looking to purchase. What’s more, the CPC (cost per click) of Shopping Ads tend to be lower than text ads. Overall, Shopping Ads are great for both making money and saving it!

Reach more shoppers

Who says your products need to be limited to the SERP? An exciting feature of Google Shopping Ads is that they can appear pretty much anywhere, including YouTube and other Google Search Partner websites. This expands your product’s reach massively and means you are able to promote on multiple platforms without having to manually set it up on each site.

Better quality traffic

It’s all about quality, not quantity (although Google Shopping Ads increase how many people you reach, too). As the Shopping Ads show images and prices on users’ SERP, once a customer has clicked on your product, they already like the look of what you’re selling. The quality of traffic on your website will massively increase, and there’ll be less window shoppers on your site since they’ll already know your price point.

Easy to use and manage

You don’t need to write any complicated code to set up your Google Shopping Ads. In fact, it’s fairly straightforward to create the ads, and Google pretty much takes care of the rest. Google automatically displays your products for relevant searches, so all you have to do is upload your products. There are even tools which will pull information from your website, so there’s minimal set up required on your part.

Reporting and data tools

Google is very on the ball when it comes to analytics reports, and their Shopping Ads are no outlier to this trend. With access to competitive data, you can monitor how well your products are performing. You can see how particular groups of products are performing by using their filters, and choose how detailed you want this information to be. What’s more, Google shows benchmark data for some competitive market analysis.

How to set up Google Shopping Ads

The different types of Google Shopping Ads

Product Shopping Ads

Product Shopping Ads are made up from the product data that you submit in the Merchant Centre. These will include an image, title, price, and your business name within the ad. You can improve your Product Shopping Ads by adding features such as ratings, reviews, and any discounts and promotions.

Local Inventory Ads

Local Inventory Ads allow you to showcase your shop and products to nearby shoppers who have searched for relevant products on Google. When shoppers click on this ad, they’ll be shown a Google-hosted page for your shop which includes directions, opening hours, and your product inventory. This is an effective way for shop owners to promote their business online while still attracting customers to your store in person.

Adding products to your Google Merchant Centre

If you already have your eCommerce store set up, you can automatically upload products to your Google Merchant Centre. Google currently supports the following platform providers: Shopify; WooCommerce; BigCommerce; PrestaShop. If not, you will need to manually upload your products by clicking ‘Products’ then ‘Feeds’.

When your products are uploaded to Google Merchant Centre for the first time, it’s normal for there to be a few errors. Don’t worry – Google will usually provide instructions to fix these, so your products will be ready in no time.

How to create a Google Shopping Campaign

Now that your products have been approved, you’ll want to create a Google Shopping campaign. To do this, you need to have a Google Ads account.

On your Google Ads dashboard, click the ‘+’ on the Campaigns screen. Next, select ‘Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance’ and then select ‘Shopping’. You’ll then be able to create either a Standard or Smart shopping campaign.

Standard Shopping Campaign

Standard Shopping Campaigns only appear on Google’s SERP, but they allow you to have full control over your campaign. Although you have to do everything manually, this does mean that you have full control over location targeting, network placement, and you can even schedule your ads. Great for the perfectionists out there, a Standard campaign means you can tailor every little thing to your wants and needs. Just be warned that this will be very time consuming.

Smart Shopping Campaign

Google Smart Shopping offers a hassle free campaign option that is highly automated and does all the hard work for you. Smart Shopping campaigns use automation for bidding, ad placement, and targeting, so they require very little maintenance while still providing impressive results. It also tests different image and text combinations to find the best performing formats for your campaigns, meaning that your ads are constantly improving.

If you think PPC tools like Shopping Ads are a great fit for your business, why not let our teams help grow your business through paid advertising? Contact us to find out more about the digital marketing services we provide.

All Articles