The e-commerce industry is booming, and making your place as a seller among millions of brands offering similar products and services can be quite tricky.
Google shopping ads are one of the most effective ways to showcase your products and services in Google search results, and they are at the top of the SERP.
Research says that spending on Google shopping ads has increased by 38% in 2024. On the contrary, revenue spent on Google search ads has decreased by 12%.
As a result, Google shopping campaigns now account for 65% of Google ad clicks.
Ignoring a great opportunity like Google shopping ads won’t be clever if you own an ecommerce store.
This article covers everything you need to know about shopping ads.
But first things first,
What Are Google Shopping Ads?
Google shopping ads are advertisements usually displayed at the top of the Google search results pages for product-related keywords.
Following is an example of a Google shopping ad for sneakers.
The best part of Google shopping ads is they can also be displayed on Gmail, YouTube, Google’s shopping tab, and Google Display Network.
Working Principles Of Google Shopping Ads
Google shopping ads work on a different principle compared to Google search ads.
You need to bid for keywords used in search terms to appear for conventional Google search ads.
Whereas, Google shopping ads work on the cost-per-click (CPC) bidding principle. That means you pay Google only when searchers click on your ad.
You need to upload a spreadsheet that contains all your product information to Google shopping ads. Google displays your ads for relevant searches.
Difference Between Google Shopping Ads And Google Search Ads
Following are the key differences between Google search ads and Google shopping ads.
| Google Search Ads | Google Shopping Ads |
| You can bid for specific keywords. | This is not possible. |
| Both products and services can be promoted. | Only product promotion is possible. |
| Displayed as links with accompanying text. | Displays appealing product images with links. |
Why Should You Use Google Shopping Ads?
You can gain the following benefits if you advertise on Google Shopping,
- Google shopping ads allow you to display your products at the top of the SERP without putting effort into outranking your competitors in organic search results.
- You can reach a broader audience using Google shopping ads as they can be displayed on Gmail, YouTube, Google’s shopping tab, and Google Display Network as well.
- Google shopping ads return 12% more revenue per click than Google search ads.
- If you run Google shopping ads parallelly with Google search ads, your products can be displayed multiple times on search results.
- Google shopping ads provide the provision for acquiring accurate analytical data on your ads. That, in turn, helps you to plan better advertising strategies.
How Are Shopping Ads Created?
This section of the article shall guide you on creating and launching your Google ads campaign.
Here you go!
Create An Account In The Google Merchant Center
The first thing you need to create a Google ads campaign is a Google Merchant Center account.
- Click the ‘Sign up for free’ button on Google Merchant Center to create an account.
- Then, you must answer a few questions related to your business.
- Then, click on the ‘Continue to Merchant Center’ button on the next page.
- Next, you need to enter the name of your business and the location (country) where it is registered.
- Clicking on the ‘Continue to Merchant Center’ button will successfully create your Google Merchant Center account.
However, you need to perform the following tasks to complete the process though.
- Add your business address.
- Confirm your online store.
- Verify your business phone number.
- Add shipping details.
- Set up your sales tax account.
Create A Product Feed
Next, you must create a product feed (the spreadsheet mentioned earlier that contains all your product information) and upload it to the Google Merchant Center.
You can do the same in the following two ways.
You can manually create a product feed by filling out all the attributes of Google’s product data specification.
However, most popular e-commerce platforms offer tools, plug-ins, or apps to create a product feed automatically.
For example,
Shopify: Google and YouTube app
BigCommerce: Google Shopping Feed and Ads app
Adobe Commerce: Google Shopping extension
WooCommerce: Google Product Feed extension
Upload Product Feed To Google Merchant Center
Once you finish creating your product feed, you need to upload it to the Google Merchant Center by following the below instructions,
- Open your Google Merchant Center account and click the ‘Products’ icon in the left menu.
- Next, click the ‘Add products’ button.
- You need to select the ‘Add products from file’ option on the next screen and click on the ‘Continue’ button.
- The tool allows you to choose the country and language in which your ads are shown.
- Next, you need to enter your product feed file URL or you can also upload the product feed from your PC.
- Choose any of the above options that are convenient for you, and then click on the ‘Done’ button.
You must ensure that the titles and descriptions of your products are adequately optimized with relevant keywords before adding them to the Google Merchant Center.
You can choose a free keyword research tool like RankWatch to find organic and long-tail keywords.
Including those keywords in your product listings helps your Google shopping ads perform better in search results.
Create And Launch Your Google Shopping Ads Campaign
Now comes the final step, where you need to create and launch your Google shopping campaign.
For that, first, you need to create a Google Ads account and log in.
The tool will present the default onboarding page, where you must click the ‘Switch to Expert Mode’ button to speed up the process.
You need to choose ‘Sales’ as your campaign objective in the next page.
Next, you must choose the ‘Shopping’ option as your campaign type.
Then, you must select your Google Merchant Center account right below the above module.
Now you need to choose between two campaign subtypes, ‘Performance Max campaign’ and ‘Standard Shopping campaign’, depending on your choice of promoting platforms.
However, we are choosing the latter option in the following example.
Finally, you need to enter a campaign name and click on the ‘Continue’ button.
The next page will ask you to choose among three bidding strategies; ‘Target ROAS’, ‘Maximize clicks’, and ‘Manual CPC’; available at this stage.
Next, you must set an average daily budget for your Google shopping campaign.
If you are running multiple Google shopping campaigns offering the same products, you can set up different campaign priorities for each campaign.
Google Ads also allows you to select the networks where you want ads to appear, devices the ads should appear on, target locations, and campaign duration.
You need to name your ad group on the next step and set your cost-per-click bid if you have opted for the ‘Manual CPC’ strategy for bidding.
Finally, you must hit the ‘Create Campaign’ button to complete the process.
Bidding Strategies For Google Shopping Ads
Google shopping ads campaigns offer two following bidding strategies,
Manual Bidding
Manual bidding is the most straightforward bidding strategy that Google shopping platform offers. It allows you to set the maximum amount spent per click on your ad.
Though this strategy offers total control over your cost, most beginners get inferior results due to their lack of experience with PPC campaigns.
Automatic Bidding
If you are new to Google ads shopping campaigns, it is safer to opt for automatic bidding strategies to ensure better results.
Google automatically sets the bidding amount per click to help your ad campaigns reach a specific target.
Following are the three main automated bidding strategies offered by the Google shopping ads platform:
Maximize Clicks: The strategy ensures your ad campaign gets the maximum number of clicks possible within your budget.
Enhanced Cost-per-click: The strategy automatically adjusts manual bids to enhance more clicks that result in conversions.
Target ROAS: The strategy ensures your ad campaign generates the maximum conversions possible within your target return on ad spend (ROAS).
How To Maximize Revenue With Google Shopping Campaign?
In this section of the article, we will provide you with expert tips on how to generate maximum revenue using your Google shopping ads campaign.
Analyze Your Competitors’ Ads
Analyzing your competitors’ ad copies can help you to find the following,
- You can find the keywords your competitors are targeting in their ad copies. The competitor research feature of RankWatch can be handy for this purpose.
- The types of product titles and descriptions used by your competitors.
- The way your competitors are pricing similar products.
Use Optimized Product Titles
The product titles used in your Google shopping ads significantly impact your click-through rate.
A poorly optimized product title may result in zero or a minimum number of clicks.
You must follow the guidelines below to optimize your product titles,
- You must use a descriptive title that clearly describes your product.
- You should include relevant keywords in your product title to help Google understand the relevancy of your product with search terms.
- You must include your key product information and keywords within the first 70-100 characters of your product title.
- You must avoid writing your product title using all caps as per Google’s official product title guidelines.
- You should not include any promotional information like price, delivery date, or shipping cost in your product title as per Google’s official product title guidelines.
Use High-Quality Images
Displaying appealing product images distinguishes Google shopping ads from traditional Google search ads.
Offering high-quality product images is your first opportunity to attract and engage searchers to your shopping ads.
Moreover, Google Shopping may stop running your ad campaign if your ad contains low-quality images.
You need to follow the below guidelines by Google for your product images,
- You must use an image size of at least 250x250px for apparel and 100x100px for non-apparel shopping ads.
- Your product images must be within 64 megapixels or 16 MB.
- Your product image must show the entire product with zero or minimal staging.
- You must use a transparent or white background for your product image to work well with existing design elements of Google shopping ads.
- You should avoid using illustrations, placeholders, or generic images as your product image.
- You must avoid including any promotional elements in your product image.
- You should ensure that you offer a unique image for each product variant.
- Your product images must display the correct variant.
Add Negative Keywords
Suppose you sell high-end badminton rackets; you won’t want your Google shopping ad to appear for search terms like ‘Cheap badminton racket’ or ‘Used badminton racket’.
However, Google shopping ads often target irrelevant search terms, which results in a waste of your ad budget.
You can prevent that by applying negative keywords to your Google shopping ads, and the best way to implement that is to prepare a negative keyword list.
You must be thinking by now “how to find keywords that you must include in your negative keyword list?”
Here comes the search terms report. The report shows a list of search terms your shopping ads have appeared for.
- To access the search terms report, you first need to log in to your Google Ads account.
- Then, you need to click on ‘Campaigns’.
- Next, you must click on ‘Insights and reports’ to find the ‘Search terms’ option.
- Clicking on the same will show you the search terms report.
- First, you must identify the search terms from the report that are irrelevant to your product.
- Next, you must find relevant search terms that are getting a lot of clicks but not creating any conversions.
- You must add all these search terms to your negative keyword list by checking the adjacent boxes to the search terms and then clicking on ‘Add as negative keyword’.
The tool also allows you to select multiple search terms and add them in bulk to the negative keywords list.
Add Product Ratings
It would be great if you think from a buyer’s point of view to understand the importance of product ratings and reviews.
You will prefer opting for an online product with a 5-star rating from a lump sum number of buyers than a product with a 2-star rating.
Reviews and ratings play a significant role in buying decisions, and Google shopping ads are no exception.
If your product gets many positive reviews and high ratings, it will increase your Google shopping ads’ CTR and conversion rate.
Remember that by default, Google won’t display product ratings for your shopping ads. You must request Google for the same by filling out the assigned interest form.
Google will then decide whether to approve your request, provided your shopping ad fulfills the minimum eligibility criteria of 50 reviews to display product ratings.
Optimize Your Landing Pages
Just like the quality of your shopping ads decides the number of clicks your ad campaign will receive, your landing page quality decides how many conversions will be generated from those clicks.
Following are a few valuable tips on optimizing your landing pages,
Place Your CTA Correctly
Research says that most visitors spend more than half of their time on the upper half of your web page.
Hence, you must place the most essential elements of your landing page as high as possible on the page.
And what can be more essential than your CTA (call to action) button?
After all, the prime goal of any landing page is conversion, and if visitors can’t find your CTA conveniently, they may leave your landing page without scrolling down further.
Include Social Proof
Most searchers feel skeptical when it comes to online purchases, and the following doubts come to their minds,
- Does this website sell high-quality products?
- Will the actual product exactly match the description and images shown?
- Will it be safe to provide credit card information to this website?
You can eradicate their doubts to a great extent by providing social proof.
The social proof that most effectively substantiates your product quality is positive customer reviews.
However, you must remember that most customers may forget to post a positive review even if they are more than happy with your product.
Hence, you need to put following efforts to ensure drawing as many customer reviews as possible for your product.
- You can send automated emails to your customers requesting them for a review.
- You must ensure your automated emails for review requests hit customers’ inboxes only after they receive your product.
- You can include offers like free shipping or discounts on their next purchase in your review request emails to encourage customers to post a review.
Ensure A High Page Loading Speed
A slow page loading speed can seriously damage customer experience, which results in a high bounce rate.
That, in turn, drops your website’s SERP rankings.
Hence, you must ensure a faster page loading speed to attract new customers and retain your existing customers.
If you find a specific page is taking longer to load, you must check the size of that web page. It should be within the average size of 3 MB to ensure a rapid loading.
You can use RankWatch’s web page size checker tool for FREE to measure your web pages’ size accurately.
Following are the three essential tips for increasing your page loading speed.
- If you use high-definition images, ensure the images are properly compressed or in a web-friendly format.
- It would help if you did not make your content unnecessarily lengthy, as that may require more time to upload.
- You must opt for a widely used content delivery network (CDN) to ensure your content is delivered to the searchers from the closest server.
Final Thoughts
If you are an e-commerce seller, you know how challenging the present market scenario is. You also know the importance of displaying your products at the very top of the search results page.
Google shopping ads provide you with that opportunity bypassing the neck-to-neck competition for appearing on the organic search results.
However, it does not mean your shopping ad campaign will be successful by default without putting in the required effort.
You must implement all the essential tips provided in this article to make your Google shopping ad campaign successful and get a positive ROAS.