Shopping campaigns are an essential part of nearly every e-commerce company’s PPC toolkit. Shopping campaigns are not only a very efficient way to showcase a product’s visual attributes, but they are also highly automated, which makes them responsive and reactive.
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But in contrast to traditional search advertisements, the user has significantly fewer alternatives when it comes to targeting because they are so automated. However, there may be a benefit to this since Google would make use of all the resources at its disposal to show an advertisement to users who are looking for the correct goods at the perfect time and inquiry.
The Reasons for Using Advanced Google Shopping Management Techniques
The fact that Google Shopping is used by all retailers is its largest drawback. Therefore, you’re only beginning to scratch the surface when it comes to securing the top spot by sticking to the fundamentals. Additionally, completing the fundamentals requires a significant financial commitment, particularly when there are hundreds of products to market.
The majority of shops use Google Shopping advertisements as a sales channel; thus, the only way to succeed is to outsmart your rivals with more sophisticated tactics.
Now is the time to start embracing the power of AI and machine learning—from real-time bidding strategies to optimizing the performance of each SKU. Implementing new AI technologies like Performance Max in your plan this Golden Quarter is the only way you’re going to level up.
How Do Google Shopping Campaigns Work?
The best part about shopping marketing is that Google handles the majority of the labor-intensive work. Their algorithm generates advertisements for your products automatically and pairs them with pertinent search terms. Your bidding strategy can even be automated.
To start a standard shopping campaign, you need to link your AdWords account to your Google Merchant Center. Next, pick which items from the feed to highlight. Every shopping strategy should have more than one ad group. Make sure that you’re putting your goods in the right groups within that.
#1: Use product groups
If all of your goods are in one group right now, this is the one for you! There are many benefits to dividing your products into smaller groups for the reporting and performance parts of your campaigns. It won’t be obvious which product is carrying the weight if, for example, you are managing a product group with dozens or even hundreds of goods that all have positive ROAS.
Frequently, a single product is what’s distorting your findings in a favorable way. You can see your analytics more clearly if you divide your products into several groups. If you follow the aforementioned procedure, you may also discover that the winning product is only using a portion of its impression share, which means you are losing money if you don’t raise your bid on that product.
One of the key components of Google Shopping advertisements is to go through your ad account and divide up large product categories into smaller, more closely related groups. This is a great way to improve return on investment.
#2. Google Shopping Bidding Strategy
One of the most effective bid methods for Google Shopping is this one.You are undoubtedly aware that certain clicks are far more valuable than others. You may exert more control over who sees your ads and when by utilizing bid modifications. Let’s discuss a couple varieties that will work well for your shopping advertisements.
Location
You can manage the frequency at which shoppers can view your advertising based on their geographic location by utilizing the location bid adjustment. If you’re advertising in multiple places and you are aware that a certain city has more competition than others, this can be useful. If those sales are particularly essential to you, you might raise your bid in that situation.
Device
Let’s say you notice that the majority of your sales come from desktop computers, with mobile devices and tablets coming in second and third, respectively. Then, in order to avoid wasting your advertising budget, you can modify your bids according to the device being utilized.
Timetable
Depending on where you’re selling and what you’re selling, your ads may do better at certain times of the day or week. If you go to the records tab, you can see how things went for each day of the week or hour of the day. You might find that your cost per conversion is much higher on the weekends or at night, so this knowledge could be very useful.
#3. Make the Most of Product Data
Every field in Google Shopping presents a chance for your business. Strive to use product data that is of excellent quality. Title, description, and other structured data markup fields can significantly increase Google’s capacity to match a customer’s search query with your goods.
The best ways to:
- Your term should be in the title of your item.
- Make sure you’re using the right type of product.
- Give detailed product descriptions that include features like color or specs and mark down prices with the “sale price” tag.
#4. Use the Right Tools for Optimization
You should see if the eCommerce platform you use has a built-in plugin or extension that can help keep shopping feeds up-to-date immediately. Additionally, you should make use of all of Google for Retail’s services. Along with ways to make yourself more visible, you might want to use technologies that help customers make choices.
For instance, ensure that you are displaying client testimonials, such as reviews and ratings. Yotpo uses this social evidence to make you stand out in searches. You can use written reviews and star ratings in your Rich Snippets, Google Shopping Ads, and Google Seller Ratings. You can connect the reviews on your website to your Google Shopping feed.
This lets you add star scores and reviews to your Google Shopping ads. This is only true for Google Shopping. This kind of user-generated content is especially important for building power, trustworthiness, and customer satisfaction. When Yotpo clients add reviews and scores to their Google Shopping ads, the click-through rate (CTR) goes up by 24%.
#5. Use negative keywords
The unsung heroes of your marketing efforts are your negative keywords. You cannot specify the keywords that will cause your product advertising to appear, unlike with text ads. Each and every query is taken from your data feed. Negative keywords, however, allow you to restrict the searches that your advertising will appear for.
Google may determine which search terms won’t result in your ads by using negative keywords. Assume you are a seller of silver bracelets. Although he might click on your advertisement, a person searching for a gold bracelet is unlikely to purchase any of your goods. And your ad spending budget may suffer greatly if this continues.
‘Gold’ can be added as a negative term as a workaround to prevent your advertisement from appearing when the user searches for a “gold bracelet.” Negative keywords can be added for the entire campaign or specifically for each ad group (more on that next). To add your values, simply select the ‘Keywords’ tab, scroll down to Negative keywords, and enter them.
#6. Optimize Your Site for Conversion
Simply put, click-through is only the beginning of the consumer journey. In order to optimize your sales funnel and reduce acquisition expenses, you must also make sure your website is prepared to handle a Google Shopping campaign.
- It takes 0.85% of clicks on Google Shopping ads to actually buy something.
- When someone clicks through, 1.90 percent of them buy something.
If you give a high-intent shopper who finds your website through a search the best experience possible, they will buy from you.
#7. Optimize your campaign structure
Creating an optimized campaign structure is one of the most important things you can do to position yourself for long-term success. But it can be challenging to understand just what it means if you’re just getting started.
Gaining as much control as you can over your product listing advertising is your aim. In this manner, you can place many bids for various things. Although you can’t do this right now, there are strategies to divide and arrange your products so that you can.
Because different products have varying profit margins, some are more popular than others, and others have drastically variable conversion rates, etc., you shouldn’t have one bid for all of your products. For this reason, you can bundle your products together using Google AdWords. You can group them according to category, brand, condition, item ID, product type, and custom labels, as we previously discussed.
#8. Use A/B testing
Even if you think you know your clients pretty well, you can’t be sure which picture will fail and which will get their attention. To find out which photos work best for your Google Shopping ad, you need to do A/B testing.
Try making a few different changes to the picture and then look at how they turned out. Knowing this gives you the information you need to change the images in your ads to make them more effective. Guessing would not be a good way to do Google Shopping marketing if you are serious about it.
#9. Don’t make drastic changes
Even though it would be tempting to attempt and implement a lot of changes at once, this isn’t the best strategy. Ads on Google Shopping are delicate. A minor modification to your offer could significantly impact your outcome. Therefore, you shouldn’t make any significant adjustments beyond eliminating your losers.
A decent rule of thumb is to avoid changing your offers by more than 20%. For product categories that account for no more than 20% of your traffic, take that action. For instance, you should only change your bids for product groups that receive a maximum of 200 visits overall if your campaign receives 1000 clicks in a given amount of time.
Not only that, but it should be easy to see if the changes you made are helping you. If you make a lot of changes at once, this will be harder. To be sure you’re picking the best options, you might want to try A/B testing with your ads.
#10. Consider running a Performance Max campaign
By the end of Q3, all Google Smart Shopping and Google Local campaigns had been transformed into Performance Max campaigns. For those of you who had been conducting these campaigns up to that point, Performance Max most likely replaced your daily routine.
You should still think about introducing this new campaign type if you’ve been using normal Google Shopping campaigns because it essentially handles everything for you! Performance Max is a new campaign type that Google Ads has added. It mixes targeting and intelligent bidding.
The main goal of this campaign is to make the company more visible and increase sales across the whole Google network. You could also run a Performance Max campaign with only feeds and no images if you only want to focus on Google Shopping. Performance Max uses smart pricing to get the most out of ads in real time.
You should definitely consider running a Performance Max campaign if:
- You want to reach new customer segments (across the Google Network).
- You want to gather lots of data on audiences, campaign performance, and more.
- You’ve set multiple goals within your advertising strategy.
- You don’t want to spend a lot of time executing your ad strategy.
Conclusion
Any e-commerce business that wants to grow its market share and make more money in a very competitive field needs to learn advanced Google Shopping techniques. If you use the detailed strategies we talked about, you may be able to make your Google Shopping ads much more effective. If you understand how complicated product feed optimization is, you can be sure that your listings are correct, interesting, and easy for potential customers to find.
Overall, learning these cutting-edge Google Shopping strategies will help you grow your e-commerce business in a way that doesn’t hurt sales and brings in more niche customers. Take the initiative, keep learning, and adapt to new market trends to stay ahead of the competition.
Komal is a dynamic and results-driven digital marketing professional with a passion for leveraging innovative strategies to drive business growth. Her expertise spans across social media marketing, content creation, SEO optimization, and data analytics, making her a valuable asset in the ever-evolving digital landscape.