Have you ever thought about why Google is the best search engine? Google is always coming up with new ideas to make itself a one-stop shop for both companies and consumers. With 89.3 billion hits a month, Google knows how important it is to help people find what they need. For companies like yours, that link can mean the difference between huge sales and failing to be seen.
Now, Google Shopping can help you show your items to millions of buyers in a way that gets their attention. Did you know that Google is where almost half of all product searches start?
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With more people shopping online, it’s clear that the future is digital. If you want your business to do well in the ever-changing online market, you need to understand buying feed optimization.
You should improve your shopping feed if you want to stand out and get the attention of people who might buy from you. This post will teach you the most important things you need to know to optimize your Google product feed.
What are free product listings on Google?
Since 2020, Google Shopping search results have mostly been free product listings. This is a big change for the product, which used to only show paid listings. This change, which started out only affecting businesses in the U.S., was applied everywhere. Free ads for products have been good for buyers, sellers, and Google all around.
Consumers now have better access to a wider range of goods and more handy ways to buy them. An increased native reach is good for sellers because it doesn’t cost them anything extra. And Google can now fight better with other big names in online shopping thanks to this move.
As the name suggests, the program is free to join, but sellers must make sure they improve their product listings by using SEO best practices. This is the best way to increase your chances of reaching a wide range of possible buyers on different Google sites.
Importance of Optimization
You made your online store easy for people to use and spent money on social media marketing. But no matter what you do, sales don’t change. There’s a chance that your Google Shopping product feed is blocking potential customers from finding your great goods.
Your feed is like the front window of your online store. Shoppers won’t be able to see your website if the window is messy and full of wrong information. This is where product data feed optimization comes in handy, turning your feed into a display that gets hits and sales.
Why should you optimize? A lot of what Google Shopping does depends on the information you put in your product list. This tells search engines when and where to show your goods. Your goods could get lost in the digital shuffle if your feed isn’t optimized and key details are left out.
People will click on your product listings if your feed is well-organized and has titles that are clear and short and descriptions that are interesting. It turns into more website visitors and possible buyers.
12 Simple Tactics to Optimize Your Google Shopping Campaigns
1. Optimize your product feed
The first step is to make the product feed optimization. This is where Google gets information about your goods so that they can show you ads. You need to add as many product attributes as you can that describe your things and make sure they are as good as they can be.
2. Product data for Google Shopping
Product data is the most important information about the things you want to sell on Google’s online store. This information in your Google shopping feed includes the product title, its price, whether it’s in stock, and a link to the product page. Having good pictures and clear descriptions is very important because they have a direct effect on how your products are shown to potential buyers.
3. Optimize your campaign structure
One of the most important things you can do to set yourself up for long-term success is to make sure your campaign strategy is optimized. It can be hard to know what that means until you’re more experienced.
Your goal should be to have as much power as possible over your product listing ads. You can then bid on different goods in different ways. This isn’t possible right away, but you can divide and arrange your goods in a way that makes it possible.
You don’t want to have the same bid for all of your items because some have higher profit margins, more famous items, lower conversion rates, and so on. That’s why Google Ads lets you set your goods apart into different groups. You can sort them by group, brand, condition, item ID, product type, and custom labels, as we already said.
4. Divide your products into ad groups
Since you won’t be able to bid on your ads by keyword, you’ll need to find another way to do it. Instead, you can use ad groups to organize your goods. Like different parts of a store, your ad groups are like those.
Another important idea is to make sure that the ads that show up are as useful as they can be. You may have seen that your first ad group was already there when you started your campaign.
Here’s how you can create additional ad groups:
- Log in to your account.
- Select “Ad groups” from the page menu.
- Press the plus sign (+).
- Pick a campaign to click on and decide where your ad group will go.
- Give your ad group a name.
- Place your bid.
- All you have to do is click “Create.”
You can now divide your goods into groups and then further groups. If your feed has categories with more than one level, you need to use each level individually.
This is how you add a product group for Clothing & Accessories > Jewelry > Bracelets: first make a group for Clothing & Accessories, then split it up by type to make a group for Jewelry, and finally split it up again for Bracelets. It might look hard, but it’s really not.
5. Find your winners and losers
There will be items in your line that work better than others. You should know this about your ads so that you can make changes that are most effective. “Winners” are items or groups of items that bring you a lot of sales.
People who are “losers” send you a lot of hits but no transactions. Since you have to pay for every click, you probably want to sell your items as well as show them off. Figure out which of your ads work and which don’t. This will help you increase sales and lower your CPA, which will increase your ROAS.
6. Exclude unprofitable products
Taking items out of your campaign is an easy way to stop selling things that aren’t making you money. You only need to mark these things as not being included in your bids.
You can quickly remove winners from your feed, though, if you use a data feed tool with a similar filter. You might also want to do this when you know that some things won’t sell well. You can write them down and use one rule to leave them out.
7. Use negative keywords
Negative keywords save your efforts without being seen. You can’t set keywords that will make your product ads show, but you can do that with text ads. Your data feed is used for all searches. However, if you add negative terms, you can pick which searches your ads will show up for.
With negative keywords, you can tell Google which search terms should not show your ads. Let’s say you sell bands made of silver. If someone is looking for a gold bracelet, they might not buy your goods, but they might click on your ad. And if this keeps happening, it could cost you a lot of money on ads.
You can fix this by adding “gold” as a negative term. This way, when he types in “gold bracelet,” your ad will not appear. You can add bad keywords to the whole campaign or just to one ad group at a time (we’ll talk more about that next). It’s easy. Just click on “Keywords,” scroll down to “Negative Keywords,” and enter your numbers.
8. Bid Adjustments as part of your bidding strategy
This is one of the best ways to bid on a specific product. You already know that some clicks are worth a lot more than others. Changes to your bids give you more power over who sees your ads and when. We’ll talk about a few types that will help your Shopping ads.
The Place
With the location price tweak, you can change where shoppers are and how often they see your ads. Putting up ads in more than one place can help if you know that there is more competition in one city. Then you could raise your price if those sales are very important to you.
Things
Let’s say you see that most of your sales are coming from desktop computers, then from phones, and finally from tablets. That way, you won’t waste your ad spend because you can change your bids based on the gadget being used.
Timetable
If you sell certain things in certain places, at certain times of the week, your ads might do better. The “Reports” tab lets you see how things are going for every day of the week or every hour. As you can see, this information could be very helpful because your cost per turn might be higher on the weekends or at night.
9. Use A/B testing images
It’s not always possible to tell which picture will work best with your customers, even if you think you know them pretty well. It is important to A/B test them to find out which ones work best for your Google Shopping strategy.
Try changing the image in different ways and then look at the effects. If you know these things, you’ll be able to optimise your product images and make your ads work better. If you are serious about your Google Shopping efforts, you shouldn’t just guess.
10. Don’t make drastic changes
It might be exciting to try to make a lot of changes at once, but that’s not the best thing to do. Google Shopping ads are very smart. A small change to your bid could have a big impact on how well you do. So, other than leaving out your winners, you shouldn’t make any big changes.
Another good rule is that you shouldn’t change your bids by more than 20%. That should be done for groups of products that bring you no more than 20% of your business. For instance, if your campaign gets 1000 clicks in a certain amount of time, only change your bids for product groups that get up to 200 hits total.
Also, it should be simple to see if the changes you made are helping you. There will be more trouble with this if you make a lot of changes at once. You might want to use A/B testing in your ads to make sure you’re making the best changes.
11. Consider running a Performance Max campaign
Google smart shopping campaigns have changed into performance max programs. So, you should consider running performance max campaigns. You should still begin this new type. It does most of the work for you! There is a brand-new type of Google Ads campaign called Performance Max. It blends smart bidding and targeting.
The main goal of this effort is to make brands more visible and get more sales across the whole Google network. You can also run a feed-only performance max campaign, which will only show ads for Google Shopping. Performance Max uses smart bids to improve ad performance in real-time.
You should think about running a Performance Max ad if
- You want to connect with new types of customers (across the Google Network).
- You want to find out a lot about your audience, how well your strategy is doing, and other things.
- In your promotion plan, you’ve set several goals.
- Putting your ad plan into action shouldn’t take too much time.
12. Take control of your product categories
Interestingly, the product type is not required. If you don’t set a [google_product_category] on your spreadsheet, Google will use its constantly changing product taxonomy to choose a category for you.
You don’t want Google to be free. You know these goods better than anyone else. You’ve already set the correct price, name, and GTIN information, as well as good, relevant titles and descriptions. Now you need to set the category of your product.
Conclusion
The Google Shopping experience is changing quickly, as shown by the fact that free ads were just added not long ago.
As people’s habits change and they become more willing to buy things online, you can expect the search giant to keep improving how people shop on Google.
The best way to be successful in Google’s shopping environment and adapt to the challenges of a changing market is to make your free product listings as good as they can be.
Vijay Sood is a seasoned digital marketer with a passion for driving online growth and innovation. With a robust background in developing and executing comprehensive digital strategies, Vijay excels in leveraging SEO, content marketing, and social media to boost brand visibility and engagement. His expertise lies in transforming data-driven insights into actionable marketing campaigns, helping businesses achieve their digital objectives.