Google Shoping is the Google’s price comparison where the user can find, as a search result, the products that match with de words used but in a atractive format with the essential elements to make a comparison between all the available offer on the Internet.
How can you improve your Google Shopping campaigns?
Google Shopping also has a lot of advantage for the advertiser because it’s about visuals ads where the potencial buyer will see: image of the product, name of the product, price and the shop where he can buy it just with a glance. So, it’s about an ad with similar structure as a sheet but sponsored and with the possibility of a great diffusion among internet users.
Also, and the most important thing, this ads appear in the first position of the search results, before any organic result and before any search ads. They can also occupy the most prominent positions, appaering in the right side of the screen, being an strategic location to guarantee good CTR rates. And if this was not enough, this advertising mode has his own section in the search engine so the advanced user can make his searches in the shoppin tab where all the advertisers can offer and show their products.
On the other hand, even though Google Shopping isn’t as developed as andvertising mode like Google Search beacous the advertiser’s panel has less elements and viriables to use for the optimitzation and a more controlled segmentation, this kind of adds offer a lot advantatges for the online store’s advertisers as it guarantee better conversion rates. And in the last years, Google is improving too much, so this will become in one of the most important tools for an e-commerce.
How does the Google Shopping works?
From now, we must consider the most important thing: stand out from our competitors, but not only in the Google Shopping results, but also in the page’s first positions. We must consider that the differential attribute in the Google Shopping Ads is the price. And therefore, to gain audience share is equally important to appear in the first results of the page of the search engine to ensure good CTR’s and conversion percentages.
To highlight our shopping ads and to appear in Google’s first positions it’s vital to work with our e-commerce’s SEO on page, because if we consider our catalog categorization, titles and descriptions as users serch on the internet, our Ad’s Quality Level will increase and therefore it will be easier and cheaper to scale and win our desired positions.
Prestashop or Magento
On the other hand, we work with moduls for tools as PrestaShop or Magento, and we must consider, not only the category tree, titles, images, descriptions product sheet (all the online shop architecture) but our policy of discounts, shipping costs and correspondence of our categories with the categories defined by Google.
However, there are other alternatives such as working with manual feeds (CSV files tabulated with specific columns for Google Merchant) that allow us to work atributes and fields to give value to our sheet. So, the advertiser that can work widely his sheet with the maximum information and quality, will be the winner and will get a postion to get the clicks from all the users. This, toghether with good PPCs in every bid executed in real time, will bring the advertiser to the top.
In this way, the sheet must be as completed and effective as possible to position his online shop better and highlight over all the competitors whether they are generated through a CSV file or through a module of his CMS.
How do we create a sheet in Google Shopping?
As we know, the sheet is very important to be in the first places of de user search. The main idea is to categorize our online store based on what the potential buyer looks in internet. For example, if we hace a furniture online store, could be interesting to fill the Product_Type of our prodcut feed based on our category tree, that we ‘ve designed it before using the key words with more searches like “Dining tables”, “Nordic style chair” or “upholstered chairs”.
On the other hand, we must also categorize the data feed in relation to the Google categories. In this way, Google will give priority to our store to show the results as we provide more information to the search engine.
Three key elements that we must consider when we are optimizating our shopping feed.
They are:
- Product’s tittle: It must contain words and specification that the user use for his searches. If we continu with previous examope of our furniture business, could be interesting to add the material, the style or if it is for kitchen or dinnning room to the product’s tittle. The point is to obtain a very good relationship between what is relevant for the user and the definition of our titles.
- The descriptions: It helps us brinmore relevance to our products. So it’s very important for us that our descriptions include all the characteristics of the product in a unique way. We must consider that this description will help the user, not only to know what we sell, but also understant the service he will find in our online store. These texts are equally important for us to communicate those added values that we think most important for our online store.
- Pictures: An other key factor. Currently, the the images are becoming very relevant to convey any information, and more than this, when we are talking about buying online.
Another important point to consider to use Google Shopping is that you can not publish any product that does not have EAN (GTIN in Google).Minimum two attributes: GTIN, brand and MPN
Finally, one last factor we must assess is the shipping costs. It’s very important that they remain clear and we can configure them in Merchant Center (intermediate platform of Google where we have to upload our product feed in CSV format, among other formats, for approval before being used as advertising material) as an any othe module for e-commerce that we are working with.
Apart from the feed optimitzation, is important for us to establish a data synchronization method to ensure the coordination of prices and stocks between ads and products that are available in the online store.
We usually program a cron to the server to update the feed during the night, but we have many less atuthomatic and equally effective ways to do that.
How do we optimize a Google Shopping campaign?
At this point, we know which factors are basic to sale in an effective way in Google Shoppin. We must implement them methodically and without sparing time and effort to not only improve the SEO of our store, but to favor search results and place ourselves above our consumers when we are investing publicly to announce our product catalog through Google Ghopping.
If you want to go further and make the most of the possibilities offered by Google Shopping we recommend you these tips:
- Prices: Set some prices and after a week download them. In this way we will be able to highlight our products through the crossed out price and the price on offer to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.
- Shipping conditions: We can highlight our ad with special shipping conditions, for example using 24-hour shipping or free shipping. With this, we will improve our CTR standing out from our competitors.
- Customer Reviews: As you already know, these show the customer ratings that have already purchased your product. It is necessary to activate the program from Merchant and hire a customer valuation service (we recommend TrustedShops, although there are some more in the market). These reviews help Google and therefore it is beneficial for our online business because it will help us to position ourselves better in the searches of the users and stand out from the competition since the opinions are shown in the ads in the form of stars giving more credibility and category to shopping ads.
Once we have launched our Google Shopping adwords campaign, we must check if our ads are surrendering. For this, we can only be guided by three parameters within the Adwords panel for advertisers:
- The reference CTR compared to our CTR. If our relative CTR is higher than the average of our competitors it means that our impressions / clicks ratio is correct and that the quality of our data feed is suitable.
- The maximum reference CPC. In this case, if it is lower means that with the same impressions as our competitors we are paying a lower price. This means that we are also on the right track since due to the quality of our advertising inventory, we are paying less for advertising bids than our competitors.
The percentage’s impressions top search and percentage impression absolute top search.
It is the number of times that our ads are shown in the highlighted positions on the Google search page in relation to the number of possible existing positions. If the ratio is less than half, we must improve the quality of the feed or increase the bids or CPC because we have not obtained enough visibility. The ideal would be higher than 90% to guarantee us preferred positions and therefore an optimal CTR ratio.
Finally, if we want to give another twist to our shopping ads for online stores, we can optimize our campaigns through four very easy steps:
- Segment the campaign initially: campaign priority and bid type.
- Customize the columns within the feed: as the calculation of the absolute margin between the PVP and the wholesale price to be able to segment the campaigns based on commercial margins of each product to guarantee a positive ROI.
- To negative traffic: it is very normal that once we have published the ads, there is a lot of low-skilled and non-relevant traffic, so it is important to optimize our impressions by excluding low quality traffic.
- Automatisms: We can creat Smart Google Shopping campaigns so that the ads also can be seen throught channels like Youtube, Display or Gmail and not only in the search network or the shopping tap. We are alweys looking for automatisms.We must know that it is important to have a sufficiently broad and valid history to be able to launch Smart Shopping campaigns, that is, not only micro-conversions but also enough conversions / transactions in the Google Ads account. It is also interesting to know that Shopping’s created campaigns can not be adapted to Smart Shopping, but we must create them again.
