Imagine: an office worker in a condo building in the center of Bangkok.
It’s 21 o’clock in the evening on a dark September Saturday.
After dinner, she is relaxing on her couch in a fully lit living room.
Tired of watching the television, she decides to finally read the book she bought a couple of weeks ago.
When she opens the book, reading the book is uncomfortable to her eyes because of the bad lighting.
She directly thinks of a solution to his problem so she will be able to read more comfortably: a reading lamp!
So she goes to Google and searches: “buy reading lamp”
You have an ecommerce shop that specializes in reading lamps. Your shop has the biggest assortment of reading lamps, from high quality to low prices.
But when he searches for “buy reading lamp” on Google, he doesn’t see your assortment in the Google Shopping search results.
Why is that? Because you haven’t started running Google Shopping ads yet. You don't have the time to learn how to set this up, so you only set up some general text ads.
Because you didn't show up at the top of the SERP, you just lost a potential customer.
You don’t want that to happen. That’s why we’ve put together this Google Shopping Ads guide for your ecommerce shop—so you can learn the fundamentals of Google Shopping. By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll have learned:
Let’s get into it.
When Google users search for any product, they're served Shopping ads. Shopping ads are shown in a carousel format on top of the SERP.
Throughout our clients, Shopping ads account for roughly 80% of clicks from non-branded product searches. All queries considered—branded and non-branded—Shopping ads drive around more than half of ecommerce advertisers’ total clicks.
Conclusion: Google Shopping is vital to ecommerce digital marketing.
For an in-depth explanation of what it takes to build a profitable Google Shopping campaign, get in touch with us today!
Short answer: a very different process compared to the rest of Google Ads.
In order to run Google Shopping Ads, you have to link your Google Ads account to Google Merchant Center. Don’t worry—it’s a fairly simple process. You can do that over here.
Once that’s settled, it’s time to upload your product feed to Google Merchant Center. A product feed is a spreadsheet that describes and organizes every product in your assortment in such a way that Google can easily categorize and index the product information.
Here is a more detailed explanation to set up your product feed for Google Merchant Center.
Shop owners with a small product assortment can create their own feeds through the use of Google Sheets. Larger advertisers (those who sell hundreds or thousands of products) will need to leverage an automated feed solution.
When creating your product feed, you’ll have to include the following information for each product in your assortment:
There’s a good reason Google wants you to include so much information: You do not create the Shopping Ads. Instead, Google indexes the product data you put in the product feed, and then it creates a digital inventory for the product in your store.
This way, when somebody searches for a product, Google has all the information it needs to automatically serve the most relevant product through Shopping ads.
Shopping advertisers don’t bid on keywords, either.
Shopping Ads uses the product information you uploaded to Google Merchant Center to target queries on Google. Such as is the case with SEO, the target keywords are automatically gathered through your product titles and product descriptions.
This way, and by uploading other required pieces of information, like the Google Product Category and GTIN—you make Google aware of the information it needs to show your assortment in the search results.
Now, it’s time to return to Google Ads Dashboard, and create some Shopping campaigns.
When you create a new Shopping campaign, Google will put all of your products into a single product group that is named: All Products. From there, you can break down that general product group into as many product groups as you see fit.
Make sure to think this through. The bids for Shopping Ads are set on product groups.
Across your assortment, products have different prices, different margins, and different conversion rates. If you put these products that vary widely across those three dimensions in the same product group, they’ll all be given the same maximum CPC bid. You don’t want that.
Here is a calculation to help you decide what to bid on a product.
To calculate available profit:
((selling price/tax percentage) * 100) - (purchase price) = available profit
To calculate Max CPC
(available profit*conversion rate percentage) = Max CPC
To calculate Initial CPC
(Max CPC/desired margin percentage) = initial CPC
In summary, the purchase cost, available margin, and conversion rate of a product, dictates the bid you can place on a product.
The only way to remove all variations between products within a single product group is to subdivide each individual product into its own product group.
In fact, we recommend this strategy for ecommerce advertisers with a small product assortment. However, if you have an assortment of hundreds or more products, this will not be possible.
You should subdivide the product groups in order to contain as little variation as possible. For any business, this is going to result in considerably different campaign structures.
Let’s say you’re a reseller who advertises products in the Lamp category. To begin with, you subdivide your All Products group into four separate product groups according to room type.Then you can subdivide these product groups according to margin: low and high margin.
Each room group is subdivided into bedroom, living room, kitchen and bathroom. Each bottom group breaks into high and low margins.
So, that leaves you with 8 distinct product groups. Here are a few examples:
These are the product groups to which you allocate the according CPC bids. Bid higher on “High Margin” product groups, bid lower on “Low Margin” product groups
Now that you’ve created the different product groups and allocated each of them with a corresponding bid, Google now knows how much you’re willing to pay per single click on each individual product ad.
As with every auction of Google Search, your Shopping ad lands in the sponsored search results for a given query partially depending on how much you’re bidding per click. The higher your click, the higher the ad will rank.
Another factor is Quality Score. Each time Google serves an ad for one of your products, it assigns the ad with a Quality Score.
Here are a few things you can do to improve Quality Score:
