10 GOOGLE SHOPPING ADS STRATEGIES TO UP YOUR GAME IN 2020

Undeniably, you would have come across the Google Shopping Ads. With every online search, these advertisements appear. This means you cannot ignore the presence of Google shopping Ads. Also, this gives businesses another reason to try the platform. When compared to traditional advertisements, Google Shopping Ads are highly effective. This is mainly because the products are displayed against high-quality images, and details that really matter to customers. Moreover, these advertisements appear in the topmost section of search results. This means potential customers are bound to see your business, at least once. When you wish to boost the sales of your business online, Google Shopping Ads can help in multiple ways.

What are Google Shopping Ads?

The Google Shopping Ads Network has two platforms that are dominant since the e-commerce revolution came into being - The Google Merchant Center and Google Adwords. The Merchant Center is the platform in which you can create the shopping feed. Google Ads is a platform where all of the marketing campaigns for the shopping feed are managed. Think of it as the dashboard or the backend, where you create budgets, manage bids, make optimizations, and gain insights as well. The Google Shopping Network helps online merchants work with a great way of selling products and advertising them to increase the reach.

Why should you use your Google Ads?

Google Ads is one of the most comprehensive ad networks available in the e-commerce sphere. It allows you to use its vast repositories of ecommerce marketing tools and features so you’ll be able to create an ecommerce business of your liking. The tools and services are also super intuitive and smart, and ensure you get all your doubts cleared with their team. Further, you’ll be able to scale up your business on the network and also hyper-target customers based on their preferences, demographics, and more. This makes it one of the best networks on the internet, and one you must surely try and use to grow.

How does Google Shopping work?

Google Shopping allows you to create shopping campaigns via Google ads and showcase these ads to the users, related to their search query. Whenever a user searches for a product-related term, the image, title, and price will be displayed on the search results. A lot of the searches that end up triggering these ads come with high intent to purchase. This is one of the main reasons advertisers see great results from the Google Ads campaigns.

Top 10 Google Shopping Campaign Strategies -

Here are some of the best strategies that can be used to improve the Google Shopping Campaign strategies -

1. Optimize the product titles - 

The product titles are one of the best areas to start if you’d like to see better results in the product feed optimization. There are a number of optimizations to a product feed and you can receive almost 10x the volume of traffic. You need to spend a decent amount of time and effort in ensuring the product titles become as relevant as possible and users can search your products with ease too. There are search query reports that can show the kind of keywords users is searching for. You’ll also need to pay attention to the words’ order along with the search terms that are driving the most revenue. Then, it’s time to incorporate the same into the beginning of the product titles too. This is an ongoing exercise and you need to find the term that suits your customer searches perfectly. With them, you’ll be able to optimize the overall query issue and get more people to subscribe.

2. Optimize your Product Feed Descriptions and Categories - 

You can also optimize the product feed descriptions and categories as well. These are the descriptions that your audience will see and use to engage and understand your brand better. The categories must be simple enough to understand and the split between products too can be made easier. The descriptions and the categories have to be properly aligned with the product being sold and its title. You can take time out once a week to complete this process in a more streamlined manner.

3. Optimizing your product images - 

The product images play such a big role when it comes to standing out from the rest of the competition. They give the product life and also help the customer understand the entire dynamics and dimensions of the product. By doing so, they will be able to also understand if a product suits the requirements as well. Up to 82% of people answered they were most likely to click on a shopping ad if the image had someone wearing the product rather than just an image of the product itself. It’s best to have a use-case of the product rather than just a simple image of the same. This too is an ongoing process and requires you to constantly optimize the images and ensure they look good on the site as well as the ads.

4. Use Google Shopping Ad Extensions - 

Ad Extensions are one of the biggest assets when it comes to text ads. In Google Shopping Ads, they can take the game to a whole other level as they can complement and enhance the existing text ads. There are generally two types of ad extensions for Google Shopping - 

1. Automated Extensions -

   These contain Tax information or shipping displayed in a PLA

2. Merchant Center Programs -

   This includes the Google Customer Review, Product Ratings, and Merchant Promotions among others.

Extensions are extremely effective in driving the conversion rates and the CTR as well. They are based purely on the information you provide in the Merchant Center. You can see these examples in different ads where additional texts generally appear. These include “90-day returns” and “Free shipping” among others. It’s one of the best ways to go about keeping your ads relevant and also interesting and engaging enough for them to keep shopping with your brand on the Google network.

5. Use Product ratings and reviews - 

This is one of the most important steps you can follow in order to drive your Shopify sales. As a large chunk of people purchases their products only after reading reviews and ratings, you need to constantly highlight the best ones on your page. By providing the right amount of flexibility in terms of honest reviews, people will shop more and look to buy more of your products. The product ratings and reviews need to be highlighted at some part of the Google ad and there are options to do this too. There’s a reason why most of the ads talk about their recommended and featured products, with reviews. 88% of online shoppers trust a product based purely on the review alone. It works in the same way a personal recommendation would and it is one of the strongest ways of product communication out there. Listings that don’t have a review or a rating look much incomplete and not very compelling when they are displayed beside listings that come with a review of the product. Product ratings can make your product not just stand out, but also build trust among many potential customers. It improves all of the visibility on search and also increases the CTR and conversion rates too. In order to qualify for the Product Ratings, you need to have enough reviews. When there are reviews, a few negative ones pop up too, but that’s fine. Why? This is because potential customers would prefer reading negative reviews as well, as it adds a layer of belief. The optimum rating for any product is 4.7 stars and not 5, as a perfect product is deemed unbelievable and fake. Adding the seller rating is also a beneficial step. It boosts the overall quality and effectiveness of the product listing too.

6. Implement a negative keywords strategy - 

Negative keywords can play a big role in making your ads show up only in relevant searches. As there aren’t any prospects of adding the keywords in the Google Shopping ecosystem, retailers have to believe Google to help them find the most relevant keywords. Despite writing near-perfect titles and descriptions, the Google algorithm doesn’t work 100%. It’s human (part-machine) after all. It can show your ads for search terms that are irrelevant. This can be problematic as your ad can pop up on an irrelevant search term and you can lose money for that. If the ads don’t get clicked, then Google will drop your quality score and not show your ads with the same frequency as before. Negative keywords are one way to resolve the issue by making the ads not show up on irrelevant search terms. Google won’t shop your ads against the search terms that contain the negative keywords. These negative keywords can save a large amount of money and also get rid of any unwanted clicks as well.  It will increase the quality score and improve the CTR of ads. It’s a simple and straightforward process that you can implement with relative ease.

7. Adjust bids by device performance - 

When the campaign is at the Ad group level, you should be able to adjust the device bids based on performance. It’s always better to track the ROAS when the account is being optimized as this allows you to do so for the content that brings you the best return for your business. In order to get this report, select the devices option that’s present in the navigation at the ad group level or campaign level.

8. Optimize by Geo Location - 

Normally, a customer’s location will play a role in the conversion rate. You can optimize this by placing modified bids based on the user location. It is important to increase the visibility of the ads and choose the ones that make a better return. This can be done at a campaign level and to discover the Geolocation, you’ll have to go to the locations tab in the campaign view.

9. Increase bids for high-performance products - 

As the campaigns are structured properly, you can also increase the visibility of products that seem to be performing better for you. You can do this by:

• Adjusting bids by the device.
• Increasing bids.
• Create a Remarketing strategy

This is a practice where you can target a previous visitor to your store and re-deliver ads to them. You need to add a remarketing code or tracking code and this is a simple process. Through remarketing, you can track customers based on their behavior and build audiences accordingly.

There are two types -

1. Dynamic Remarketing - 

In order to remarket, you can use the Display Ad campaign that’s available on Google. Once enabled, it uses the information from the Merchant Center and bulbs ads that are customized to the products the customers previously viewed.

2. Remarketing Lists for Search/Shopping Ads -

Remarketing lists are not an actual campaign and they are easily produced. Instead of having to build a total campaign, you can attach the audiences built with Google Ads or Google Analytics to the campaign.

To conclude - 

These are some of the best and user-friendly ways with which you can increase your Shopify sales. Keep experimenting and you’ll find the right ways to go about the different steps. Good luck!

Guest Post by AdNabu - 

AdNabu helps improve sales in Google Ads for eCommerce companies. If you are running the search, google shopping, or display campaigns in Google Ads, This software will be able to increase your sales.