Google Shopping is a feature that allows users to shop online. Customers may use it to look for, view, and compare items. When a person searches for a type of product on Google, these products appear either on the main search engine results page or in the shopping section. Having your products listed on Google Shopping is optimal for eCommerce owners. Let’s get into how you can get started and how you can boost rankings if you already are listed on Google Shopping.
How To Get Listed On Google Shopping
To make use of Google Shopping, retailers will need to use two platforms: Google AdWords and Google Merchant Center. They let you manage budgets, bids, and parameters like location and ad schedule, as well as optimize based on AdWords account ad performance information. A seller’s ‘product feed,’ can be found in Google Merchant Center and include important product attributes such as EAN, price, color, and ISBN. If you don’t already have accounts on these platforms, you will need to set them up.
It’s important to mention that Google Shopping is not available in several countries, which is why you need to ensure that you are targeting shoppers in a country that supports it. You can find the list of countries where Google Shopping is available here. For our local readers, Google Shopping is supported in Canada.
Setting up a Google Merchant Center account — You’ll need to submit information about your business and validate your website to create a Google Merchant Center account. Next, you will need to upload your feed in XML (or text) format containing a list of your products for sale, along with their corresponding attributes, price, availability, brand, and so on. We’ll cover more about how to correctly optimize your product lists shortly.
Creating Google Shopping Campaigns
To get started on listing your products on Google Shopping, follow these steps:
- Link your Google Merchant account to your Adwords account.
- Select your country of sale on Google in Merchant Center.
- Start configuring your shopping settings and Adwords settings such as campaign priority and bidding strategy.
- Make sure to select “product shopping ad” for your created campaign.
- Create an Ad group that contains “All products”.
How To Optimize Google Shopping Campaigns
Optimization is as crucial on Google Shopping as it is for the search engine. If you want to run a successful shopping campaign, then this requires optimization at the forefront and then regular monitoring. Follow some of our key tips to improve Google Shopping ranking to increase accuracy for your target audience and yield better results. Google is relatively hush-hush about the specifics of their ranking system and what metrics they base it off. However, there are a few foolproof tips you can follow to boost your Google Shopping ads ranking, such as:
- Product feed — Google takes the product information from the product feed and implements it in your ads with the help of attributes. This includes anything from product id to availability and condition. If this information is not inputted by you, then it will not be used and can harm your chances of ranking well.
- Bid adjustments — not all clicks are necessarily in your favor, which is a concept you may be very familiar with from Google Adwords. The same applies to Google Shopping. Redirect your attention to products that are generating better results and less on those that have a higher cost per conversion.
- Use Google Special Offers — you may have seen products displayed on Google Shopping with a “Special offer” tag. This is a great way to catch the attention of scrollers. If you want to give your products an edge over the ocean of competition, then special offers are certainly one way to do so.
- Google Store Ratings — a five-star ranking and credible reviews can never be a bad thing, especially in the world of eCommerce. Google Shopping typically displays a product rating on a five-star scale that is fetched from third-party sources. Having at least 50 reviews on your product is also optimal since trusted products offer more reliability among buyers.
- Quality score — optimizing for Google’s quality score is another great consideration when running shopping ads. The quality score of your ads and keywords is rated on a scale of 0-10 and considers the page’s clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and overall experience.
- Optimize product titles — Google Shopping title optimization is just as necessary as creating enticing and informative titles on any other platform. Instead of listing the product as “red couch”, opt for “maroon loveseat with cotton-soft cushions”. You don’t need to write an entire paragraph to make the products stand out and provide more appealing to the user.
- Look into negative keywords — Your Google Shopping quality score can also be impacted by negative keywords. These are the keywords that you don’t want to draw in views for since they don’t match with what you are targeting.
- Use high-quality images — utilize clean and high-quality images for your product listings. If there is too much noise in the image or the image seems like it was taken with a low-quality smartphone, then not only will this repel shoppers but it will impact Google rankings as well.
Ranking on Google has expanded past only optimizing for the search engine — your business also needs to rank on Google Shopping if it’s in eCommerce. A great way to optimize and rank high on Google Shopping is to reflect on how you shop on eCommerce giants like eBay or Amazon. You typically go for the listing with the non-blurry picture, detailed description, and lengthy positive reviews. Implement these changes into your Google Shopping campaign and you’re bound to notice positive results. When in doubt, contact us and our team of digital experts will get your Google Shop campaigns up and running.
