What is Google Shopping & why is it important?

Shopping Campaigns make it easy to connect with consumers and promote your products by streamlining the usual process prior to a conversion. The reason this is possible is because these ads not only show a title, but a product image and price. For this to work, you require a e-commerce website & product feed compatible with Google’s feed specification.

The campaign in Adwords helps with managing & bidding on the individual items in your feed. From here, you can see individual or group items performance data. With shopping campaigns you also have access to competitive landscape data.

Get started on your shopping campaign right away:

Use the Product Feed in the Merchant Centre Properly

Google’s Merchant center is one of the most important aspects of the Shopping Campaign. This is where you store your data feed. The data feed is a list comprising of all your products and a whole bunch of attributes for each. For each product, you have to define attributes as required by Google. These attributes include fields like ID, Title, Availability, Price, and so on. Once you finish filling up these attributes, the ads for your products will be automatically generated based on the data entered by you in the feed.

Below is an example of a product data feed:

Some Tips for Product Feeds

There are things to keep in mind that will help you to make proper use of Google’s Shopping Campaign. For example, you should know the position of your ads is not determined by keywords – it works via an algorithm that searches whether your product data is a good fit for a user’s search query. Therefore, you should use titles and descriptions for your products that attract customers. Also, ensure that the links to product pages are working, and the product prices that you mention are exactly what you are selling the product for. In addition, the product images that you are using are high quality and do not contain any watermarks.

Example of good and bad images are shown below:

 Tips for Product Grouping and Bidding

You can bid individual by item or in groups (and you can define these as you want to). Note: Google will automatically add a group called “Everything Else” at every hierarchical level for a ‘safety net’.

If your inventory is small, then you can start grouping by category and brand and then place bids for each product ID. However, if your inventory is large, then bidding for individual product IDs becomes infeasible. In such cases, you could group products based on the profit margins and then place a bid for each group. Remember that, to Google, it does not matter how you opt to group your offerings. Grouping is for your bidding convenience only; so group wisely.