Why Is It Necessary to Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaign?

Simply put, to get better results! By optimising your Google Shopping campaign, you can decrease cost, increase order volume within your spend, revenue & therefore return on advertising spend (ROAS). There are several features and options available to get the most out of your shopping ads.

The following are ten recommended principles to managing Google Shopping campaigns:

Remove products that do not make you money

If you were to bid the same amount on your entire inventory in Google Shopping, then you may not bidding at the optimum price in order to get the most back from any individual item. In the example below, each product A, B, C & D has had 100 clicks. However, each has a different return on advertising spend so bids should be adjust accordingly. Item D for instance is not making any return, so by excluding this product, you have more money to spend on what is performing. Item A has a return of investment that is 1200% so it is worth increasing bids to try influence how often that product is served on Google.

Use promotions in your add to increase click through rates

There are a few ways to separate your products from the competition on Google Shopping. You can add additional text that users see when they hover over your ads (shown on the left). Also, you can showcase any voucher codes that are available (shown on the right). By using either, you are encouraging users to click on your ads instead of your competitors. Otherwise, the consideration might be based purely on price point.

Use custom labels

Custom labels are useful for segmenting the products that are in your shopping campaign into groups of your choice. You can choose up to 5 custom labels. You could use them to label the price bucket an item falls into, or separate your best sellers & items in clearance.

Below is a good example of utilising custom labels to index your merchandise:

Data Feeds

Your Google shopping campaign is heavily dependent on your data feed. You should try optimise these and its fairly easy to do. There are only a few points to remember: try to put in a photograph that stands apart from the photos shown by your competitors; use descriptive and self-explanatory titles – for example, instead of using an alphanumeric number, which doesn’t tell much to your potential customers, as a title for a product, just use the exact description for the product (say, a large red shirt or a sea green carpet) that will tell potential customers exactly what they are buying.

Other Things to Note

These examples only explain a few recommended principles. However, it is important to remember they must all be taken in consideration in order to improve the overall performance of your shopping campaigns. It is very important to keep on top of these strategies, especially making sure that you regularly add negative keywords because of how Google’s algorithm works. Remember, with Google Shopping you do not select the keywords you want to target – Google’s calculates what you should show for based on your product feed & how relevance it is to any search query.