A Strategy Guide for Google Shopping Campaigns

So you’ve started a new business selling goods online. Your ecommerce site is good to go and you want to get your products in front of as many people as possible. Time for Google Shopping ads!

In this blog we’ll go through some things to keep in mind when you enter the world of Google Shopping ads to ensure you make as much money as you can and achieve the most success possible!

Google Shopping overview

When a user searches on Google for a product, for example a t-shirt, Google Shopping ads are the ones that appear at the top or the side of the search page with an image and information about the product.

You’ll want your products to appear there to immediately catch peoples’ eyes and drive them towards your business.

So, how do you go about getting these ads up and running? First, you need to link your online store’s product feed to your Google Merchant Centre and your Google Ads account.

Now you’ll have to decide whether you want to run with standard ads or Smart Shopping ads. If you want full control over every element of your ads, standard is for you. If you want to get quickly up and running and leave the nitty gritty to Google to figure out then Smart Shopping will suit you just fine.

Smart Shopping ads essentially write themselves, as the copy and product description are put together by Google from a large selection of titles and product descriptions that you provide them with. The more information you give Google at the start then the more power they have to create adverts that will give you the best chance at a conversion.

Soon though, Performance Max adverts will replace Smart Shopping and they’ll be the go-to ad format for Shopping campaigns, but more on them at a later date!

Use trends to leverage sales

One of the best strategies you can use when managing Google Shopping campaigns is to base your campaigns on seasonal and social trends.

For more on why trends are so important, let’s hear from our Paid Media Manager, JP:

“Seasonal and social trends are massive factors to be aware of when dealing with active shoppers as this allows you to start planning your budget and campaigns in advance.

For example, when do people start looking for bikinis? Well, by taking a look at the last 5 years of Google Search trends that we’ve provided, you can see that search for bikinis generally go up in February, peak in July and decline in August.

But what about social trends? This is about being more responsive to the market, and not missing an opportunity. For example, one of our clients, The Fragrance World, saw great fortune when Love Island star Teddy mentioned that his aftershave was Baccarat Rouge 540 which sent demand for the product skyrocketing. We were able to adapt, and prepare our budget and segment our campaigns towards the highly sought-after aftershave to make sure our advertising spend got the best return possible.”

Essentially, if you can anticipate when people will be searching for products that you sell, you can really take advantage and push your brand with the best chance of success.

Make informed decisions

Every decision that you make when setting up Shopping adverts should be led by data. If you’re just guessing and making decisions willy-nilly then you’ll see mixed results, and you’ll likely never be able to decipher what’s working and what isn’t in your bizarre marketing strategy.

The two most important metrics for you to keep in mind when constructing Shopping ads are cost per conversion (CPC) and return on ad spend (ROAS).

Ideally, you want the lowest CPC and the highest ROAS possible. Of course, this is an ideal scenario and can be very difficult to achieve depending on your niche but provided that you take the time to test any changes to your adverts before you fully implement them then you’re well on your way to making this a reality.

Finally, Google provide you with something called Clickshare which is a metric to show how many times your ads were clicked on compared to how many searches they showed up for.

Other tips

Lastly, here’s a few more tips for you to keep in mind when composing your Google Shopping strategy.

You should take advantage of custom labels. These are essentially groups of your products that can be saved for ease of use later on down the line. This is essentially just keeping your product feed up to date and grouped together. But you can also create labels for groups such as ‘best sellers’ which won’t necessarily be grouped on your product feed but you may want to run adverts on them.

As well as this, if you use Shopify then you should consider using their custom API to keep your product feed up to date. In the past, this tool was quite cumbersome and unreliable to use, but now it’s been updated and actually makes transferring your Shopify product feed into your Google account quick and simple.

Use a Google Partner agency

The best tip that we can give is to leave your Google Shopping strategies up to the experts to decide.

At Blaze Media, we run Google Ads for many of our clients and are effective at delivering a high ROAS (return on advertising spend) across multiple industries due to our engaging and bold strategies.

Get in touch with us and we can set up a chat with our Paid Media Manager who can advise on what the best course of action is for your business in relation to your goals.