Utilising Google Shopping campaigns in your eCommerce marketing strategy

The importance of a well executed Google Shopping campaign for your eCommerce marketing strategy

If you run an eCommerce business, the way you measure your success will undoubtedly be orders being placed through your website and revenue generated. In order to meet your goals, you should have a well thought out eCommerce marketing strategy in place.

One of the key elements we recommend for any start-up or existing eCommerce business is having a Google Shopping campaign in place. In this article we explain a bit more about what a Google Shopping campaign is, how it works, and how to make the most of it. 

So, what is a Google Shopping campaign? 

We’ll start with the basics. A Google Shopping campaign is an advertising method specifically for eCommerce websites, allowing businesses to get their products in front of the right people as they search on Google. 

It works by adding various product information and assets to a shopping ‘feed’ called the Google Merchant Centre, which is then automatically pulled into a product ad that displays on Google. 

To give you an example, if you type into Google ‘Mountain bike tyres’, you will see various product images appear at the top of the results page, before any text based ads. These are pulled in from Google Shopping campaigns and will be showing a variety of products that are available to buy online. 

There is also something called a Google Smart Shopping Campaign which is an automatically generated advert for people looking to buy the products you sell. Sounds good right? 

Benefits of setting up a Google Shopping campaign

If you run an eCommerce store, utilising Google Shopping is a no brainer really. Here are some of the key benefits: 

  • It puts you at the top regardless of your organic rankings – many businesses struggle to get organic rankings quickly. Especially for start-ups, it can be hard to get a prominent presence without paying. Google Shopping allows you to do just this for a reasonable budget. 
  • It’s relatively cheap to advertise in this way – the question about budget for this type of campaign isn’t an easy one to answer because it completely depends on the competitiveness of your products, the number of products you wish to advertise, and whether you want to appear first or not. However, in our experience, it falls between search campaigns and display campaigns in terms of cost per conversion.
  • It can be paired with Google Search ads – for a killer Google advertising strategy, you want to run your Google Shopping and your Google Search alongside each other, this allows you to dominate search results. 
  • It’s easy to amend and add to – have a new product you suddenly need to promote? Google Shopping feeds are easy and quick to add new products too. 
  • It puts everything the customer needs in front of them – when a customer sees a Google Shopping ad, they’ll see: 
    • An image of the product (or lifestyle image)
    • Name of the product
    • Product description
    • The price 
    • The company 
    • Any discounts or offers
    • Reviews (if added) 
  • Higher conversion rate – when compared to a search or display campaign, shopping campaigns generally have a great conversion rate because of all the above reasons, which means more purchases for you. 
  • There are some fancy technical improvements you can do – a basic shopping campaign is a good start, but you can do more if you have the time and money (and expertise). We will get onto this later in the article. 

Some top tips when creating a Google Shopping campaign

Unless you are Google Shopping certified, we wouldn’t necessarily recommend trying to build a campaign from scratch by yourself, it’s complex stuff and done incorrectly can waste you a lot of money. But, if you are confident you want to give it a go, here are some pointers: 

  • Start your feed with just a few products (possibly up to 10 or so) to see how far your budget stretches. 
  • Consider your search terms and make sure they are prominent in the title and description. 
  • Choose your product category carefully – Google will provide you with thousands of category codes, the more specific you can be the better. 
  • Check, check, check – there are a lot of fields to complete and the feed can get very busy, so the last thing you want to do is add an incorrect link or price so always double (or triple) check everything. 
  • See if your online shop tool can automatically pull in information for you – saving you lots of time!
  • Make sure you have the right conversion tracking set up so you can see what people are doing once they land on your website from an ad.

Some more techy Google Shopping information… 

I think we’ve covered some of the main basics, so let’s quickly run over some of the more complex elements that Google Shopping can provide (you’ll need a Google Shopping pro for this part). 

Ever heard of a dynamic shopping ad? No? We didn’t think so… This is where Google can really blow your mind. 

Ever been followed around the internet seeing a product that you viewed a few days before? This is a dynamic ad. It’s an ad that is personalised to the customers’ shopping experience. 

Ready to set up shop?

Getting all this live on your own is overwhelming, time consuming and potentially costly if it’s not done correctly. We would always recommend our clients not ‘try this at home’, but instead use the services of our fully accredited Google Shopping experts to get you up and running. 

At CW Marketing, we’ve been running Google Shopping campaigns for various different clients for many years now. These include the UK’s largest Michelin tyre dealer, a beer company, a flip flop brand, a lifestyle shop, a luxury London skincare brand and MANY more. So don’t waste any more time, get in touch with us today… call us on 01202 888200 or email info@cwmarketing.co.uk.