Google Shopping is an excellent opportunity for vendors to take advantage of when it comes to products being sold online. It’s got a high conversion rate, it’s effective at conveying information about your products, and it greatly improves visibility.
When Google determines a user is looking for a specific product (i.e. men’s dress shirt), it will populate the top of the SERP with results from Google Shopping. Get your products into that valuable real estate!
Set Up Your Google Merchant Center Account
Google Shopping requires a Google Merchant Center account. All you need for that is a Gmail account. You can fill out your business information, where you want customers to check out (on your website or through Google), and connect PayPal and Shopify accounts, Once the account is set up for free, you’re ready to set up your Google Shopping.
Create High-Quality Product Images
Images are the cornerstone of sales online, and that holds especially true on Google Shopping. You want to make sure you have a high-quality camera and professionally shot photos that will sell your product. This isn’t just a recommendation–Google itself will penalize vendors with low-quality photos by taking their ad out of the rotation.
Add Your Product Data Feed
Your product data feed is the file from which Google pulls all your product information. This usually comes in the form of a spreadsheet–a template is provided by Google Merchant Center when you select a spreadsheet as your upload format. You can also have Google regularly fetch product data from your website by hosting a file on your site, which is significantly less work but runs the risk of your product data being misunderstood by Google and displayed incorrectly. We recommend going with Google Sheets.
Link Your Google Ads Account
Once product data is uploaded, you should link your Google Ads account so you can create campaigns funded by your ads budget. All you need to do is click on the three vertical dots inside your Google Merchant Center account and insert your customer ID under “Account Linking.”
Inside Google Ads, you can create a new campaign by clicking on New Campaign>Sales>Shopping. You can choose between the Smart Shopping campaign, which allows Google to maximize your budget for you and pick the products most likely to sell, or the Standard Shopping Campaign, which allows you to do everything yourself. To start, we recommend Smart Shopping.
Create Product Groups
Product groups consist of 2 subtypes–Product Shopping and Showcase Shopping. Product shopping is for single-product advertising, while Showcase Shopping is best for showcasing multiple products at once. You can create multiple product groups within a campaign, so play around with each one and see which performs best for your industry.
Once you’ve set these up, your ads are good to go! Simply set your budget and let Google do the bidding for you. There are a variety of ways you can optimize your Google Shopping campaign, but the best way is to test it out yourself and see what works.
