Grow Your Sales With Google Shopping

Also known as “Product Ads,” Google Shopping ads are almost always at the top of the search results. They are the first thing that consumers see when they are looking for a product. Often, these ads are overlooked by retailers and those in the ecommerce industry. In fact, they only make up 20% of the overall amount Google receives for paid advertising in the vertical market.

Google Shopping ads are very effective because they are at the top of the search results, show an image of the product, and also include a price comparison. In most cases, there are five chosen products that appear in this highly sought after position.

Building Your Google Shopping Campaign

Google doesn’t make it easy to establish a Google Shopping campaign. You need to first create a Google Merchant Center account. It does take some time to generate all of the required data and then wait for Google’s approval. If you’re in a hurry to sell something in a timely manner, it’s not your best option.

Once approved, the Google Shopping options are linked to your Google Ads account – the same way that you purchase traditional Google pay per click services.

There is one big difference between Google Ads and Google Shopping, however. With Google Shopping, you don’t actually pick the keywords that you want to target. Instead, you have to rely on Google to serve the ads to the right people. But don’t worry about this, it’s in their best interest to find the right market and they just may do it better than you could do it yourself. Google has great data feeds on the kinds of keywords people use when searching your product. They will get better at it over time so you need to be patient with the platform while it “finds” your best keywords and market. 

Interestingly, while you cannot suggest keywords to Google Shopping that you wish to target, you can suggest keywords that you don’t want to target by adding negative keywords. This will help you get off to a better start if you take the time to do it, because it will cut back on the keywords that Google would ordinarily try out.

The Purplegator Approach to Ecommerce

Purplegator also uses the “Campaign Authority” option for your Google Shopping program. With it, we can prioritize which products are better sellers for you or which of your product skews have superior profit margins. Otherwise, this would not be taken into consideration by Google Shopping.

One of the things Purplegator loves about Google Shopping is the branding that it provides. Like Google Ads (pay per click), you don’t pay unless the shopper actually clicks on your ad. The bonus of Google Shopping, however, is that the consumer has seen an image of your product with its built-in branding, thus making it a far superior buy from purely a branding perspective.

Bob Bentz is the founder and CEO of Purplegator. He’s also the author of Relevance Raises Response.