Over the last two decades, Google advertising has become a marketing norm and a familiar term worldwide. Coming from such a credible search engine with an expansive reach of over 5 billion search queries a day, no wonder Google Ads are touted as a tried-and-true practice for marketers in every industry. With more and more marketers looking for instant conversions that help drive sales, Google Shopping Ads are quickly becoming an advertising necessity beyond Search and Display ads.
What Are Google Shopping Ads?
Google Shopping ads are product-based ads that are displayed specifically for product searches on Google. These types of ads can be enticing to a buyer as they show an image of the product with its product title, price, store name, and reviews.
Types of Google Shopping Campaigns
- Product: These are created based on the product data that you submit to Google Merchant Center so you don’t need to create the ads yourself.
- Showcase: These can be made by grouping together a variety of similar products. Customers will be able to compare a few of your products and choose the best one, which allows people to explore your inventory without even going to your store. With that said, Showcase Shopping ads are still relatively new and supported in fewer countries than regular Shopping ads.
- Local Inventory: These types of ads are useful if you have a physical store. They use product feed data from your local inventory to display your products from a physical store to nearby Google shoppers.
How Bidding Works
The bidding process for Shopping ads works a little differently than what we are familiar with Google Search campaigns because you have the ability to set the bid on the actual products you are selling. You can either set the bid on individual products or you can set the bid on groups of products.
When it comes to best bidding practices try setting your bids lower than you typically would for the search network. Try starting at $.50 – $1 and keep a close eye on them as you start to accrue data. Tweaking a bid can have a fairly immediate effect on performance and do wonders for your overall selling strategy.
3 Benefits of Google Shopping
- Increase conversions: People performing a product search are ready to buy. If your Google Shopping ad appears at the top of the search results, it has a high chance of receiving a click. Not only does this boost your click-through rate (CTR), it increases the odds of a conversion
- Improve SEO: Google Shopping ads appear at “position 0” (above the #1 URL in the search results), and it shows before the text Google ads. This makes them a powerful SEO tool, which helps capture leads from organic searches
- Learn more about your customers: The analytics alone is enough to make Google Shopping advertising worth it. You can learn about who’s clicking on your ads, which products perform the best, and how your ad campaigns compare to competitors.
Now that you know the foundations of Google Shopping ads, it’s time to start driving traffic that actually leads to sales. To learn more about shopping ads or to start advertising on Google, contact us for more information.