How to Get the Most Out of Google Shopping

The Google Shopping unit has been growing exponentially over the past few years and it shows no sign of slowing down. As of Q1 2018, Google Shopping Ads are driving 82% of retail search ad spend in the UK. According to Adthena, the 82% of retail ad spend in Google Shopping Ads were responsible for 88% of clicks.

Google shopping has not reached the point of saturation yet either, so they still offer good values to retailers in terms of spends/click ratios with room for growth in some industries. These statistics tell us how important Google Shopping can be to your Paid Advertising strategy, and therefore you need to make sure you are getting the most out of it. Here are our top tips to doing so:

Optimising titles

Shopping Ads differ from your traditional text ads because they aren’t based around keywords. Because of this, you can take a similar approach to SEO ensuring your titles are optimised around the searches people are likely to input. We still need to make sure we are doing our keyword research so we can remove the low volume terms from our title. Each word in our title needs to have a purpose, especially the first three. we should consider having the product name, what it does, the colour or the style in there to help users know exactly what it is you sell.

A healthy feed is a happy feed

This is the most important element of Google Shopping. If your feed is set up incorrectly, your products won’t even be shown. Google Merchant Centre gives you an overview of your product feed in a health check, letting you know how many of your products have been disapproved. Google are actually very helpful in letting you know why your products have been rejected and it’s important to get this rectified as soon as possible so you can start selling your products. Google will provide us with a template so we know exactly what we need to put into our feeds which is also a handy asset.

Create urgency

An old favourite marketing tactic used for decades in all forms still applies to the Google Shopping Adverts. Special offers, offer codes, limited time sales are all applicable here that can draw the attention to your advert rather than your competitors. Think of Google Shopping Ads as a shop window with similar products from different brands all competing for the same small amount of space. We need to detract eyes from the competitor and get them on our adverts.

Reviews

More and more people are relying on reviews before they make a purchase. Trust signals can significantly increase the conversion rates of your website if you have a great rating. It tells new customers that the brand reputation is strong because of your quality products. Say you’re looking at two different pairs of black trainers. One company has a 2 star rating and one has a 5 star rating. You’re definitely going to go with the 5 star, and you may even pay more for the privilege.

Use great imagery

The image you select is likely to be the first thing somebody sees when your advert is shown so you want to ensure these leave a lasting impression. We need to use high quality pictures so they are shown well on mobile devices.

In our feed submitted to Google, we dictate the colour and size of the products and we should make sure the picture reflects what we have input into the feed. We should try to post pictures that do not have text covering the image. Google dislikes this kind so save any sales messaging for the titles.

Lastly, we always need to test what works better. Lifestyle images may work better for jumpers, whereas product images could be better for trainers.