Google Shopping management that will improve your return on ad spend and boost your online sales.

Google Shopping (previously known as Product Listing Ads) is another Google Ads product allowing businesses to insert visual listings of their product offerings directly into search results pages, or under the dedicated ‘Shopping’ tab available on Google’s search bar. This makes it even easier for clients to gain insight into your product range before they even land on your site. Beginning on the Google Merchant Centre, users upload their individual product feeds before linking it through to a Google Ads account. When a search engine user enters a keyword, Google will scan the Merchant Centre database for the most relevant answer to display. Once someone then clicks on the ad, they will be directed back to the product in question available on your website.

Building a successful Google Shopping campaign rests on two areas: creating your product listing, and then proper segmentation. Your product listing will consist of what your business offers and will need to be perfectly optimised to be seen as the right answer to users’ search queries. This means crafting a clear product description, selecting a high-quality photo, applying the right price range, attributing the right colour and sizes – every detail can either work for or against you when it comes to users clicking through to your site.

Whether you are a brick-and-mortar store looking to take your product range online, or a completely digital ecommerce store, Google Shopping is an effective marketing platform for any business selling products from their website. In previous years, brands would have to go to far greater lengths to attract users to their website, simply for them to review their products. Now, shoppers are already primed for purchase by searching for items within your product lines and knowing exactly what they want when they click on your ad, making them some of the warmest leads possible.

Google Shopping, like other Google Ads products, is a flexible marketing model allowing you to invest as much or as little as you want. The key components for determining costs will be your goals, how fast you want to achieve them, and the available budgets you have in a given period. Shopping ads have helpful features leaving it simple to set budgets against campaigns and making fast adjustments whenever you need (for example, if your business has a goal of accelerated sales during busier periods, such as Christmas, you can increase the budgets behind your campaigns, and then reduce it back to normal levels in the new year). This is because Google Shopping also works on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, meaning you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. Once the budget you have allocated to a campaign has been exhausted, then the ad will no longer be shown, and you will not have to pay a penny more. The cost per click (CPC) can range anywhere between 30 cents, to a dollar, and maybe even more for competitive keywords. Through clever campaign structuring and segmentation, the budget behind each campaign is maximised to deliver the greater return on investment for your products.

Almost 80% of retailers are using Google Shopping to drive qualified traffic to their products for one simple reason: it works. Potential shoppers are always going to be in some phase of the buyer journey, and never before has that existed more than on digital platforms. Ecommerce stores succeed and fail on the amount of online traffic that can be generated and held on their website, meaning their marketing efforts need to be tailored specifically for this business model – and making Google Shopping a perfect place to start. These ads place your product line in front of engaged buyers looking for exactly what you are selling and can be exposed to your brand at scale compared with alternatives in the industry. By establishing a strong Google Shopping campaign with a viable, well-priced product, this can spell consistent success for your brand.

Google Merchant Centre is the online platform available to retail stores and ecommerce businesses to place their products before potential customers using the search engine. When a user enters a keyword relating to a particular product, the Google Merchant Centre reviews the database of products to find the most relevant ads to list as options to select from. It is for this reason that creating a refined, well-structured Google Shopping campaign with a high Quality Score is so imperative, in order for Google to recognise your brand and product as viable to include in the shopping selection.

If you are working with the specialists at Clearwater, then you don’t have to worry. We provide frequent, transparent, and clear reporting around the performance of your Google Shopping Campaigns to demonstrate performance and the associated return on investment.

If you are tackling building and maintaining Google Shopping campaigns on your own, there are several important performance indicators that you can review for key insights. The first is simply the number of impressions and clicks your ad has received from audiences. This gives you some insight on how often your ad is shown, and how appealing your ad is to get traffic from the search engine to your website. Cost-per-click (CPC) then shows the amount you are paying for each of these clicks, and will give you your first look at the financials of your campaign.

Now you want to start looking at those who converted. Conversion rates refer to the average number of conversions achieved per click of your ad. Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) is the financial metric behind this, indicating how much you are having to spend on your Shopping campaigns in order to make a conversion. Lastly, you can review your overall return on investment (ROI), which is a simple calculation of dividing the revenue received from your ad campaign by the total costs.

Google Ads products often require a brief period for review before they can go live (approximately one business day). After this is approved, your Google Shopping campaign will be ready to start generating traffic to your website. The kind of results you will see, however, will depend on the campaign structure and segmentation.

Google Shopping is an incredibly effective tool – which unfortunately makes it an incredibly crowded place to promote your products. The most common challenge retailers and ecommerce stores face is standing out against their competitors to achieve the results they are craving. Simply having a campaign set-up won’t cut it anymore when it comes to healthy sales figures. Google Shopping campaigns require an incredible amount of skill, consideration, expertise, and constant refinement in order to garner positive return on investment. This extends to bidding, as many people also make the mistake of failing to optimise the resources placed behind their ads. Google Shopping campaigns allow users to get to a specific, granular level with their efforts, allocating different budgets to different products, getting the most out of the items drawing the greatest attention and traffic to your website.

The specialists at Clearwater have been creating and refining Google Shopping campaigns since the beginning, and we have seen how this marketing platform has rapidly grown to become a staple in every modern retailers’ strategies. We are passionate about analysing performance and making optimised adjustments to deliver the results your business needs for success, which is why we work hand in hand with you every step of the way. We are proud of this commitment to making our clients’ lives easier and their dreams come true, demonstrated by our enviable 5.0 Google reviews score.