But did you know that there are ways to make these ads even better? By optimizing Google Shopping ads, companies can make sure their products show up when people search for things they want to buy. In this article, we’ll explore some tips and tricks for optimizing these ads to make them more effective and help businesses sell more products.
Start by Optimizing Your Product Feed
By optimizing your product feed, you can enhance campaign performance by ensuring it meets platform requirements, looks appealing in search results, and is both accurate and trackable. To use Google Shopping, it’s essential to link your Google Ads account to Google Merchant Center (GMC) and optimize your feed accordingly.
High-performing shopping campaigns necessitate both feed and campaign optimization. Your product feed is akin to SEO, requiring optimization and configuration to exhibit precise and pertinent information. It should include vital product information, such as Product ID, Product Title, Product Price, Product Description, Image, and URL.
Mandatory fields like Availability, Gender, Age Group, Condition, and numerical fields such as Price, UPC, MPN, ISBN, Shipping Weight, and Shipping Cost are also necessary. Category fields can be determined through the category ID or pathway.
Certain channels may require the use of a GTIN, which represents the numerical value of the barcode. The GTIN helps Google match and identify your product. If you lack a GTIN, you can use MPN or UPC as substitutes.
Tracking Metrics and Taking Advantage of Reports
First, there’s the Item ID Report. This report provides you with a performance breakdown of each product you’re advertising. You can sort the data by clicks to identify which products are your top performers and which ones are lagging behind. Armed with this information, you can focus on the high performers and remove the low performers to improve your ad spend.
Next, there’s the Device Report. This one tells you which device your ad traffic is coming from. If you notice that a specific product group is performing better on one device than another, you can adjust your ads accordingly to maximize conversions and ROI.
The Search Term Report is another valuable tool for improving your campaigns. Although you don’t use keywords in Shopping campaigns, this report shows you the specific queries that users used to find your ads. By analyzing this data and ordering it by cost, you can identify high-performing search terms and leverage them in your traditional Google search ads.
In addition to these three reports, it’s also crucial to look at your performance metrics, such as click-through rates and conversion rates, to gain a better understanding of how your campaigns are performing. By using the correct reports and metrics, you can make data-driven decisions that help take your campaigns to the next level.
Get More Clicks, and Pay Less For Them!
Although you don’t bid on keywords for product display ads, Google still uses search queries to determine which products to show. By reviewing which searches trigger your product ads and whether searchers are clicking through, you can filter out underperforming search queries. This process is essential for optimization, as it allows you to make the necessary adjustments for more clicks and better ROI.
To filter these low-performing search queries, you should sort them by cost per conversion. This way, you can determine which searches are costing too much and ultimately driving up your ad spend without generating enough revenue.
For example, if a search query generates 40 clicks but results in only one sale of $100, while another term brings you 60 clicks and four sales of $100, you may be spending more on the first search term, even though your conversion rate is lower. By monitoring these terms regularly, you can ensure that you get the most clicks for your spending and make the necessary adjustments to your Google Shopping campaigns to improve your ROI.
7 Essential Tips for Optimizing Google Shopping Ads
1. Use High-Quality Images
2. Optimize Product Titles and Descriptions
3. Use Negative Keywords
4. Monitor Your Competitors
5. Test Different Bid Strategies
6. Use Seasonal Promotions
Take advantage of seasonal promotions like holiday sales and back-to-school discounts to boost your Google Shopping ad performance. You can also use ad customizers to create dynamic ad content that reflects current promotions or inventory levels.
7. Regularly Review Your Data
Keep a close eye on your Google Shopping campaign data, including metrics like click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and average order value (AOV). Use this data to make informed decisions about your campaigns and make adjustments as needed.