Google Shopping

How are Google search and shopping ads different?

• Shopping ads are primarily visual with the product photo being their main focus;
• Product pricing is very important because shopping ads contain very few other buying cues or encouragements to click;
• In Google Shopping, it is safe to infer buying intent. In other words, people who click Shopping ads are ready to purchase. In comparison, the traffic coming from search results, paid or organic, is more ambiguous.
• In order to run a campaign on Google Shopping, the advertiser must submit an XML product feed formatted according to Google’s requirements.
• For search ads, advertisers decide when their ads should appear by designating target keywords. On Shopping, Google decides when and how to show an ad.
• Whereas ad rank and placement of search ads are determined by their CPC and quality score, Google is much less transparent in the case of shopping ads and does not disclose exactly how it assigns ad placement. Quality scores are not used at all on Google Shopping.

What factors contribute to the success of advertising on Google Shopping?

• Good product photos are indispensable.
• Product feeds must be updated at the same cadence that Google updates Shopping results -- once a day. That way, products that are obsolete, out of stock or priced differently never appear in live results. The last thing you want is to waste your advertising budget and tick off would-be shoppers.
• Even though Google Shopping doesn’t allow advertisers to designate keywords, keywords in the product names and titles are still crucial to whether and where your ad will show up in results. Cogney can advise on best practice in naming products on your ecommerce site so that their names are optimized in the resulting XML feed for Google.
• Shrewd and comprehensive designation of negative keywords is important since positive keywords are not used.
• In order to optimize a campaign, it is crucial to separate your product catalogue into groupings so that bids and parameters can be adjusted with fine-grained precision. Moreover, your profit margins on certain products may be higher, permitting you to apply a higher CPC for that product grouping.
• Even though keyword targeting isn’t an option, other forms of targeting are available, for example, brand versus generic targeting. If you enjoy a competitive advantage for specific products or brands, you might want to allocate more budget or increase the CPC for those items.
• Google gives you access to competitive benchmarking data on various facets of your campaign, so you can assess the desirability of spending more or less for individual products or product groups. These analytics not only tell you whether you are doing better or worse than the competition but whether you should get out of a product altogether because you won’t be able to compete on price.

When does it make sense to advertise on Google Shopping?

• When you have an ecommerce store;
• When you have a big product catalogue and don’t want to write ads or match keywords;
• When your products fall within an established category and are competitively priced. Competitive pricing is crucial especially if what you’re selling is a commodity or quasi-commodity.