Should your eCommerce website be using Google Shopping?

When Google first started selling adverts, they were adamant that the “old school” ads featuring images weren’t going to be part of their brave new world. Plain, simple text ads were going to be the future.

Fast forward to 2002 and the forerunner of Google Shopping, Froogle (as it was then called) was featuring images of products within its price comparison listings.

Today, Google Shopping is still featuring product images – they’re pretty strict about showing only that, no promotion text or branding allowed – but the price comparison element has been watered down by other factors, including how much you’re willing to pay per click to have a user come to your website.

But is advertising on Google Shopping easier and more effective than traditional AdWords text ads?

Merchant Centre Setup

It’s not as easy to set up as AdWords text ads – you need to:

• set up a Merchant Centre account and validate your domain ownership
• create a feed of products to feed into Merchant Centre (or a Google Docs spreadsheet)
• ensure you have the right data on your website database
• link Merchant Centre to Google AdWords

You can get a text ad live on AdWords from scratch in under 30 minutes – but getting onto Google Shopping is usually a day’s work, especially if you have more than a handful of products and need to write code to generate the feed of products for Merchant Centre.

The time killer isn’t the technical setup though – it’s having the right information on your database to pass Google’s acceptance levels.  They insist on having two out of three of:

• brand
• manufacturer’s part number
• EAN (European Article Number)

And also that you feature tax-inclusive price prominently – yet a lot of sites we work with supply to trade as well and rightly show ex-VAT prices.  But when Google’s systems detect this, your account is suspended until you prove you’ve remedied it.

AdWords Setup

It’s important to split your Google Shopping campaigns up into manageable chunks – many sellers have 000’s of products and you can’t hope to optimise them if they’re all in one campaign

Split them up into different campaigns, using combinations of

• product type
• brand
• price

It’s not as easy to do as text ads – and depends on the level of detail you’ve managed to put into your product feed at the Merchant Centre end.

Optimisation

Because you’re not specifying keywords to bid on – your product title takes care of that – it’s a very different discipline to text ad optimisation.  We’ve also found that Google is very good at pushing budget and clicks to products that get a lot of clicks – but don’t sell very well.

Google also gives you figures on your search visibility and lost share of impressions – which can be misleading.  With a set budget, it’s not visibility that counts – it’s profitability, and chasing visibility usually means a lower conversion rate and less profit.

We concentrate on pushing budget through proven conversion products, through the management of bids of better and worse performing products.

We also keep a close eye on the Merchant Centre feed diagnostics – Google is tightening up on the amount and quality of data all the time, and it’s easy to have your whole campaign stopped by Google for a week if you miss any warnings about your product data

Conversion & Profitability

Is all the extra effort worth it? Yes.

One of our best-performing accounts typically had a maximum return of £3 in sales for every £1 spent in clicks via text ads.

Now concentrating solely on Shopping ads, they get a return of £8-11 in sales for every £1 click spend.

Another client who sells to a more “traditional” (=older) audience combines the best of both worlds – the older audience still prefers text ads to Shopping ads, but by combining the two we have moved conversion rates from £2.50 to £4.20 in sales, for every £1 spend on clicks.

Our advice is – if you sell online, you should be using Google Shopping ads. Google is pushing their ads more and more in search results, and getting a head start on your competitors here will mean they probably won’t ever catch up with what you learn using Google Shopping.