3 Smart Tips for Selling With Google Shopping

Google Shopping is a powerful channel for reaching new customers.

In fact, it accounts for a surprising 56% of ad spend from retailers.

It's a type of ad called a “product listing advertisement,” or PLA for short.

They show up at the top of the page on certain searches with clear commercial intent, putting your products on display and making sure customers see it.

You can start advertising with Google Shopping PLAs by creating a Google Merchant Center account. You can then link it up with your AdWords account.

It's a tough marketplace, though.

It's become more and more popular since its introduction back in 2011, and today, it's one of the top ad platforms for online retail.

To stay competitive, you need strategy.

This involves segmenting products, using certain keywords in a strategic way, and other actions you can take to maximize the ROI on your ad spend.

In a recent blog post, Convince & Convert offers some key strategies for making the most of your PLAs.

Segment by Search Query

First, segment your products depending on the type of search query. Performance varies significantly depending on the type of search query.

For example, if somebody is searching for “Nike trainers,” you might want to bid more than if somebody was simply searching for “trainers,” because Nike trainers are generally more expensive a well-known brand, so shoppers are more likely to convert.

This can be done by creating two separate Google Shopping campaigns containing “trainers” and then adding branded terms as negative keywords in one.

This will then become your non-branded campaign where you want to reduce bids. The other will then become your Nike branded campaign, where you will want to increase your bids.

Place Keywords Strategically

Google Shopping has no keywords, so it is fundamental that you optimize your product feed so that Google knows when to show your products in search.

One of the most important places to include keywords is within the product title.

If you want your Google Shopping ads to show up when shoppers search for “party dresses,” they you should place that keyword within the product title.

When Lispsy London did this, they saw the number of impressions for that term jump from 419 to 4023.

Interestingly, they also saw an increase in the number of impressions for other relevant products too.

Use Remarketing for Your Ads

Finally, as most of you know, users that have previously visited your website are more likely to purchase from you than people who are visiting for the first time. (This is why remarketing works so well.)

So why not use remarketing for Google Shopping ads?

RLSA can be applied to your Google Shopping campaigns and have been shown to increase click through rates and conversion rates by as much as 4X.

To get the best performance, segment your remarketing audiences depending on what pages they have visited on your website.

For instance, if they have visited your category page, you might want to increase bids by 10 percent. If they have visited your product pages, then they are likely to be further down the buying cycle and know which products that they want to purchase, so you might want to increase bids by 20 percent.

Cart abandoners are the second most likely people to purchase, so you should increase your bids by more, possibly 30 percent.

Existing customers are the most likely to purchase from you, so you will want to bid the highest for them—a bid modifier of 40 percent, perhaps.

By implementing these seven advanced Google Shopping strategies, you should see a significant increase in performance in terms of conversion rate, revenue, and profit.

You can read more Google Shopping tips over at Convince & Convert.