Adwords, or Google Shopping Ads, only account for 20% of retail-paid search clicks. What does this mean for you? It means it will be easy for you to differentiate from your competitors with an AdWords shopping campaign. Even better, companies see up to 130% higher conversion rates for AdWords shopping ads than other online shopping ads. If you want to increase your brand awareness, stand-out from your competition, and increase sales, you should invest in a professional, high-converting AdWords shopping campaign for your business.
Who can benefit from AdWords shopping ads?
While online stores still are the obvious beneficiaries of an online shopping ads campaign, offline stores can also benefit. You can use your ad to funnel traffic to a local store.
In fact, big-box superstore Sears Outlet increased their in-store foot traffic by 122% after formulating an effective AdWords shopping campaign. Even better, Sears managed to earn 8 dollars in-store for every 1 dollar spent online. That’s a whopping return on investment.
What do AdWords shopping ads look like?
When you enter a keyword phrase into the Google search bar, product listing ads will display at either the top of the search page or on the right-hand side.
How do you get started creating ads?
First, you’ll need to create a Google merchant centre account. With a Google merchant centre account, you can give Google the necessary information on your products you’d like to create ads for.
Next, you’ll need to create a shopping feed. A shopping feed contains the products your store sells. Once you finish formulating your account and shopping feed, you’ll connect the merchant account to your AdWords account. Your AdWords account is where you’ll create the ads.
When creating an ad, you’ll need to choose the networks where you want your ad to display. You can click the ‘include search partners’ option, and also use the Google Display Network (GDN). The GDN is huge. It reaches over 2 million websites and over 90% of global internet users, so you’ll want to include it when crafting your shopping ad.
Decide on a location for your campaign. The location can be broad, i.e., an entire country or continent, or you can narrow it down to something as specific as a postcode. Also, you can include local inventory, so customers who are shopping for a product you carry near your local store can see it is available. Including local inventory in your ad will increase your in-store foot traffic and sales.
Keep in mind that unlike other AdWords campaigns, shopping ad campaigns DO NOT enable you to pick keywords or phrases when you create your product listing ads. Basically, shopping ads work by displaying product types that are in your product feed and showing them to viewers, utilising Google’s keyword data. You’re advertising based on the product type, and your ads will appear for what Google knows to be the most relevant keyword.
But, you can add a negative keyword to the campaign. A negative keyword is a word you want to omit from the search. Negative keywords will stop your products from appearing when a user enters them into the search query. Competitor keywords make excellent negative keywords. This will keep your cost-per-click (CPC) low.
The ‘advanced shopping settings’ in your dashboard will enable you to whittle down your campaign metrics further. You can tweak the ‘inventory filter,’ which will select the specific products you want to display.
Also, you can enable ‘campaign priority‘ options. The default setting for your campaigns is ‘low,’ so you’ll need to change them to either medium or high, depending on your goals. The campaign that you give the highest priority to will bid first. Once the budget is exhausted for that campaign within your allotted time frame, the campaign with the next lowest priority will bid. Campaigns with higher priority get bigger exposure.
Running an effective Google AdWords shopping campaign requires vigilance, tweaking, and pivoting. Effective campaigns require your time and attention, which, as a business owner, you probably don’t have either metric in abundance. To get the greatest ROI and targeted exposure for your products, you’ll benefit from having a qualified expert handle your AdWords shopping ads.
We Can Help
Here at Australian Internet Advertising, we know exactly how to integrate your Google merchant account to your AdWords account seamlessly, and how to get your products to display to the right customers. With high-quality, targeted advertising, you can increase your online and offline store traffic, get exposure, and increase your bottom line. Contact us today and see what we can do for your business with an AdWords shopping ads campaign.
