You might have been wondering how some of the e-commerce shops get overnight success! They have uncountable social media followers and online reviews by thousands of customers by selling hundreds of products and services.  But what’s the secret behind all these? Google AdWords for e-commerce websites acts like a magic potion!

You might have set up a campaign for Google AdWords for e-commerce website of your business and have seen higher CTR (click through rates) but not a single conversion has come your way. Don’t get upset for you are not alone. Each one of us wants a good returns on investment on our business but if the ad campaigns are not rightly set up, or specific keywords are not used, then lots of traffic may come but without any sale. But here is some great news for you advertisers. Google has now come up with simplified ads for effectively increasing your ROI. Your selection of keywords matter a lot for your business if you want to increase your traffic incoming, conversion rates and amount of sales. Hence many of the businesses are using Google AdWords for the optimization of their ad searches for gaining higher rankings on the Google results page.

Why Use Google AdWords for E-Commerce?

AdWords and e-commerce are in sync with each other. They go together like bread and butter and works effectively. Researchers say that e-commerce retailers gain greater amount of CTR (click through rate) in comparison to the other industries. You can drive in sales through creation of profitable AdWords campaign. AdWords can empower your e-commerce business and simultaneously also making you aware of great things such as the upcoming challenges that stand in your path for optimization of AdWords.

The e-commerce market is experiencing a continuous growth and has no chance of slowing down in the near future. Latest studies show that more sellers and buyers will turn e-commerce businesses into one of the pivotal industries within 2020.

1. Google functions as the search engine

One fantastic reason for you to advertise on Google is that people all across the world use Google for finding stuffs and answers to their questions. There are many other platforms for advertising that have been popular through the years and there have been huge conversions on these ad platforms. But Google is still the leader for consumers use Google to get the information and then make purchases using this gateway. Hence Google is the supreme place for catching potential customers while they are active in searching for buying products you are offering.

2. Higher accuracy levels through AdWords

Everything is known to Google. And as the saying goes, “knowledge is power” hence Google is the most powerful for all you business owners and digital marketers. You can reach out to the exact and potential target audience at the perfect time and location. Google has the ad scheduling feature and by using this each advertiser can have his ad displayed at the optimal days and timings and are displayed to the audiences according to the zip codes. You can also target people depending on more specific data such as gender, age groups, parental status or income levels. These data options allow you to have more control over your ads and you need to leverage them for increasing your returns on investment on your ad spend.

3. Standing out from your competitors is a major challenge

And it is more interesting to gain organic visits from Google.  You can get a hold on AdWords and this practice can help you to grow your business while fending off your competitions in the market in the present day situations as well as in the future.

Studies suggest that almost 98% of the total visitors on e-commerce websites leave without making a purchase and out of them 70% people tends not to return on that website store.

And Google remarketing capabilities works here and offer incomparable advantages for all you e-commerce owners. You don’t have to give up on those 98% of the people and on the contrary you should focus on driving them back to your web store. Remarketing offers you the second, third and many chances to bring back those left visitors to your website. The store shows the returning audience those products they were once interested for or some similar products to lure them back to your web store and tempt them to make a buy. Remarketing is one of the best means of promotion for your e-commerce website.

Google Shopping Works Fantastic for E-Commerce Website: 

Google Shopping allows you to run online shopping with the help of Google AdWords and Google merchant center and sell products directly on Google according to your desires in comparison to the standard searches or display ads. While the audiences search for basketball shoes, you can generate some ad-based results through search network and this can help you to sell products thereby driving potential traffic. This also helps you to drive in e-commerce sales.

When a user searches for a product, they wish to see an image of the product for they want to envision how to use it after the purchase. You cannot do that with general text ads only.

Google shopping is required here.

With Google shopping, users can directly see the product images instead of only the text ads and calls-to-action that reflect with their searches along with the brand names, reviews as well as prices. The right-hand side scroll button can help you to view more products in the selected category. You can be able to provide an endless catalog of products from where your audience can choose from. You can use the ad extensions for increasing your conversions and your ads will only perform better than the basic searches.

Google shopping works like a comparing website where the users can browse over products from numerous brands without even clicking back or forth the current search results.

Let’s Setup Your First Shopping Campaign:

#1. Setting Google Merchant Center

The first step is to set up a merchant center for it is the launchpad for your Google shopping ad campaign or product listing ads(PLA). Setting up of merchant entre is easy as a breeze and the advertiser just needs to create product feeds and from here Google will fetch them. Follow these steps

a) Sign up with your Gmail account.

b) Put your website URL and Adress.

c) Put Shipping Information

d) Verify your Ownership of the website by putting a meta tag on the website backend, or you can verify with Google Analytics/Google Tag Manager if you are signed with the same Gmail account. 

#2. Setting up Merchant Center product feed: 

Product feed consists of information of the advertiser’s products containing all necessary product information. This is perhaps the hardest part of the setup process of Google shopping and it is time-consuming for you need to give every detail such as product title, price, description, SKU, link, brand, image link, etc. each product feed needs to be accurate and according to the Google specifications.

But when you are opting for automated feed, your product data will be automatically moved to the Google merchant as data feed without any manual process involved.

The next important step includes the linking of your Google Ads account to your merchant centre. Click on Google merchant centre and click on ‘data feeds’ on the left-hand side menu. Then click on the link “create schedule” and specify the time of the day when you want your feed to get updated automatically.

You will get a link like:

http://websitename/shop/feeds/googleProductFeed-75638c06g5bbcad99edf0201e89.txt

Then just paste the URL and click on schedule. Your products will start getting updated regularly and Google will get the latest product details on daily basis.

The greatest advantage of automated feed is that brings fresh data and in case any new product is launched or a product gets out of stock, the feed gets updated automatically.

But with manual feeds, you can add specified information for each of our products with proper description and title details according to your own requirements and preferences.

#3 Link Google Merchant Center & Google Ads:

Once you’re done with the product feed setup you have to link your Google Merchant Center account with Google Ads, so that you can setup Shopping campaign in your Google Ads account.

#4 Setup Your Shopping Campaign

The above steps completed; you are now ready to create shopping campaigns which is pretty simple. You just need to choose a merchant centre product feed along with a sales country. Be it a standard shopping campaign or a smart shopping campaign, organising them is a big step.

In a standard shopping campaign, the shopping ads serve only on Google Search network.  You can organise your products by product type or custom label into different Ad groups. In Standard shopping campaign, you have more control over max CPC bid and campaigns settings.

But with smart shopping campaigns, your existing product feed gets combined with Google’s machine learning and this shows a variety of ads across the networks and this helps you to get the best value from each single ad. Be it the placement of your ads or the bidding for maximum conversions in a given budget- all these are automated by Google in smart shopping. ‘

But one should go for smart shopping only when he has been successful in acquiring at least 50 conversions (sales), or else you will flow your money down the drain with Google’s automated bidding process.

#5. Split ad groups depending on product category

Once the campaign is created, now it’s time to think about the process to organize the ad groups. Ad groups serve the purpose of the organization in shopping campaigns. Small companies tend to create just a single ad group for they have very limited product feeds. But bigger businesses split their ad groups by category of products or brand.

Ad groups are split according to the product category to maintain a proper data for each of your brands otherwise if you keep a single ad group for all your products, it might be difficult for you to determine the performance of a single product in a particular geographic location and set goals accordingly. But with individual ad groups, you can easily measure the number of conversions received for a specific product from particular geography as per the feed data generated by the product ads in each ad group.

#6. Setup Conversion Tracking with conversion value

One important step is to set conversion tracking for your ad groups while setting up of a Google shopping campaign. This is helpful to show your which products are bringing in sales and which are the losing ones. Also, you can know the location as well as the time when maximum conversions come and also the duration when very fewer sales come along your way through ads. Hence conversion tracking tool is an essential part of shopping campaigns along with the conversion value to denote the sales figure against the ad spend for a particular product.

#7. Put negative keywords

You should be inspired to use negative keywords which you want to exclude from your ad copies. In this way, you will be able to determine the low performing keywords that are less revenue generating leads.

When a specific keyword generates many clicks but the sales generation is by a smaller amount, then you can understand that the keyword is not much effective as it is expected to be.

While analyzing the keywords that are used for finding your products whether they provide an insight into improving your product descriptions, you can find the importance of negative keywords.

Some negative keywords list are as follows:

• Free
• Cheap
• Image
• Photos
• Pictures
• Pic

For instance, if you sell “men’s shoes” but you have a product description of just ‘men’s waterproof shoes’, then people who are looking for normal shoes see your ads and click on them and your CPC gets wasted due to irrelevant searches. So, you should adjust and add negative keywords to your ad groups to get better customer clicks and conversions. When your product listings will match exactly to the people’s search queries, better conversions will come your way with potential sales. Your products will get better positions with the addition of negative keywords.

With Google Shopping campaigns, you can add negative keywords to cut down unwanted or irrelevant traffic on your website. 

#8. Ad scheduling and bid optimization

Scheduling your ads in a proper way is crucial for your shopping campaign. Scheduling your ads on weekends might bring more conversions to your ecommerce website, clothing or accessories. Customers are prone to purchase more on weekends on getting some leisure time so you must schedule your ads from Friday-Sunday. Ad scheduling also includes time of the day besides day of the week. The maximum buyers tend to make purchases from 4pm- 8pm and the minimum purchases happen during the morning slot. Hence you should choose your time and day and set the bids accordingly- higher bids for the conversion prone timings and days and lower bids for the time and days when minimum conversions take place.

#9. Audience level bid optimization

You should increase your bid by 20-30% for past website visitors who did not buy from your website on their first visit. As we know only 2-3% users make purchases on their first visit to a website. Chances of getting conversions from the past audience are higher as they already have an association with your brand/website and they might be considering to buy from you.

#10. Split location targeting

Geo-targeting is another important aspect of your shopping campaign for you need to target the right locations. The maximum sales might come from a specific location or city so you should increase your bids on this location and run your ads more frequently in that area. Again, in some cities your ads get very less or negligible conversions so you should reduce your bids in that location or you should pause your ads for that area. This targeting can help you to bid in a better and fruitful way and enhance the sales incoming for your business with the right data and proper implementation of marketing strategies. That’s why put all cities and provinces in the location targeting instead of putting the whole country. Example: put all cities (e.g. London, Birmingham, Leeds, Brighton, Manchester, Paignton etc.) instead of targeting United Kindom as a whole.   

Once the campaign setup is done, monitor the performance on a weekly basis and Optimize based on the performance data gathered to get maximum out of your Ads spend.

Got stuck with Google shopping?

Know from the experts how to manage your Google shopping feed for your business!

Our Google shopping management can be a savior.

Dynamic Remarketing Campaign is a Must for E-Commerce Website:

Learn how to setup Dynamic remarketing campaign for your e-commerce website here. 

Setup Keyword Target Search Campaign:

Target the keywords that already converted into sales. Find the converted keyword list from Google shopping campaign search terms and set up search campaign targeting the converted search terms.