Google Shopping is a type of advertising campaign in Google Ads designed for online stores that want to sell their products through the Google search engine. Trade ads allow users to quickly find the products you offer. Thanks to this, you can attract more potential customers by presenting them with affordable products with current prices.

How does Google Shopping work?

The user is looking for a specific product that you offer. Data on each of the products is contained in the product file. The buyer will find there a description of the product and detailed information about its name, brand, price, availability, category, as well as many other attributes that distinguish this product from hundreds or even thousands of others.

The product feed is located in the Google Merchant Center. It is a tool that regularly downloads information about all the products in your online store and then directs them to Google Ads so that you can advertise the products from the current price, availability and the like.

Once connected to the Google Merchant Center (GMC), Google Ads allows you to create campaigns for selected or all of the products described in the movie.

The user submits a request (for example, Samsung smartphones), and after entering the brand and product category (these values ​​are contained in the product feed), the product ad captures the impression.

The user can select the product and go to the advertiser’s website.

Who is Google Shopping for?

The Google Shopping service should mainly be used by online stores that sell their products both in Ukraine and in other countries.

What does product advertising look like?

Google Shopping advertising is created automatically based on product information, contained in the product feed. It consists of a photo of the product, the current price and the advertiser’s data (the name of the store, which we determine when setting up Google Merchant Center). At the very bottom of every commercial in the Google search engine is information about which comparison engine is used for commercial advertising. The most common version is “Author: Google”, which indicates an advertising campaign on the Google Shopping tab. You can also find other comparison mechanisms such as Ceneo. Optionally, your trade ad may also have a discount if the price of the product is reduced.

How do I start creating a campaign?

• Prepare the product feed.
• Set up Google Merchant Center (GMC).
• Upload the product file to GMC.

Wait for product feed approval (usually takes a maximum of 3 business days).

If the attributes of the product do not comply with the product file creation policy, make corrections according to the messages in the Google Merchant Center.

Link your Google Merchant Center account to Google Ads.

Select the products you want to advertise, then create a Google Ads campaign.

The benefits of a Google trading campaign

• Visual presentation of the product – the user goes to the site after seeing the photo of the product. Advertising is legible and contains the most necessary information that should lead to the purchase of goods (price, photo, name).
• Knowing the price of the goods before going to the store.
• Reduction of the trade route – the user immediately goes to the product subpage, he is interested.
• Very high performance – this type of campaign plays a critical role in the success of Google Ads campaigns. Google accounts for more than 60% of all transactions received through Google Ads in the execution of generated online transactions.
• The maximum cost-per-click is set at the product level, so a markup on this product can also be considered, allowing you to achieve high campaign profitability.
• The cost-per-click is lower than standard text ads on the search network. This is not a golden rule, but in most cases, clicks in a Google Shopping campaign are cheaper than in text ads, resulting in greater campaign efficiency and profitability.
• The fee is charged when you click on the ad and visit the store.
• Additional inventory – If you use Google’s text and commercial ads, your ad can appear in two versions at the request of a single user, as the trading campaign is a separate auction that does not affect the display restrictions of standard text ads. You can take multiple ad slots (one ad slot for text and one or more ad slots for product ads).

Google Shopping Campaign Types

The most commonly used type of campaign is the “Standard Product Campaign”, but more and more advertisers are choosing the “Smart Product Campaign”, which can achieve amazing results, although there are some limitations in managing such a campaign. A less common form is the YouTube embedded video product campaign, which is not to be missed.

Standard product campaign (in the search engine)

This type of campaign is available from the beginning of a Google advertising campaign (formerly known as a product information ad). By choosing this form, we have complete control over the products we promote in such a campaign. We can independently adjust the cost per click at the product level. In the Search Terms report, we can see which queries entered by users have triggered an ad, so we can eliminate ineffective website traffic by adding keyword exceptions.

The campaign targets only the Google search engine and partner search engines, so if we want to dynamically remarket on the media network, we can do so in a separate campaign, rather than in the case of a smart campaign within a single campaign.

Smart trading campaign (search and media)

When you select this type, we have a limited selection when setting up a campaign. Intelligent product campaigns use machine learning, which takes on some of the work that marketers used to do. The results of such campaigns are surprisingly positive, but several shortcomings should be borne in mind. First of all, we have less control over which keywords trigger your ads (you don’t even see which search queries your ads received, and you can’t add negative keywords).

You can still choose which products will be advertised. Just select a brand, product category, or any other available product filtering method.

Ads are also displayed on the Display Network (as part of dynamic remarketing), but this requires at least one remarketing list in your Google Ads account with a minimum of 100 users (cookies) in the list. By creating a smart media campaign, you can create an ad template for content network remarketing.

You can add text to this ad for headlines and descriptions, and we have the ability to add a logo and photos for some versions of ads based on this template.

Product (with YouTube video)

TrueView in the product campaign is based on the enrichment of video advertising in the stream thanks to interactive elements in the form of product presentation. Product advertising is also created based on data in the Google Merchant Center in the form of trading cards next to the YouTube video.