The bulk of product discovery takes place on Amazon, where commoditization and lack of data sharing undercut a brand’s ability to establish direct and long-term connections to customers.
Search engines, however, help retailers acquire new customers when they’re actively looking to buy. You own the customer experience once these visitors land on your website, with no comparison against other retailers. The sale is yours for the taking.
A critical portion of that strategy is Google Shopping, the leading price comparison shopping service that connects consumers with brands who offer products related to their Google search. Merchants who underutilize the advertising opportunities in Google Shopping could be missing out on a huge chunk of revenue.
This guide shares how to get in on the action, with guidance on how to set up and optimize Google Shopping campaigns.
What is Google Shopping?
Google Shopping is an advertising platform that allows businesses to reach people searching for similar products in its search engine. Potential customers use Google Shopping to browse items from several different online retailers and view their price, availability, and fulfillment options. When shoppers click a product listing, the Shopping tab takes them to the relevant product page on the retailer’s ecommerce site.
“Google Shopping is a really powerful way of getting traffic and it takes them to the product page, which is very close to conversion,” said Ace Reunis, founder of Threadheads, in a recent Shopify Masters episode.
How do Google Shopping ads work?
Google Shopping works by collating product listings from retailers that participate in Shopping campaigns. This database is analyzed to understand what the product is and who would buy it. When an ideal shopper conducts a Google Search for a product, the platform’s algorithm matches the query with the most relevant product listings in its advertising database. The advertiser is then billed according to the bidding strategy they’ve selected.
Google Shopping vs. Google search ads
Google Shopping ads display product images, prices, and store information directly on the search results page. Google Search ads are text-based ads that appear at the top or bottom of search results based on keywords.
Benefits of Google Shopping ads
Google Shopping ads are a staple in many retailers’ marketing strategies because they help:
- Reach customers when they’re shopping. Some 59% of shoppers use Google to research a purchase they plan to make in-store or online. Yet search engine optimization (SEO) is a long-term play—it can be months before you start to appear in the search results for related searches. Google Shopping campaigns let you skip that optimization process and appear in the product carousel through sponsored ads.
- Increase search visibility. The Shopping carousel appears at the top of the search page. You don’t need to bet on customers scrolling down and seeing your organic listings.
- Gain a competitive advantage. Google lets retailers add extra context to their product listings in the search engine results page (SERP). Highlighting promotions, local pickup options, free returns, or speedy shipping can influence a shopper to click your ad over another brand’s.
How to set up a Google Shopping campaign
Here’s how to create a Google Shopping campaign for the first time.
1. Create a Google Merchant Center account
If you don’t have one yet, create a Google Merchant Center account. This is the place to add your product feed and connect your product data to Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords) so that you can start building shopping campaigns. Here, you’ll also configure your basic business information, shipping, and tax settings.
2. Submit your Google product feed
The Google Shopping product data feed is a file that contains product information like titles, prices, product images, and other details that tell Google what your products are and how ads for them should be served.
Unless you only sell one or two products, this isn’t the kind of file you want to create manually. With a product base of any scale, creating a product feed manually is likely to lead to errors and incompleteness. Plus, since Google requires that your product feed be refreshed every 30 days, a Google Sheet or static CSV file isn’t the most efficient way to maintain an up-to-date catalog.
💡Tip: Have a system in place that automatically uploads your feed at least daily. The Google & YouTube app for Shopify syncs your product data across Google in real time, so that your ads are always showing the most important and in-stock products.
3. Create your Google Shopping campaign
Now that your product feed is inside the Google Merchant Center, it’s time to create a new campaign. Here’s how to do it:
- Sign in to Google Merchant Center.
- Click the + New Campaign button.
- Choose Sales as the campaign goal and Shopping as the campaign type.
- Select the Google account you want to use.
- Enter the country where your products are sold.
- Click Standard Shopping campaign, or Smart Shopping campaign for Performance Max (more on this later).
- Give your campaign a name.
- Choose a bidding strategy and budget.
- Define where you want your Shopping ads to appear—both for locations and placements.
Google Shopping bid strategies
Bidding describes how to compete and pay for your Google Shopping campaigns. We can break the options down into two categories: manual and automated bidding.
Manual CPC bidding
Manual bidding lets you decide how much you're willing to pay for each click on your ads. Google uses this in its ad auction to determine whether or not your ad is shown and in what position it appears.
Manual bidding offers complete control over your campaign. You can customize your bidding strategy based on your specific goals, product margins, or seasonal trends, and get full visibility into how much you’re spending per product.
However, you might wind up bidding too high on underperforming products. or too low on those that could generate more sales. Plus, as your account grows with more products, it becomes increasingly difficult to scale manual bidding efficiently.
Automated bidding
Automated bidding gives Google control to automatically adjust your bids to optimize for a specific goal, such as maximizing clicks, conversions, or ROAS. It uses machine learning and historical data to make adjustments in real time based on the auction environment and user behavior.
Here are goals you can optimize for:
- Target cost per action (CPA): Set a specific price that you want to pay for an action.
- Target return on ad spend (ROAS): Use this if you want to get the most revenue from your advertising budget.
- Maximize conversions: Use this to get the most conversions possible within your budget.
- Maximize conversion value: Define the value you want to maximize, such as sales revenue or profit margin.
- Enhanced cost per click (CPC): Automatically adjust your manual bids to maximize cost per click.
Target ROAS might sound like the most logical option for Shopping campaigns, but it relies on your conversion data more than any of the other bidding strategies. Account-level data isn’t specific enough—Google’s smart bidding strategies learn from conversion data on a per-campaign basis. This is why Google requires 15 conversions over a month for this bidding strategy.
For remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) or other standalone campaigns, experiment with your bid strategies—but if you’re heading toward target ROAS, err on the side of having more conversions in your campaign over a 30-day period.
Tips to optimize Google Shopping campaigns
There’s more to the Google Merchant Center than diagnostic product data and basic business data. Let’s explore more advanced features that can enhance your campaigns—and make your life easier.
Optimize product titles
Unlike paid search campaigns, Google Shopping doesn’t let you target specific keywords to control the intent of your traffic and how you bid on it. The searches that trigger your ad are totally dependent on your product feed.
When optimizing product titles for your Google Shopping campaigns:
- Move the most important parts of your product title closest to the front. Google reads your product titles from left to right. Words earlier in the title may be given more weight when Google determines when to serve an ad.
- Include the name of your product in the title. (It’s easy to take that one for granted, but it matters to searchers and to Google.)
- If you’re selling a device or appliance, include the SKU or model number in the title.
- Use your brand name appropriately. If people search for your brand specifically, include it toward the front. People using these queries are already familiar with your brand and its products—perhaps they’re even existing customers who want to find a specific product on your site to include in their next order.
- Add descriptive words in the product title. Women’s clothing brand Ravella does a great job of this in their product title, hence why it appears among the first Google Shopping results: it names the gender and type of sweater right upfront, which happens to match how I search.
Choose the right campaign structure
If you’re already running Google campaigns and feel confident in your product titles but can’t seem to win customers, you may be falling victim to “the mob effect.”
The mob effect happens when a few particularly searchable products steal the lion’s share of your budget and bring you little to no conversions in return. Because your budget’s being bogarted by those select products, top sellers and customer favorites are hidden from browsing shoppers.
Let’s put some numbers to the story using the below example. These data points are from an actual account that was stuck under the mob effect.
As you can see, four products are taking up over half of the budget while contributing less than a tenth of the revenue. Even if this account were already profitable, imagine how much more it could achieve with an adjustment—and it did.
From one 60-day period to the next, spend decreased by 27%, while revenue increased 71%:
Use negative keywords
While you can’t target shoppers using keywords in your Google Shopping campaigns, you can increase the odds of appearing for specific searches by using negative keywords.
Performance marketing agency KlientBoost calls this “the gold pan technique.” It’s the process of mining the most profitable search terms captured by shopping campaigns and suppressing generic searches that convert less often.
Because the product feed will always determine how your ads are served, you need to use negative keyword lists, Shopping campaign priorities, and shared budgets in order to funnel your traffic from a generic campaign to a specific campaign. This will help you to pay less for generic clicks and maximize traffic for the more profitable search terms.
Negative keywords force traffic for those search terms to a lower-priority shopping campaign that will target only your prized searches: the golden nuggets. As a bonus, you’re free to bid higher in your lower-priority campaign to maximize traffic for your top-converting terms.
For example, you could build:
- One set of gold pan campaigns for your top sellers
- One set of gold pan campaigns for all products
- One set of gold pan campaigns for products that are on sale, or a catchall campaign to help you keep up with frequent inventory changes
To use this Google Shopping structure, two of your shopping campaigns must have matching ad group structures and settings for your traffic to be funneled appropriately. A mismatch could result in a leaky gold pan (and leaked profits as a result).
Now that you have built two Google Shopping campaigns, here’s how to determine profitable search terms you should you add to the negative keyword list attached to your generic campaign:
- Exclude brand terms from your Shopping campaign.
- Download a search query report with a sufficient amount of traffic, isolate the highest-performing search queries, and add those as negatives to your generic campaign.
If your brand falls into the sweet spot of high-traffic volume and relevance, exclude your brand terms from your generic campaign. Klientboost reports that, after applying this method to a client who fell in the sweet spot, it saw a 295% higher ROAS from the branded Shopping campaign:
A shared budget ensures that your group of Shopping campaigns always remain in the same auctions and hold your gold pan together.
Otherwise, unless you can somehow conjure every negative keyword in the universe immediately, the high-ROI campaign will start to claim all the generic traffic and won’t be a high-ROI campaign anymore. It’s so much easier to use your shared budget, negative keywords, and priorities appropriately.
Finally, if you’re showing ads for the same product in multiple campaigns, priorities tell Google which campaign you want to promote your product first. Priorities don’t affect your search relevance or the likelihood that your product will show for a certain query. In this case, priorities just help us assign the different pieces of your gold pan.
Create single-product ad groups
Single-product ad groups (SPAGs) help you isolate budget and prioritize your bestselling products in Google Shopping campaigns.
If you have a catalog of 120,000 products, for example, managing 120,000 individual bids and ad groups would be a pain—but, even with a catalog that large, you may still identify your top 10–30 bestselling products. Because these sell so well, you’ll want to ensure that they live in their own campaign.
In that scenario, or if your store sells 30 products or fewer, SPAGs can help you manage bids for each individual product for optimal profit. They also help you see the exact search terms that each individual product is triggering.
To create a SPAG in Google Merchant Center:
- Create an ad group.
- Name it after your product ID or title (whichever helps you stay organized).
- Subdivide your product group by Item ID.
- Select the ID you named your product group after.
- Exclude “everything else.”
If your store sells a large catalog of products that would make it too inconvenient to use SPAGs for your entire inventory, try to get more granular than “All Products.” Analyze performance by setting brand or product categories—this will keep things manageable but still help you to achieve better bidding efficiency.
Add annotations and badges
Google recently announced new features, known as annotations and badges, to add extra context to products that appear in the Shopping carousel. Google decides which annotations to use based on relevance and context—meaning that you can’t guarantee whether one of these annotations appear:
- Sale price
- Free and fast delivery
- Same-day delivery
- Estimated delivery date
- Currency conversion
- Price drops
- “Top quality store” badge
- Returns policy
You can, however, increase the odds of Google using the relevant annotation and badge by optimizing your product feed. If you offer same-day delivery for a particular product, for example, highlight this on your product page. If you have a 14-day free returns policy, call this out in product descriptions.
Create promotions
Shoppers can see when a product has been discounted in their Google Shopping tab. Considering that 62% of consumers actively search and use discount codes, use the Merchant Promotions tab to your advantage and run promotions for products in your Google product feed.
To establish these, opt in to Google’s Merchant Promotions program. Then:
- Sign in to the Google Merchant Center dashboard as an admin.
- Go to Merchant Center programs under the three-dot menu. You’ll see a screen with different Merchant Center programs.
- Scroll to the bottom and enable Merchant Promotions. This will take you to a short application where you’ll fill in some basic details. Google approves most online stores within a few days.
Once approved, create a new promotion by clicking the “+” and selecting your country of sale. Define what kind of promo you’ll be running. Google gives you the option to select between:
- Discounts (e.g., percentage or amount off)
- Free gift, including gift cards
- Free shipping
You can also set sub-rules for your promotion, like minimum quantities or purchase amounts.
Lastly, give your promo a title (shown in the “Special Offer” link for your ads) and ID—a unique value so that Google understands how this promo differs from others. Tell Google which products are part of the promo, specify a discount code if applicable, and schedule the dates for your promotion.
When you submit a promotion through the Merchant Center, you’ll need to pass a basic policy approval. As long as the title in your promo is clear, accurately describes conditions for the promotion, meets basic editorial standards, and isn’t misleading in any way, you should be good here.
The second approval is the promotion status (or validation review), which isn’t submitted to Google until the promotion is active on your site. For this step, Google testers will test whether the promotion works on your site as described. If your promotion is item-specific, Google will also make sure your promotion’s IDs are mapped to products appropriately.
To avoid issues, test for validation review before your sale actually starts by creating a promotions feed. Your promo’s start date is actually split into two distinctions:
- Promotion effective dates: when your promo technically starts
- Promotion display dates: when your promo is actually shown in ads
To trigger an early review, set your promo effective date to a few days beforehand and activate the promo (without advertising it) so that Google’s testers can verify it. Set your promotion display date to begin when your sale actually starts. This will give you a head start on the review process, and you can head into your sale with the confidence of knowing your Google Shopping promos are approved.
Set up Merchant Center attribute rules
Attribute rules are an easy way for you to create new attributes or improve data in your product feed. Rather than manually adding data to your feed, rules allow you to add new information based on data that’s already there.
- Sign in to Google Merchant Center.
- Find Data sources and select your product source tab.
- Go to the section marked Attribute rules.
- Click Add attribute rule.
For example, you can create a feed rule to assign a custom label value called “sale” for any marked-down products. From the process attributes menu, let’s select custom label 0, because that’s where you want to assign your “sale” value.
Next, to ensure that only sale products are selected, set the value to include only products with “sale price” greater than 0. Because you want marked-down products to have a custom label 0 set to “sale,” use the rule “Set to” and type in “sale.”
Google Merchant Center then gives you the option to run a test of your rule—this allows you to double-check that it works for both your products and your strategy.
Turn on Performance Max campaigns
Unlike traditional campaigns, Performance Max ads can be shown across all of Google’s major networks, including Display, YouTube, and Gmail. The advertising algorithm uses machine learning for automatic bidding and ad placement—it relies on conversion rate data to make educated guesses about what to bid and where.
Athleisure brand Public Rec used Performance Max to increase online conversions by 28% and achieve a 5:1 return on ad spend. Their SEM manager, Esther Yang, says, “We’ve been able to grow our business by tapping into all of Google’s properties, ensuring that we’re capturing the right customers from every angle.”
Enable remarketing lists for search ads
Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSAs) helps you target people who’ve visited your website in some capacity—allowing you to reach people who are actively searching and are already familiar with your brand and products, and therefore more likely to buy them.
Google Ads gives you two options for using RLSAs:
- Observation (formerly called bid only): This gives you the option to observe how previous visitors behave without restricting your campaign’s reach.
- Targeting (formerly called target and bid): This gives you the option to target people who are on your list exclusively.
To set up a standalone RLSA Shopping campaign, copy your higher priority campaign. (Your lower-priority Shopping campaign is already absorbing your high-performing search queries, so you might as well keep it running.)
Then, exclude your brand name and less generic top-performing terms from your standalone RLSA campaign. Coupling search RLSA and targeting audiences with broad match keywords gives you the chance to score new search terms you might not have considered while maintaining a controlled environment.
Think of your standalone Shopping RLSA the same way: utilize it as an opportunity to grab more non-brand impression shares that may not convert as efficiently without the power of audiences. As a bonus, you can capture any new search terms that convert and try targeting them in your search campaigns to grow your account even further.
Run local inventory ads
Local inventory ads help you reach local shoppers by appearing in the Shopping results for people near a retail location. With them, you can show stock levels for individual stores; showcase buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) or curbside delivery options; and track advertising campaigns’ impact on store performance.
💡Tip: Use the Google & YouTube app to configure local inventory ads from Shopify POS. Connect your Google Merchant Center account to Shopify, create a Google My Business listing, and confirm that your local inventory is accurate. You’ll then sync your inventory data and appear in the Shopping tab for Google searchers who are looking to buy products nearby.
Maximize success with your Google Shopping ads
Google Shopping is more than just a place to run text ads. Turn the world’s largest search engine into a profitable advertising channel to showcase your products to shoppers when they’re actively looking to buy.
Use the optimization techniques we’ve outlined here to maximize your business’s Google Shopping performance. From writing engaging product titles to hosting promotions and showcasing local inventory, the Google & YouTube app for Shopify stores can help you do it all.
Read more
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- Why Leading Indicators in Ecommerce Are the Key to Success & How to Find Them
- Ecommerce Pricing Strategies: How to Scale and Grow Without Losing Profit
- Intuitive Copywriting: How to Say The Right Thing, in The Right Place, at The Right Time
- Returning Ecommerce Visitors: How to ‘Nudge’ Non-Buyers into Taking the Customer Leap
- Guest Checkouts: Definition, Benefits, and Best Practices
- One-Page Checkouts: Definition, Benefits & Optimizations
Google Shopping Ads FAQ
What are Google Shopping ads?
Google Shopping ads are a type of advertising campaign. Retailers can pay to display their products in the Shopping carousel of a Google search for related terms.
How much do Google Shopping ads cost?
The average Google Shopping ad costs between $0.46 to $1.20 per click, though this depends on your bidding strategy, industry, and competition.
Are Google Shopping ads worth it?
Google Shopping ads are worth the investment, particularly if your customers consult Google during product discovery. Sponsored Shopping ads can appear at the top of their search results and highlight any information that sets you apart from competitors, like a special deal or local pickup promotion.
How do I advertise products on Google Shopping?
To advertise products on Google Shopping, first create a Google Merchant Center account. Use the Google & YouTube app for Shopify to sync your product feed, then create a new campaign using the “Shopping” type.
How do I advertise my shop on Google?
To advertise your shop on Google, follow these steps:
- Create a free Google Business Profile.
- Optimize product pages for keywords your customers search for.
- Run Google Ads.
- Create Google Shopping campaigns.
