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There’s an old saying which goes like this: ‘If you build it, they will come.’ Well, to be honest, the saying has been overused in the field of digital marketing.
It’s not enough to just build a Shopify store or any other e-commerce store. That’s just a beginning.
Users can find almost everything on the internet, from directions to the nearest hospital to buying that perfect gift for a loved one.
We already know what the customers are looking for.
All we have to do is show up at every turn to capture and entice the customers to make a purchase.
When you find the exact people who are looking for the products you have on-shelf, tell them you have an exciting offer, and then make them purchase the product of their choice in as fewer clicks as possible.
Why Choose Shopify E-commerce Platform?
When it comes to choosing an E-commerce platform from a myriad of options, Shopify is the one you should look up to.
Shopify is one of the coolest E-commerce platforms which allows to set up an online store for your products.
It has made setting up an online store a cakewalk for everyone.
Hosting more than 500,000 online stores, Shopify became the first hosted E-commerce solution to use Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Here are a few features of Shopify which are enough to blow your minds:
- A complete hosted solution
- Supports multiple languages
- 100+ professional themes
- 100+ payment gateways
- A completely functional mobile application
- Unlimited products and bandwidth
- 24/7 support
To begin with, an advertising platform to get the most out of your Shopify store, Google Shopping ads can do it for you.
What is Google Shopping Network?
When it comes to Google Shopping Network, two platforms have been dominant ever since the E-commerce revolution came into being.
These are – Google Adwords and Google Merchant Center.
Google Merchant Center is the platform where you create your shopping feed. That is exactly where thee feed lives.
Google AdWords is the advertising platform where all the marketing campaigns for your shopping feed is managed. There you’ll set your budget, manage your bids, gain insights, and make optimizations based on performance.
Google Shopping Network provides online merchants with a unique way of selling their products and advertising to increase their reach.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”One of the greatest things you can do for your online store is using Google Shopping Campaigns. ” quote=”One of the greatest things you can do for your online store is using Google Shopping Campaigns. “]
These Google Shopping Ads have great potential to drive-in quality traffic to your Shopify store so that you can enjoy a consistent stream of visitors who are looking for the products you are offering.
How do you make your Products Appear in Google Shopping?
Here’s how you get started with Google Shopping Network:
Step 1: Start with a Google Merchant Account
The Google Merchant Center acts as a repository for all your products that you want to sell.
It essentially contains the product images and all the related information like prices, sizes, colors, and offers.
You use this data from Google Merchant Center to avail various other services provided by Google.
To create a Google Merchant Center, you have to create your account on the platform.
When you create an account, Google will ask you for information that you would have to provide to meet the requirements.
Here are the requirements to create a Google Merchant Center Account:
- All contact information must be complete and accurate.
- All return policies, billing terms, and sales conditions must be clearly posted on your site.
- Your checkout process must be comprehensive, allowing products to be added to the cart and complete checkout online.
- You must have a valid SSL certificate to verify secure checkout procedures.
Once you create your account on Google Merchant Center, you will have to verify and claim your URL.
Step 2: Create Product Data
Creating a data feed is the most recommended method of supplying your product information to Google.
Here are the minimum requirements of information on Google Merchant Center:
- Pricing
- Availability
- Complete shipping details and costs
- Listed Product must match the product on the landing page
You may use an Excel sheet to create your data feed or you may use Google Sheets spreadsheet as well.
The file formats accepted by Google Shopping are .txt, .xml, .gz, .zip and .bz2.
Step 3: Manage the Account from Dashboard
You will be managing your account and product information from the dashboard itself.
You may find all your products, data feeds, related metrics and diagnostics on the dashboard.
From the dashboard, you can manage the tax information, shipping details, account users and more.
Step 4: Linking the Merchant Center to AdWords Account.
Next step is linking the Merchant Center to AdWords Account.
Let’s see how you can do it.
How to link Google Merchant Center to Adwords Account?
In order to allow Google AdWords to access the product data, you would have to give it the access to your Google Merchant Center.
To do that, you have to link the Google Merchant center to AdWords Account.
This can be done by going to ‘Settings’ tab on ‘Dashboard’.
Select AdWords and then identify your account and then click the option to add.
After that, you will receive a request for approval.
Click on the approval link and you are set to create your shopping campaign.
How to set up Google Shopping with Shopify?
In order to set up Google Shopping with Shopify store, you would have to set up your Google Merchant Center.
While you do that, the set up will ask you to verify your Shopify website.
To do that, you can either use an HTML tag and add that to your Shopify website or use the Google Analytics account or the Google Tag Manager account.
- Select the HTML Tag radio box.
- Copy the HTML tag from the text box and go to the Shopify Account’s Admin Page.
- Now on the left-hand side site navigation click on Online store, then select Themes.
- Click on the ‘***’ icon on the right-hand side.
- Click “Edit HTML/CSS” to edit the theme.
- Now open theme.liquid by clicking on Layout and then theme.liquid.
- Scroll down theme.liquid and then find the </head>, add the HTML meta tag that you copied from Google Merchant Setup.
- Now click Save.
- Go back to the Google Merchant set up page and click on ‘Verify and Claim’ button.
Now the Google Merchant Center is linked to your Shopify website.
But with a ‘Set it – Forget it’ attitude and a short-term mentality, you are not going to get any visible result from any of your Google Shopping campaigns.
You will need to look after the Google Shopping Ad campaigns and optimize them to the best results.
Here are 10 Ways to Optimize Google Shopping Campaigns for Shopify Stores
Tip #1: Feed Optimization
Before heading into understanding how to optimize the Shopify feed, it’s essential to know a few basics of creating the feed and attaching it to the Google Shopping Merchant account.
To make Google shopping work, you need to make accounts on Google Adwords and Google Merchant Center.
Google Merchant Center is where your feed lives.
It is where you set up the feed in accordance with Google’s recommendations.
Google Adwords is required to set up the Ads for Google Shopping Campaigns.
Google Analytics helps you to track the performance of the campaigns and enables you to prepare reports for conversion tracking.
To optimize the feed, you need to comply with all the prerequisites that Google recommends.
It’s essential to keep your product-listing feed optimized as it helps to boost the visibility on SERP, resulting in a higher Click-Through-Rate.
A study conducted by Salsify shows that more than 88% of shoppers consider the content of a product-listing ‘extremely important’ before making a purchase.
It’s very important to centralize the product information and edit the product data w.r.t. Google’s specification.
Adapt all other product information to Google feed requirement and create a process that makes updating the content easy.
Not only advertisers should focus on making the product title clickable, but they should also make them search friendly.
If you are trying to drive more impressions and conversions from your shopping ads, optimizing your product titles is the most fundamental things to start.
Modifying the titles with information that closely matches the term shoppers are searching can help your products to appear in more relevant queries.
Here are 4 methods to optimize your product title in Google Shopping:
Add brand names to the title: Adding a well-known brand name to the product titles can do wonders for your Ads. These are words that consumers with strong brand loyalty are likely to include in their search query. The more closely the words are to the beginning of the title, the more importance it signals to Google.
Include color, style, patterns & size: Including these aspects of the product in the title is a great technique to draft your product title. These details help the title to be more descriptive.
Include gender: When you include gender of the demographic the product is listed for, your chances of getting a relevant click increases. Adding ‘men’ or ‘women’ in the title can help optimize the title for a particular gender you are targeting. For example- ‘Women’s black fit Flare Dress size medium’.
Include MPN: When you include the Manufacturing Part Number at the end of the title, it attracts the shoppers with high intent to purchase. This is especially true in verticals like hardware or auto parts where high intent shoppers often know the unique identifier number of the product they are looking to buy.
Advertisers should aim for 500 to 1000 characters and include the relevant attributes like size, age range, special features, technical specs, etc. in the first 150 characters.
When writing descriptions, it is recommended to add visual details like the pattern, material, and design.
Proper punctuations and grammar should be used throughout the description.
Minimum usage of exclamations and special characters is advised.
We can use Merchant Promotions with the help of the Merchant Center.
Advertisers may use any of these Google Shopping Campaign Merchant Promotions:
- Free Shipping
- Lowering the Free-shipping threshold
- Buy one, Get one or Buy one, Get one 50% off
- Tiered percentage discounts
- Brand specific rebates
In case you fail to find the Google Merchant Promotion tab, fill out the required form.
Tip #2: Use Compelling Imagery
When putting up product images, it’s essential to make sure they are of high-quality.
The images should be able to reflect a brand’s personality and show specific parts of the products which you want to focus.
The images should be optimized to make them work well within the platform.
The image size especially should be taken great care of.
The link and the image link are both important.
The link is the product page’s URL while the image link is the URL for your product image.
Regardless of how you have made the product images, make sure that the images are of high-quality with an all-white or neutral background.
For example, if you are in the Fashion category, having product pictures taken while on models is a great way to connect to the psyche of the consumer.
Not only the product images look great that way, but it also helps them imagine how the clothes will look on them.
You should note that Google will disapprove the products if it contains anything that takes away from the actual products themselves like watermarks or overlaid logos.
Always double check your product images to spare yourself the pain of getting Google’s disapproval.
Tip #3: Implement a Negative Keywords strategy
Negative keywords play a crucial role in making your ads show up only for relevant searches.
Since there are no prospects of adding keywords in Google shopping, retailers have to trust Google to find the most relevant keywords for their products.
Even if you write exceptional titles and descriptions, Google’s imperfections can make your ads show up for completely irrelevant search terms.
This is problematic due to these two reasons:
- Well, if your ad shows up for an irrelevant search term and a user clicks on your ad, you would have to pay for that.
- If your ads are not being clicked (which will happen when they show up for irrelevant keywords) Google will drop your quality score and will not show you ads as frequently.
Negative keywords can help to resolve these issues by making your ads NOT show up on irrelevant search terms.
Google will stop showing up your ads against search terms which contain those negative keywords.
Negative keywords save you a large amount of money by getting rid of unwanted clicks.
This will also result in an increase in the quality score as the CTR of your ads increase.
Adding negative keywords in Google Shopping Campaign is fairly simple and straightforward.
Just head to the appropriate campaign and find the negative keywords tab.
Look for the negative keywords list in the shared library section.
Click on the Plus sign to access the list.
Here you can either add the negative keywords for a particular ad group or the entire campaign.
Potential negative keywords:
- About
- Definition
- Example
- Examples
- Sample
- Samples
- What are
- What is
- Guide
- News
- Review
- Reviews
- Statistics
- Tutorial
- Tutorials
- Bargain
- Cheap
- Clearance
- Discount
- Discounted
- Free
- Inexpensive
- Price
- Prices
- Quote
- Quotes
- Create
- Craft
- Handmade
- Make
- How to make
- Import
- Export
- Drop shipping
- Rental
- Gift
Tip #4: Campaigns priority
When you are running multiple Google Shopping Campaigns for Shopify stores that have the same product, you are free to choose which campaigns can participate in the auction.
This is the magic of using Campaigns Priority settings on Google Shopping Platform.
Campaigns priority settings come handy when you are advertising the same product in different Shopping Campaigns.
To begin with, all the campaigns have the Low priority. But you can change the priority to ‘Medium’ or ‘High’.
This will determine the aggressiveness of bidding for the products in these campaigns.
There are rules advertisers should consider when making use of Campaigns Priority.
The campaign with the highest priority will bid.
For example. Let’s assume there are two campaigns with different campaign priorities, say one has High and other has Medium priority.
Google is programmed to use the high priority campaign for auction and bidding, regardless of the bid amount on any of the campaigns.
When the campaign with the highest priority runs out of budget, Google automatically begins bidding for products in a Campaign with lower priority.
If there are campaigns have the same priority, then the campaign with the highest bid amount will be chosen to participate in the auction.
Let’s take another example. You are selling a product, let’s say Flip-flops for the coming summer.
Now you have the same product listed in two campaigns – Summer and Footwear.
But you have a specific budget you want to spend for your summer campaign.
Whenever flip-flops are shown you want the bidding to be done by the summer campaign, not your footwear campaign.
To make sure the bid comes from your summer campaign, you should set the summer campaign at high priority and give footwear campaign a low priority.
Tip #5: Match Bidding Strategy to Budget
It is very important for the bidding strategies and budget allocated for any campaign to resonate with each other.
To do exactly that, here are three factors which should be considered when determining your bids:
- Product price: It’s really not a good idea to bid the same price for every product. We see merchants with campaigns where they have the same bid for every product they have on feed. A $1.99 screw box has the same bid as a $500 engine. One should avoid doing this.
- Profit Margin: Product price alone should not be a factor on the basis of which you bid. One should take into consideration the average gross margin. It is recommended to keep this simple and try to bid intelligently.
- eCommerce conversion rate: Here, you would want to have a look at your average conversion rate. Your average conversion rate from the paid search would be higher than your site average.
When you are launching your campaigns, it is recommended to increase the bids a few times to start gaining impressions and clicks.
If you have followed all our optimization techniques and still you are not getting any significant impressions, you need to bid more.
It’s rare for a shopping campaign to hit it’s daily budget initially.
Google’s algorithm will show your product listings very conservatively and track the user behavior for them.
As the performance metrics of your Google shopping campaigns for shopify stores improve over-time (most importantly CTR), Google will start showing your ads frequently.
It’s very important to set a budget that allows your campaign to grow.
If your budget is $5/day and your average bid is $1, Google knows that you are five clicks away from exhausting your budget.
What this does is, it makes Google show your ads less frequently. Regardless of the delivery options (accelerated/standard) you mentioned.
Tip #6: Google Shopping Ad Extensions
Ad Extensions have shown what they can do for text ads. But when it comes to Google Shopping Ads, they take the game to a whole new level for your Shopify store.
There are essentially two kinds of extensions for Google Shopping:
- Automated Extensions: Shipping and/or Tax information displayed in a PLA.
- Merchant Center Programs: Includes Google Customer Review, Merchant Promotions, and Product Ratings.
These extensions have proven to be very effective to drive CTR and Conversion Rates.
Automated Extensions are based on the information you provide in the Merchant Center.
You would see this in ads where additional texts appear. For example, ‘Free Shipping’ or ‘90-day returns’.
There are default templates you may use or customize it as per your choice.
This adds a unique element in the Ads and may very well become a reason why users click on your listing.
There are many more Ad extensions which can help you to drive sales.
Merchant Promotions can help you add more visibly appealing messages like ‘Special Offer’ which when clicked, opens up a dialogue window displaying the unique offer.
Tip #7: Products Rating & Review
There’s a reason why we recommend you to feature products rating and review.
According to a study, 88 percent of the people online trust a product or brand based on a review.
An online review works in the same way a personal recommendation works.
Listings without a review or rating look incomplete and less compelling when displayed beside the listings who have ratings for the product.
[bctt tweet=”Not only Product ratings make your product stand out, but they also help to build trust with potential customers, improves visibility on search, and increase CTR and eventually Conversions.” username=”AdsTriangle”]
To qualify for Product Ratings, your products must have enough reviews. When there are a large number of reviews, customer trust the ratings even more.
Well, nobody’s going to trust your product rating based on a few reviews, right?
A study revealed that 52 percent of people trust products with some negative reviews and low ratings!
Confused?
Well, customers want the reviews to be genuine.
So a five-star rating may hurt your sales. The optimum rating that gets the most sales is 4.7.
Customers know that a 5-star rating is found only on the products with only a few reviews.
Adding seller rating is beneficial as well. It boosts the effectiveness and quality of your Product listing.
Tip #8: Product Segmentation
Product segmentation is important so that you can focus on the products that are performing well.
The 80/20 effect while segmenting the products will help you focus on what is important and spend time doing just that.
The common ways you can do product segmentation are:
Segmentation by Best Sellers
In most of the businesses selling a product or service, only a handful of the products generate the majority of the revenue. As a rule of thumb, 5-10% of the items will produce 75% of the revenue. Therefore, while doing product segmentation, it is important to concentrate on products which has sold the best in the past 1-3 months.
Segmentation by Traffic
In this segmentation method, the products are shortlisted on the basis of their search volume and demand.
With the help of this method, you can focus on 20% of the products that are generating 50-80% of the traffic and thus a large part of the cost.
This method allows you to spend more on products that have the potential to grow more in the future.
Segmentation by ROI
Here’s another way to segment your campaigns.
With this, you will be able to prepare different shopping campaigns which have high, average and low ROI.
Segmentation by ROI enables you to allocate the resources for the campaigns and have a better control of the CPC.
For example, you can lower the bid for any low performing products.
Segmentation by Gross Margin
There will be cases where you will be earning more by selling a certain brand. Let’s say you have a downloadable product or a product which you produce yourself.
If you have a high-profit margin (let’s say $100) from those products, the campaign deserves a higher budget spent on marketing.
Splitting the products on the basis of high, medium or low-profit margins allows you to have a better control over spending.
Tip #9: Remarketing Strategy
Remarketing, in simple words, is a practice of targeting previous visitors to one’s store and re-delivering ads to them.
It’s a great strategy to that no marketer should miss out on.
For remarketing, you have to add a Tracking or Remarketing Code on your website’s code.
Through Remarketing, the user or customer behavior is tracked and then used to build audiences.
You can easily segment the retargeted groups using criteria such as previous purchases or shoppers who abandoned the cart.
When it comes to Google shopping for Shopify, one should know of these two types of Remarketing campaigns:
Dynamic Remarketing
To target the previous visitors and deliver ads to them on the websites they surf, you can use the Display Ad campaign on Google.
When you enable Dynamic Remarketing, Google uses the information from the feed in Merchant Center and builds ads customized on the basis of products that customers previously viewed.
RLSA – Remarketing Lists for Search/Shopping Ads
RLSA is the most preferred type of remarketing used in Google Shopping for Shopify stores.
Remarketing Lists is not an actual campaign and can be produced relatively easily.
Instead of building a complete campaign, merchants and advertisers can attach the audiences they build using Google Ads or Google Analytics to their campaigns.
When a previous store visitor searches on Google for the product you offer, Ads are delivered to them based on the products they viewed on your website, in this case, your Shopify store.
Tip #10: Refine your Targeting
To make sure you are driving the right traffic to your website, you have to target the right users.
There are many ways you can accomplish that.
Using geographic location, demographic information, interests, affinity, or lookalike audience, you can optimize your Google ad campaigns to reap maximum visibility.
It’s very important to narrow down the target audience to make sure your ads are shown to the right people.
This immensely boosts your campaign, as your ads are shown only to the relevant audience, making sure you are not paying for clicks that won’t convert.
Marketers should also consider the fact that keeping the targeted audience narrow might also backfire.
It is quite a possibility that you may end up exhausting an audience by using narrow targeting.
What most retailers do when targeting is that they use basic location targeting and simply include the country they are shipping or selling to.
CRO expert Igo Belogolovsky blogged for Neil Patel and explained why it is better to adjust bids by geography.
The reasons why refining the audience through targeting works are:
- It helps to identify the countries where the ads appeared.
- You can break down the audience on the grounds of state, city, airport, neighborhood, university, and city region.
- It is possible to make bid adjustments on the basis of Ad performance at a particular location. You can always lower the bids on underperforming Geos and double down on the ones that are performing strongly.
Retailers who are operating in specialty markets or home improvement space can greatly benefit through extremely specific geo-targeting techniques.
You may use multiple shopping campaigns to employ different targeting criteria.
This way you can target multiple locations and identify the best location to show your ads at.
Final Thoughts
Shopify stores have highly benefited from Google Shopping Campaigns.
One of the greatest advantages of using Google shopping campaign is getting qualified leads.
From Increased Site traffic to higher click-through rates and ability to refine the bidding strategies, everything is possible on the GDN.
Google Shopping is one of the most potentially lucrative digital marketing channels today for online e-commerce store owners.
These shopping ads have proven to be a major asset who are looking to acquire unique and returning customers.
Not only these Ads are extremely targeted, but they are also incredibly cost-effective.
Yes, it will require a lot of efforts to get started and manage over-time.
But the investment will absolutely pay off for those who have patience and the tortoise mindset – slow and steady always win the race.