What is Google Shopping?
Google Shopping is available as a paid advertising service from Google that promotes products from your online store in Google search results. For the online shopper, Google Shopping is a section on Google where you can browse for items that are for sale.
Google Shopping results often appear at the top of search results which is great for your advertising presence. Do to their prime position and graphical nature we expect that Google shopping ads will attract more clicks. As Google typically gets paid on a per click basis it’s also a likely indication that the shopping ads can get more clicks otherwise they wouldn’t give such prime real estate to Google Shopping ads.
Why Google Shopping?
Acting as a crash test dummy for Google Shopping on your behalf is a business my wife and I recently launched with two friends, www.pureandwholesome.co.nz. Pure and Wholesome is an online store selling natural pet food, pet accessories, baby wipes and ethically produced homeware.
As a new business we have no existing customer base and we know it will take time and plenty of good content to climb up the search rankings so we’re using paid advertising with Google and Facebook to build awareness and draw potential customers to our site. With digital advertising you are create advertisements that aim at people who are searching for specific words and phrases or people that meet certain characteristics such as their interests or search behaviour.
It’s still very early days for Pure and Wholesome but the initial results for Google Shopping look positive. The conversion rate for Google shopping ads is nearly five times better than the traditional Google adwords and the cost per click is 25% lower than adwords. The volumes are still low so these results are likely to be lacking true statistical significance but we’re encouraged by what we’ve seen so far.
How to get Google Shopping with Rocketspark's Google Merchant Feed
There are two key parts to Google Shopping campaigns:
- Google’s Adwords service is used to set up and manage your Google Shopping campaigns.
- Google Merchant centre is the service that takes the information about the products in your online and shares your product details with Google Shopping in Adwords.
A new feature we’ve just launched makes it so much easier to manage your Google Shopping campaigns. In your website dashboard shop settings you’ll find a menu called Google Merchant which enables you to create a direct connection between your online shop and your Google merchant centre. The technical term for what we’ve created is an XML feed for your Google Merchant Centre but what is really means for you is a simple copy and paste of your unique Google Merchant feed address.
Once your Google Merchant Centre is set up to receive your product information Google will fetch your online shop’s data automatically. Google let you schedule these fetches to occur daily, weekly or monthly. The Rocketspark Google merchant feed provides all of the essential information to Google such as product title, a link to your products, an image and stock availability. The automatic feed from Rocketspark means that your Google Shopping campaign can stay up to date with the latest products in your shop and also ensures you are not wasting your advertising budget on products that are out of stock.
Free listings on Google Shopping
If you’re an existing user of Merchant Centre and Shopping Ads, and depending on which country your business is operating in, you may be eligible to take advantage of free listings. Head to the Surfaces Across Google program to check if you can opt-in to free shopping listings.
When setting up your product feed for Google Shopping, there are two options for your listings (if you're eligible for free listings)
- Shopping Ads (the paid version) or
- Surfaces across Google (the free version).
Retailers can show their products in unpaid listings on the Google Shopping tab by opting their products into Surfaces across Google. This allows shoppers to see more products from more stores.
Connect with Facebook too
An added bonus of Rocketspark's Google Merchant feed is that the feed can also be used to connect your website with Facebook to use Facebook’s Dynamic Adverts service which promotes your products on Facebook. Facebook talk about uploading your product catalogue and this uploading can be achieved using your Rocketspark Google Merchant Feed.
As Facebook can glean quite an understanding about what their users are interested in so their advertising services can be highly targeted.
Where to get help with Google Merchant Centre and Google Shopping?
- We’ve created a step by step guide for how to connect your Rocketspark ecommerce with Google Merchant Centre for Google Shopping
- Google have a myriad of resources about Google Shopping
- Learn more about Facebook Dynamic adverts
- While we’ve made it easy to connect Rocketspark with your Google Merchant Centre you still need to know how to run a Google Shopping Campaign. If you’d like to engage an expert to help you please contact us and we can connect you with preferred partners who can help you set up your campaign. When contacting us please let us know if you’d like help with just setting up the campaign or if you’d like someone to manage the campaign for you.
