Improve Your Google Shopping Ads Performance
Google Shopping ads were initially a component of Google Ads but are now a standalone product. Google Shopping is exclusive to advertisers selling tangible merchandise, downloadable product or media online. For e-commerce clients, traffic from shopping ads has a higher probability of converting as compared to conventional text ads, which make them very cost-effective. Providing you manage your shopping ads properly. However, just like with other types of ads, you have to optimize Google Shopping ads. If you have been asking
Optimize Product Titles
Product titles are probably one of the most important aspects to optimize for your Google Shopping ads. Taking all aspects into consideration, product titles contribute to approximately 80% of your ranking.
The reason for this is that unlike text ads, you will not be bidding on keywords with these types of ads. Instead, you will include keywords in your product titles, which is what Google Shopping works with. Nonetheless, a product title needs to be both natural and descriptive such that it makes it easy for clients to understand what your product is.
How to optimize your Google Shopping product titles?
- Character Limit: Google only allows 150 characters though the algorithm tends to truncate any titles longer than 70 characters. You should ensure that your titles are no longer than 70 characters.
- Front Load Key Terms: It is not recommended to keyword stuff though you should include your most important keywords as close as possible to the 70 character limit allowed.
- Be Natural: Do not just stuff keywords in an effort to target everything as this would seem unnatural. When writing titles you should be writing for people rather than for the algorithm. Research businesses in the niche to find how they are writing their ads.
- Be Descriptive but Contrite: It is critical to include the name of your product but the search engines and shoppers may need other things. For instance, you may include things such as gender, size, color or promotions.
Automated bidding for Google shopping
Automated bidding is one of the most effective campaign strategies particularly if you are running several campaigns at the same time. This makes it possible for the machine learning algorithms to learn and test your ads and be able to set the best bids that fit your marketing objectives.
With automated bidding, you can let the algorithm do the bidding for you and also use real-time trends and changes to optimize your bids towards the achievement of your business goals.
Google provides a range of automated bidding options when you are doing Google Shopping ads which include maximize clicks, enhanced PPC, Target ROAS, and rule-based bidding. For a more comprehensive look check them out here.
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Maximize Clicks – The algorithm automatically sets bids so that your ads can get as many clicks as they can within the target ad spend you set. This will make it possible to be within your target ad spend even as you increase clicks to low traffic products.
▶️ Enhanced CPC
– The algorithm will adjust your manual bids to improve the probability of a click resulting in conversions. In doing so, it will enhance conversions while allowing you to control your bids.
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Target ROAS – The algorithm will automatically set your bid to optimize conversion value while achieving a targeted return on ad spend (ROAS).
Rule-based Bidding
You need to remember that no matter how good automated strategies are, it is not prudent to automate all your ad strategies. A hybrid approach that includes human bidding strategies combined with automated strategies is always preferred. Some of the best rule-based strategies to adopt are:
▶️ Bid Increase rules
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Pull back on wasted ad spend
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Reduce bids on unprofitable terms
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Bump products with zero impressions
One of the biggest benefits of adopting rule-based bidding strategies is that it allows you to set thresholds. Through strategies such as threshold bidding, you can customize rules according to trends, ROI, impressions, and conversions which means you can make changes to your ads at scale.
Add Negative Keywords
Even though Google Shopping ads do not depend on keywords as much as Display or Text Ads, you still need to optimize by removing negative keywords. Optimizing by reducing negative keywords ensure that you do not appear for irrelevant or expensive terms, which may not provide a good ROI or may plain waste clicks.
The Search Terms report should be your first stop when you are looking to optimize your ads. It shows all the search queries users were using before they were presented with ads they clicked to get to your site.
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Irrelevant Search Queries – Sort out your queries by impressions to get a list of all keywords you do not want your ads to be shown for. This may include color variations you do not sell, wrong size of clothes or any other irrelevant attribute.
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Competitor Search Queries – These re product searches that involved competitor brand names combined with product name.
In the example above, the e-commerce seller sells consumer electronics and competes with the likes of Target, Amazon, and Walmart. Remove all such keywords.
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Very Generic Search Queries – While you cannot pick the keyword to advertise for on Google Shopping ads you can remove those you do not want. You can not look at keywords per product. You can only see all of the keywords that show up in your campaign.
