A Definitive Setup Guide To Google Shopping Ads [FREE Strategy Cheatsheet]

It’s already 2020 and if you are working in the eCommerce industry as a retailer or as a marketer, you must be aware of what are Google Shopping Ads aka Product Listing Ads (PLA’s) and how much power do they possess.

Google Shopping Ads are a beautiful way to steal conversions directly from Google Search Engine Result Pages(SERPs). These ads are crowned at the very top of SERPs, which attracts many shoppers to the products and services you offer.

It is really important to be strategic when running Google Shopping Ads campaigns. In this article, we are going to understand every aspect of Google Shopping Ads; you need to stay ahead of the curve and get maximum conversions, every time you run them.  

Let’s get started.

Shopping Ads Overview & Benefits

What are Google Shopping Ads?

Google says, “Shopping Ads are a type of ad that features detailed information about the specific products that you sell. They consider your feed, your site, and your bids to determine what search queries trigger your ads.”

Where do they appear?

Shopping ads can appear at the same time along with text ads because Google wants to give shoppers access to the full variety of products that match their search. This helps them find the best fit for their product even before clicking the ad.

Here’s where you might see your Shopping ads across the web:

• The Shopping tab on Google Search.
• Google Search, next to search results or above them.
• Google Search Partner websites (if your campaign is set to include search partners)
• The Google Display Network

Why Shopping Ads Become The First Choice Of Marketers?

1. A perfect way to include visuals of the product.
2. It features products at the top of Google’s search engine results page, even before organic listings for some keywords. A Shopping ad and a text ad can also appear at the same time. This means your reach with shoppers for a single search could double.
3. It includes additional information that boosts engagement such as prices, reviews, and special promotions.
4. It supports upper-funnel awareness initiatives as well as drive lower-funnel conversions.

How Does Shopping Campaign Work?

Setting up a shopping campaign can be an intimidating task. As it’s completely different from creating a Google Search campaign that completely relies on its keyword-level bidding.

But I am here to help.

What is the Google Merchant Center?

Google Ads is not the only tool that comes to your rescue while setting up shopping campaigns.

Google Merchant Center is the place where half of the magic happens. It is the platform that allows you to upload your product-related details in it via product data feed which can further be used in Google’s product advertising channel. 

What is a product data feed?

A product data feed needs to be submitted through the Merchant Center which contains details about the products you sell. A product feed is nothing but a file that contains several fields, some of which are mandatory while some are optional.

Two most used formats for uploading data feed are text (.txt) and XML (.xml).

Some important fields used in product data feed are:

• Product ID- The ID you use to uniquely identify your product
• Title- The name of your product; this will be the text that’s shown when your ad is served
• Description- This text describes your product and will be shown when your ad is clicked
• Link- Link to item’s page on your website
• Image Link- Link to the main image of your product
• Availability- Status (in stock or not)
• Price- Submit the product’s price and currency, and match with the price from your landing page
• GTIN- Your product’s Global Trade Item Number (GTIN)
• MPN- Your product’s Manufacturer Part Number (MPN)

Therefore, Google uses these details when it matches a user’s search query for your ads making sure to show the most relevant products.

Linking the Merchant Center and Google Ads

After setting up your Google Merchant Center account and uploading your feed, you need to approve a link request between your Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts. This will allow your product data to flow from the Merchant Center to Google Ads to be used in advertising campaigns.

Steps to link your Google Ads account:

1. In your Merchant Center account, go to the 3-dot icon dropdown and then click Account linking.
2. Select Google Ads.
3. Under “Your Google Ads Account,” find the Google Ads customer ID (10 Digit number) of the account you want to link. You can find the customer ID at the top of any Google Ads page when you’re signed in, near your email address.
4. Click Link.

Note: Link requests are always initiated from the Merchant Center. You can link multiple Google Ads accounts to a single Merchant Center account, or a single Google Ads account to multiple Merchant Center accounts.

Optimize Your Product Feed

For getting the most out of your text ads, you majorly focus on your keyword selection and your search ad relevance. In the shopping campaign, it’s done through maintaining a high-quality product feed.

Your product data feed is the only way how search engine communicates between the user’s search query and your website products.

Product Feed Optimization

Here are a few tips & tricks you can follow to make a top-quality product feed:

1. What’s in a name?- I hope everyone amongst us is aware of this famous saying from “The Bard” but when it comes to optimizing your product feed, this may not hold true. Your product name or title carries the maximum weight here because Google uses it to trigger your shopping ad. So the aim is to first get your keywords sorted for your product and place those keywords at the start of your title. This ensures that your title doesn’t get shorter in the search results and the same is present on your website as well.

   Note: Updating your product titles must be an ongoing task, according to the change occurring in the user’s search terms.

2. Choosing The Right Image- After setting up the right titles, the second most important attribute of a feed is images. It’s like the first contact for your customer even before your website landing page. So you wouldn’t want to create a bad impression by using ordinary images. Here are some guidelines for product Images:
   • Use High-quality images
   • Recommended image size at least- 800 X 800 pixels
   • No image larger than 64 megapixels
   • No image file larger than 16MB
   • Use original product images, no cropped image
   • Logos or icons are not allowed (Software category products are an exception)
   • Promotional offers or content on images are not allowed
   • A product with multiple views can use additional_image_link attribute
   • At least 75% of the image area should be covered by product but not more than 90%.
   • Use a white or transparent background
3. Merchant Promotions- This is a free of cost feature offered by Merchant Center for advertisers to offer marketing promotions or offers on their products. This incites shoppers to click their ad and buy more. It’s like using ad extensions in search ads.

   Google accepts the following promotions:

   • Discounts: Percent Off, Cashback, Buy One Get One Free, or Buy One Get 2nd One x Percent Off
   • Free gifts: Free item or free gift card for a specified value
   • Shipping: Free or discounted shipping

   Note: Read Merchant promotions policies & criteria here.

4. Google Product Categories- Though Google assigns product category automatically from its product taxonomy, it can be overridden. Just to clear it out, these categories won’t show with your ads. They only work from the backend and they are used to get more relevancy and more visibility to your products.

   There is another term that always coins with product categories i.e. product type. The main difference between the two is the latter needs to be filled with values you define and not from Google taxonomy which is the case of the former.

   The main benefit of assigning product type is to let Google know how specific you are while defining your products so that more relevant audiences can be brought to those products.

   Google product categories example- If you are selling Air Jordans limited edition Travis Scott shoes you can choose categories for them like this- Apparel & Accessories > Shoes

   Google product type example- You need to categorize them under product type like this- Apparel & Accessories > Shoes > Air Jordans > Travis Scott

5. Product Description- Apart from product titles, descriptions are the place where Google looks for related keywords. You can include up to 5000 characters.

   The key is the same as done in titles i.e. to include important details in the first 160-500 characters.

   Pro Tip- In your product page’s description, include your product’s most relevant features and visual attributes such as.

   • Size
   • Material
   • Intended age range
   • Special features
   • Technical specifications
   • Shape
   • Pattern
   • Texture
   • Design
   • Variants
6. Custom labels- In simple language, these are the kinds of some advanced filters that enable marketers to further breakdown product groups which are already provided by Google Shopping on the basis of Category, Product Type, ID, Condition, Brand.

   The main role of custom labels comes into play when you create your shopping campaign bidding strategies.

   Google gives you an option to create up to 5 custom labels such as custom_label_0, custom_label_1, custom_label_2, custom_label_3, and custom_label_4. You can create these as columns in your feed.

   The values you enter in these columns are completely your choice and they don’t show up in the frontend with your ads. You can even set rules for the same in your Merchant Center account. No need to make edits in the original feed. In simple words, you can use custom labels at your discretion in Google Ads.

   Pro-Tip

   • You can use custom labels in case you want to create separate bidding for some set of products.
   • You can also use it to generate a detailed report of some specific product groups.

Creating Shopping Campaign Using Advanced Strategies

After fully optimizing the Google Shopping feed, link the merchant center account to your Google Ads account.

Now, the last step is creating a perfect shopping campaign.

How to set up a Google Shopping Campaign

Creating shopping campaigns is a pretty simple task. Here are the step by step instructions:

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. In the page menu along the left-hand side, click Campaigns.
3. Click the plus button, then click the New campaign.
4. For “Campaign Type,” select Shopping and click Next.
5. Choose your advertising settings such as your Merchant Centre Account, Bidding Strategy, Budget, Devices, Location & Network
6. Click on Save & continue
7. After that, create an Ad group.
8. Choose an Ad group type
   • Product Shopping Ads- These are useful when customers would be searching for detailed terms like ‘women’s hiking boots’. They’ll see your product image, then they can click your ad to purchase that product.
   • Showcase Shopping Ads- These would be useful when customers would be searching for broader terms like ‘hiking equipment’. They’ll see your header image to get an idea of the products that you sell, then they can click your ad to see specific products and get information about your business.
   • Local Inventory Ads- These ads are useful when the nearby user searches for products in your local store. Users can check view in-store inventory, store hours, find directions and many more things when the user clicks on your ad.
9. If you are new to Shopping ads, choose the product shopping option for now.
10. Enter your Ad Group name and click Save.
11. This is going to be slightly different if you haven’t ever created a Shopping campaign as you might land on a product group tab and not a keywords level tab.
12. Here in the product group tab, you will see the “All Products” group which contains all the products you have submitted via feed in your Merchant Center account.
13. We can further split these product groups using subdivisions to bid more strategically and further optimize the shopping campaigns.

Splitting – How to organize product groups

Your “All Product” product groups contain all the product information which you have given to the Merchant Center. You can further break it down on the basis of Category, Brand, Item Id, Condition, Product Type, Channel or even Custom Labels which we discussed earlier.

Breaking a product group further gives an advertiser complete control on how much to bid on some specific products as all products wouldn’t carry the same price. Thus, their profitability would also differ.

So let’s assume that you sell a range of shoes from brands like Nike, Adidas, Reebok and other local brands in your online store. All your shoe ranges fall under your first product group i.e- “All Products”. If you set a bid on this product group without further breaking it down, all of your shoes would follow the same bids.

This would be advisable in case you have 100-300 shoes in your store but let’s say you have 10000+ shoes in your eCommerce store. Then it would be a daunting task to maintain the profitability of each shoe brand.

In the image below, we have subdivided the shoes on the basis of brands Nike, Adidas, and everything else. Nike & Adidas being the most high-end ranges and rest we have kept under everything else.

We have further segmented the Nike product group as it contains categories like Nike Jordans, Air Max, React Infinity, Nike Court Air Zoom.

For Nike, subcategories bids vary from $2 to $0.70.
All shoes under the Adidas group, bids have been set at $1.7 flat.
All shoes under everything else, bids have been assigned at $0.50 flat.

This process of splitting or organizing your product groups gives you way more control over your products than bidding on keywords for your products in a search campaign.

Use Campaign Priority Setting for Shopping Campaigns

Campaign priority is nothing but a feature that comes up when you set up a product shopping campaign. It’s not available for Showcase Shopping ads.

This feature enables you to prioritize a campaign over another one. It’s useful when you are advertising the same products for the same country of sale but in multiple campaigns.

For example– Let’s say you have set up 2 different campaigns with different budgets and bids. One at $150/day under Campaign A  and another one at $70/day under Campaign B. Both campaigns A & B have a similar category of product. Let’s consider shoes but the advertiser wants to prioritize the shoe category in campaign A over that of campaign B; for which he goes in the campaign settings tab and changes the campaign priority of campaign A to high and for campaign B as low.

Campaign A bids will be used prior to Campaign B whenever the ad is triggered for the shoes immediately. When Campaign A runs out of daily budget, campaign B bids will be used.

Note: 

1. All shopping campaigns, by default, have low priority settings.
2. Campaign priorities won’t affect your search relevance or influence how well your product shows for a specific query.

Few Instances:

1. With 3 campaign setup at high, medium & low priority setting, first bids from high priority campaigns will be used to deliver ads even if bids are higher for campaigns with medium or low priority.
2. When the daily budget of higher priority campaign gets exhausted in the middle of the day, the next lower priority campaign starts bidding
3. When 3 campaigns use the same priority level, campaigns with the highest bid amount will bid first.

Wrapping Up!

With this article coming to the end, you have all the latest information related to what shopping ads are and how to launch them with advanced level strategies. At last, don’t be afraid to try new optimization techniques as it always comes with an opportunity to learn new things. Cheers!!

If you like the zest of this article, do share it in your comments. I would be happy to hear from you.