Google's Improving Shopping Campaigns

For retailers and manufacturers alike, Google Shopping campaigns are an absolute must.

In an update announced last week, Google now provides greater prominence in search engine results for Shopping campaigns, allowing more in-depth product information.

Businesses can now populate product pages on Google Shopping with inspirational and high-quality content. Highlighting product features and capabilities that shoppers care about most.

Alongside this are revamped Shopping analytics, within the Google Merchant Centre, making it easier to identify areas of opportunity for campaigns.

New analytics include:

• Performance trends like top performing product groups and significant changes in performance or price
• Insights on product variants like top search terms for your products and average price trends
• Product group stats like which competitor’s brands and products appear most often with yours

New Shopping Features Good For Brands & Retailers Alike

Expanded Shopping results will be particularly welcomed by manufacturers as they provide greater control over how products appear and are presented in search engine results.

It also makes it easy for brands to keep product information up to date. Rather than relying on retail partners exclusively for all.

The move is also a positive one for retailers, with greater visibility and detail in search results helping to drive better-qualified traffic.

Google Shopping campaigns have blown up the past few years, with increased attention and prominence afforded to Shopping ads in the search results page. Google Shopping ads, commonly referred to as Product Listing Ads (or PLAs), have become the most popular ad format for retail advertisers.

Google Shopping ads now drive 76.4% of retail search ad spend, generating 85.3% of all clicks, according to an Adthena study. A much higher proportion than standard text-based search ads.

Setting Up Google Shopping Campaigns

Shopping campaigns work slightly differently to standard Google ads since they do not run off keywords in the traditional sense.

Google Shopping is powered by two platforms: Google Ads and Google Merchant Centre.

Google Merchant Centre is where your product feed lives. The product data that you submit through Merchant Centre contains details about the products that you sell. Google uses these details to match a user's search to your ads, making sure that you show the most relevant products.

For most brands and retailers the work normally needs to go into here, since most are already set-up in Google Ads. Not unlike setting up catalogues in Facebook for dynamic remarketing or Instagram Shopping campaigns.

Advanced online marketing activity increasingly works in this way, with automation central in the decision-making process. Therefore, the job for marketers becomes more one of set-up and management.