Google Shopping has been around for quite some time now. Today, it is no longer a novelty for online stores. Many have already implemented it, but not everyone understands the algorithms of its work and what can be influenced to increase sales. That is why we decided to write this material.
So, let's go! You have a shopping campaign, what to do with it next?
Just top up the balance and wait for sales? Option. But this is not the best way for systemic types of business that have many costs and obligations. What should you pay attention to first of all:
➊ Feed validity in Merchant Center
Are all products allowed to be displayed? In our practice, there were cases when a store came with 80% of rejected products and did not understand what was happening and why the advertising was not working.
We go to the Merchant Center in the diagnostics section and check the statistics of product approval. We find rejected ones and find out the reasons for the rejection.
The most popular reasons for product rejection are:
- image size is too small (minimum size 100x100px);
- incorrect image format (acceptable formats are JPEG, PNG or GIF);
- broken product or image URL;
- violation of rules regarding product ads (most likely, the product is prohibited from being shown due to its specificity).
Less critical reasons are errors in the feed. Usually, this is a discrepancy between the data on the site and in the feed itself. Yes, Google scans your site and checks whether you are deceiving users, say, with a low price for advertising purposes.
We check that the products have passed moderation for product ads, otherwise they will not be shown in the shopping campaign.
If ALL products are rejected, then the entire site is rejected and you have not passed moderation. In this case, we recommend watching our video on the page - how to launch Google Shopping and pass Merchant Center moderation.
If you have a green color next to each product, then everything is fine. Let's move on.
➋ Optimizing product metadata
The main feature of Google Shopping is that you don’t need to enter keywords. Products are displayed based on the information from the feed. This is a matter of creativity and analysis. It is necessary to analyze the entire content of the feed and compose it so that the system considers your products relevant to specific requests.
There are many techniques for manipulating titles and descriptions to optimize for the necessary keywords. Some leave only the name of the product in the title, others pull up the necessary characteristics or even such marketing components as a discount or sale. Everything is determined depending on the specifics of the niche of the product being promoted.
➌ Product catalog structure
To manage a shopping campaign competently, or to build several shopping campaigns, you need to have a well-structured feed, thanks to which you can efficiently manage the advertising priorities of product groups.
This is where the most transparent analytics of the trading campaign work opens, starting from CTR, clicks and impressions, ending with the percentage of impressions in the auctions of the advertising campaign and the received conversions. Adjustments to rates, structure, division into campaigns - all this is individual and depends on the project.
Everything is so specific that there are even projects that do not specify a structure at all and include everything in one category.
How to divide, adjustments, why exactly like this? This is already work specifically for a contextual advertising specialist and web analyst, whose function we actually take on ourselves. We constantly interact with the client on the effectiveness of advertising and make adjustments. Let's move on.
➍ Working with negative keywords
You already know that we do not enter keywords, they are automatically selected by Google. That is why they need to be regularly analyzed, maintained and certain conclusions made, so as not to incur financial expenses for non-target visitors.
These are far from all the moments of optimization of trade campaigns. There are many more nuances that emerge from the results of the analysis of a specific project. In addition, Google is constantly introducing something new, which is primarily available to Google Partner agencies, such as us.
➎ Work with efficiency, Performance Max
One of the most recent evolutions of Google Shopping is the introduction of Performance Max campaigns, which replace Smart Shopping campaigns.
Performance Max is a miracle campaign that shows ads in all possible Google sites with the ability to target a specific end result, provided that analytics and all synchronizations are well-configured.
Here, management is no longer limited to working with the interface and setting up conversions, but also understanding the business, comparing a lot of data and building a promotion strategy.
Thanks to our extensive experience with Google Shopping, we regularly shoot videos about optimizing and running shopping campaigns and post them on our channel, where you can find much more details. We recommend watching them.
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