Why is it important?
When set up properly, shopping campaigns can be one of the best acquisition channels for most ecommerce stores. To start running them, 3 things are necessary:
- an active Google Ads account
- a Google Merchant account
- a feed for your products.
Google Merchant Center is a tool, provided by Google, that lets merchants manage their inventory on Google, and a feed is basically an Excel file where all products available for sale are listed along with the most important data (title, price, availability, description, image url, landing page,…).
What makes shopping campaigns so special? Google Ads cost is mainly defined by the number of clicks the account generates to your landing pages (with few exceptions where spending is based on impressions, or conversions). Which means that with shopping campaigns, potential customers already see a lot of information about the products being sold before even visiting the website. At the very least, they see the image of the product, along with the price and title.
Compare this with standard search campaigns where only ad text is visible. This indicates that if someone clicked on the ad, they are already somewhat familiar with the product, and they wanted to learn more about it, which is a good sign of interest.
And history/experience has shown that this results in higher-quality traffic which converts better than the average website visitor. The second advantage these campaigns have is that they improve the users purchasing experience: they can see more about the products already in Google search results, without having to go on the website.
What if the test fails?
If the account fails the test, this means that there are no active shopping campaigns at the time. If you don’t know where to start, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected], and we will set them up together.