The biggest name in online advertising is, of course, Google. The company’s AdWords offering has revolutionised advertising and eCommerce to a whole new level. Even with the glut of online shopping sites, many people still search on Google for the products they are looking to buy. Now, eCommerce websites and sellers can increase sales and boost revenue by using a new tool launched by Google Shopping called Shopping Campaigns.
E-commerce is booming in this day and age. Online shopping is as ubiquitous as breathing and has been a paradigm shift in how we buy products and services. The conveniences offered by online shopping and eCommerce simply cannot be matched by traditional brick and mortar stores.
While traditional Product Listing Ads or PLAs have been a staple of Google Shopping cards for a long time, shopping campaigns introduce a lot of features for sellers and make it very easy for sellers to manage their various listings, bid on placements, and find new avenues to boost traffic to your product page. Read on to find how Shopping Campaigns can help sellers to greatly simplify the way products are advertised on Google and how Campaigns can help you sell more products and generate greater revenue at little to no additional efforts or technical expertise.
Google Shopping Campaigns provides sellers with an easy way to access their entire product inventory directly from the AdWords page. This greatly simplifies generating the relevant ads to buy on Google’s platform. You can also create product groups that ease the process of bidding on Google listings. With Campaigns, you can also manage your product inventory by adding custom labels.
Labels allow you to add relevant tags to your products that help you generate relevant data about the various items in stock. You can add labels as per your requirements as per the attributes that matter to you. For instance, you can label unsold products as “clearance” in order to tell yourself that selling off these products sooner rather than later is a priority. Or you can create a “margin” label that can help you separate the products with high-profit margins and help you prioritise the amounts you spend on promoting the different categories in AdWords.
Another very important benefit of Shopping Campaigns is the analytical data you get access to. You can see in real time how your ads are performing according to the various metrics such as views and click through traffic. This allows you to gauge how your ads are performing either on a product basis or attribute basis. For instance, you can the performance of individual products or all products with the “high margin” label.
This flexibility is in addition to pre-set Google parameters such as product category, brand, item id, etc. Therefore you can see the performance of products under, say, the electronic accessories category without having to formally divide the entire electronics category. You can check which products and search terms are driving the most traffic to your page and therefore you can possibly gain insight into how to further optimise your product listings or where to invest with reference to Google AdWords.
Another great area where Shopping Campaigns provide unprecedented information is how well your products are performing against the competition. You can view estimated average CTR and other parameters like the Max CPC for sellers with similar products or product categories. The data is anonymous and is aggregated from other sellers also using Google AdWords so you can rest assured that your precious data is not being broadcast to your competitors. However, this insight is precious.
You can see which parameters are working the best and optimise and reallocate your budgets to accommodate the highest performing keywords or bids the next time around. There is also an included bid simulator that estimates changes to your performance as you vary the bids you place with AdWords. This kind of information was simply not available in the past and can help you greatly improve your prospects in eCommerce.
For Shopping Campaigns to work its magic you need to maintain your product feed. Your feed must be well defined and updated to reflect your latest inventory, product information, pricing, availability, etc. Google cross validates your data feed against your website data and if it finds discrepancies, your ads will not be displayed. Therefore it is of utmost importance that the product feed is always updated and maintained.
For retailers with large product inventories and a number of categories, manually managing spreadsheets can transform into an insurmountable task. The probability of human error is too great in these cases and continuously syncing the feed to the website data is a tedious task. This is where you can use a WooCommerce plugin such as Product Feed.
WooCommerce Product Feed is a very popular WordPress plugin that generates and actively maintains your product feed so that it can interface with Google Shopping Merchant centre. It automatically handles currency exchange rates and updating availability of products according to inventory. Product Feed plugin is available in both free and premium versions. The free version supports up to 2000 products including variations such as size or colour. This number is enough for small retailers or if you are trying to trial the software.
The paid version, in addition to supporting the unlimited number of products, also has additional features that are not included in the free version. The feed generated can be TXT, CSV, or XML file according to your needs. You can use the plugin in other 500+ comparison shopping engines such as Shopbot, Price Runner, Idealo.de, PriceGrabber, Facebook Dynamic Product Ads, eBay and affiliate marketplace like Affiliate Network, Commission Junction, Share a Sale etc and also support advertising networks. So you need not worry about it being functional only on one vendor. The plugin is totally platform agnostic.
WooCommerce Product Feed plugin for WordPress is a boon for eCommerce sellers in that you do not need to know any coding in order to implement in on your website. You can easily synchronise your feed to your engine of choice and not worry about doing extensive coding. With Product Feed, using Google Shopping Campaigns is as easy as can be.
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