Google Shopping is a powerful ecommerce customer acquisition tool. Placed so prominently within the Google search results page even large companies like Amazon, Ebay and Not on the High Street use it to help promote their inventory and find customers.
To create ecommerce growth, Vertical Plus uploads inventory to the Google Merchant Centre so that it can be advertised effectively on Google as shopping adverts on the Google Ads platform. This helps us to generate more sales growth by advertising inventory to a global audience – whilst improving your return on investment.
To use Google Shopping, we assist our clients in setting up a Google Merchant Centre account. This involves providing details about the business; a physical address, contact details, the website domain and other important details.
Once this is completed we then create a bespoke inventory file for Google Merchant to read – this provides the backbone for accurate and effective product inventory data on Google.
Some of the attributes that we include in the product data are:
This data is updated regularly in order for your product to stay ‘active’. If the stock or products are regularly changing, we stay on top of keeping product information up to date. We have had several years of trial and error with Merchant Feeds to create the optimum conditions for uploading inventory to Google Shopping. Keeping this product catalogue up to date involves a great deal of monitoring and maintenance of Google guidelines to make sure that it does not go out of date.
A key component of the feed is how it works with the Google Ads account and how bids and budgets are set and made in Google Shopping campaigns. In the early days of an ecommerce store, it is especially important that inventory is uploaded and promoted in just the right way to create growth.
Google Shopping is a key driver for effective online growth especially for new ecommerce businesses. Google is the most popular search engine on both desktop (around 70% of all searches) and on mobile (a whopping 94% of searches) so having a prominent position for products on Google is essential.
As well as making sure products are placed on Google Shopping it’s also important to:
Make Sure Inventory Is Optimised Correctly
This might sound obvious but it’s really important to make sure that Google Shopping has been given all of the information it needs to find new customers. This does include making sure titles and descriptions are appropriate with descriptive text as well as a little out of the box thinking. For example, we have found that keyword synonyms can lead to more customers finding inventory.
Integrate Well With Google Ads
A Google Merchant feed without Google Ads is rather useless. Having an effective Google Ads strategy is just as crucial as optimising inventory. This largely involves understanding data so that you can set effective shopping budgets for products, categories and stores across different ecommerce scenarios. These budgets need to be flexible and responsive to different market conditions.
Track The Customer Journey
Finally, the journey from a Google Shopping customer to your checkout needs to be highly effective to make sure you are getting the most out of your advertising budget. The simplest way to do this is to walk in your customer’s shoes. Go through the shopping process yourself to understand the customer experience and you may encounter points that could be improved upon for example; how can they interact with the product or brand and what action should be taken next. This type of information may help you to increase your conversion rates.
BONUS GROWTH TIP 1: The Power Of Google Reviews In Shopping
Another feature set of Google Shopping is that when you become more established Google starts to incorporate Reviews into the search listings. This means that reviews appear alongside products so that customers know that you are a trustworthy supplier. These can come from approved review aggregators or your own feed if your reviews pass Google’s checks. Although you do need to be an established retailer to do this, it can create a large boost in sales by improving your click through rate and lowering your CPA.
BONUS GROWTH TIP 2: The Power Of Remarketing
It is worth noting that Google Shopping also works with Google’s powerful dynamic remarketing algorithms. Sometimes shoppers won’t make a purchase straight away. In these cases, we will want to utilise the dynamic features of Google remarketing services which allow us to target and display products to wayward shoppers long after they have left the website or their original search.
In our next article in this series titled Google Shopping Inventory Optimisation Tips (due for release in December 2021) we will focus more specifically on how to optimise inventory for Google Shopping. In the meantime, if you’d like to find out more about our ecommerce services and how Vertical Plus can help you and your business, please get in touch: hello@verticalplus.co.uk.