January 2020

PPC, Pay-per-Click, Google merchant centre, PLA ads…..

It can seem an arduous task getting start on Google Shopping ads. Thankfully we have been through this process many times and can offer advice on how to set up the basics and get you head around Google Merchant Centre and Google Shopping Ads.

What is Google Shopping Ads?

Google shopping ads or PLA’s are the image based search results that come back when you search for a brand, product or e-commerce product on Google and (Bing).

These ads are essential for any e-commerce store as it delivers rich search results based on a users search. Google Shopping Ads are your way to promote your products on Google Shopping. They are CPC ads where you pay when a user clicks on your ad and land on the exact product page on your e-commerce store.

Shopping Campaigns are one of the main growth drivers for e-commerce stores. They get 87% of the search budget of retailers (source: Merkle Digital Quarterly report Q3 2018) and have increased their share of total store orders by 160% in the last 2 years. Therefore, they are indeed a traffic source that lives up to the hype.

Merkle Digital

3 Pillars to success

As with everything that is effective in e-commerce, setting up Shopping Ads can be frustrating and cumbersome. I know many in-house web managers who simply cannot get their heads around the task as it requires a level of technical ability and liaising with your development team (many out-sourced) to successfully implement the basic feed.

In essence, your SKU’s need to go to your Google Merchant Centre and from there Google Ads scrape the data to publish the results on the SERP’s page.

Sounds easy?
In our experience, many companies get stuck on setting up a successful Google Merchant Centre feed. For more information on setting up the feed to your Google Merchant Centre click here.

After your business data is implemented, and your feed is up and running you can do wonderful things like adding custom labels and also create Google Shopping Promotions.

Google Shopping promotions are a wonderful way of increasing CTR’s (20% in our experience) by simply having more visual presence.

Conclusion

If you are in e-commerce and not running Google Shopping Ads, then you are simply missing out on the best Google ad creation ever invented.

Scaling up

Google have also loosened up the rules in running Shopping ads in other countries. Originally, both your landing page and currency had to reflect your visitors location, however if English is a popular language in a country like the Netherlands for example, then you can run ads without the need for geo-language switching.

Also, with a UK currency feed – Google will allow automatic currency conversion using their own currency conversion data.

This means rapid scalability with the single feed set-up.

The effectiveness of these ads cannot be underestimated. And that’s before chatting about mart shopping, showcase shopping ads, promotions and Google shopping actions which is going to be a direct competitor to Amazon….. if it ever gets out of Beta.

It is available in the U.S. and France.

If you need any Google Shopping advice or wish to know on scaling up sales through shopping Ads simply email info@leagueofadvertising.com to find out more.