What are Google Shopping Campaign?

Google Shopping product advertisements are a type of ad campaign in AdWords that features the display of banners with information about your products on Google and search partners. All the necessary information AdWords takes from the data feed, on the basis of which it decides for which search queries to broadcast your products.

This is how Google’s shopping ads look like:

Advantages of shopping campaigns

1.Visibility of a commodity position. Compared to the usual Adwords advertising on a search, advertisements of shopping campaigns are accompanied by a product image and a current price, which makes them stand out.

2. Cost per click is significantly lower compared to search campaigns.

At the same time, shopping campaigns have their own specifics.

1. Google Shopping has strict advertising policies.

2. Since search queries are generated based on the feed, the CTR is usually much lower and requires more careful work with negative keywords as compared to regular search campaigns.

The main steps in setting up Google Shopping

1. Preparing a site for advertising shopping campaigns.

2. Preparing data feed.

3. Register a Google Merchant Center account.

4. Set up a shopping campaign.

Preparing a site for advertising shopping campaigns

As previously indicated, Google purchases require adherence to a set of rules for broadcast advertising:

1. Only goods in stock are allowed for advertising.

2. Only non- prohibited content items are allowed .

3. The site should be clearly spelled out the rules for returning the goods and money.

4. Payment terms must be indicated not only on a separate service page, but also in the order basket.

5. Other rules can be found on the Merchant Center rules page.

In order for the user to broadcast ads with the goods that he viewed on the resource, you must configure the transfer of data from product cards.

Data Feed Preparation

It is highly recommended to make the feed for Merchant Center dynamically updated and accessible via the link. When creating a feed, the following formats are used:

1. TXT – text format;

2. XML – XML ​​format;

3. GZ – Gnu zip, compressed text or XML format;

4. ZIP – Zip, compressed text or XML format;

5. BZ2 – Bzip2, a compressed text or XML format.

The data feed for Google Merchant Center should contain the following required columns:

– Id (product identifier).

-Title (product name).

– Link (link to product page).

-Image link (link to the product image).

– Availability (availability of goods). Values ​​used: in_stock, out_of_stock, preorder.

-Price (price of goods).

– Brand (product brand).

GTN or MPN. In the feed you need to specify the GTIN – international marking code. If the product does not have a GTIN code, the manufacturer’s MPN code is indicated.

Condition (condition of the goods). Values ​​used: new, refurbished, used.

For some categories of products (articles of clothing and accessories, media, software), it is necessary to specify google_ product_ category.

There are also a number of other additional columns that are described in more detail in the Google Merchant Center Help .

What is Google Merchant Center?

Google Merchant Center is a tool that allows you to upload data about your store, brands and products and submit them to Google Shopping and other Google services. To advertise your products on Google, you need to create an account at Merchant Center, after which you can create publications about your stores and their range in product advertisements and Google services (text, product image, name, price, share, and site URL), which will allow:

1. Attract more potential buyers when they actively shop on Google, YouTube and the Internet;

2. Monitor the appearance of your products on the Internet;

3. Update information about their products.

Register a Google Merchant Center account

To create shopping ads, you’ll need to register with Google Merchant Center.

When registering an account, specify:

1. Company name (to be broadcast in shopping announcements).

2. Specify the address of your project (next to the site address field there is a check mark about the presence of “adult-only” positions. If your site does not contain such positions, do not put a check mark).

3. Next, we confirm the rights to the resource. We recommend using the Google Tag Manager for this. To do this, you must provide administrator-level access in your Tag Manager account and then verify the site in your Merchant Center account.

The next step is setting up a Merchant Center connection with Google Adwords. In the Merchant Center interface, you need to request access, and then confirm it in the Adwords interface.

We load the goods feed in which we specify the country, the name of the feed and, depending on the file, select the method for linking data with the Merchant Center.

Moderation of data on average takes from 1 to 3 days. After that, in the “Products” tab you can track the dynamics of loading positions:

Set up a shopping campaign

To create a shopping campaign, select the type of campaign “Google shopping.”

Next, fill in the following fields:

1. Google Merchant Center Account ID.

2. Country of sale.

3. Enable / disable search partners.

4. Advertising geography.

5. Budget and rates.

6. Show method.

In the advanced settings of Google purchases you can configure:

1. Campaign priority – this function is used if several shopping campaigns with the same goods are created in your account. The higher priority of the campaign allows you to choose it to advertise products instead of other shopping campaigns in your account.

2. The product filter makes it possible to additionally block certain goods in advertising. It is recommended to use it in conjunction with priority.

3. The “Local” function allows you to broadcast products from a separate type of feed “Local Products”, which is used to advertise products sold in offline stores to the users closest to them.

After that we proceed to create an ad group. In this case, you have 2 options: create one group for all products with one given rate or create several ad groups by product type. In order to break a feed into groups of products, it must include the corresponding data in the “Brand” column (brand) or in the “Customer Label 0” column (custom label 0):

Shopping campaigns do not need to create ads, they are automatically generated based on information from the Google Merchant Center feed.

The following campaigns are available to you in the shopping campaign:

1. Ad groups – depending on the initial settings, you will have one or more groups.

2. Product groups – depending on the initial settings, the tab displays your product groups or the “All products” group. If you didn’t initially set up a breakdown, you can do it already in this tab.

3. Products – in the tab statistics are available in the context of products, which makes it possible to determine the most sold positions and turn off ineffective ones.

4. In this tab, you have the opportunity to analyze search queries and add negative keywords.

5. Lecture hall. In the shopping campaigns in this section, you can customize ads for remarketing lists and similar audiences.

6. Fast statistics.

Conclusion

Google Shopping (Google Shopping) allows you to attract more attention to your products at the expense of more visually appealing image ads. To create a shopping campaign you need to take care of the fulfillment of all the mandatory requirements of the Merchant Center and Google Adwords. Do not forget to use all the features of this tool for maximum results.