Google Shopping

What is Google Shopping?

Google Shopping Ads is a type of campaign that is part of Google Ads. This platform is geared towards merchants that sells physical products to their target audience. If you have an e-commerce website, Google Shopping is definitely one of the most effective marketing channel that should be included as part of the digital marketing strategy in driving online traffic and sales.

How do you sell on Google Shopping?

To sell on Google Shopping, you will need to create a Merchant Center account as well as a Google Ads account. To setup a Merchant Center account, you will need to have the following ready:

1. Business Name
2. Business Address
3. Business Phone Number
4. Sale location
5. Store Website URL

Once the account is created, you will need to verify and claim the website. The next step will be to create a product feed. For this section, you can head over to Google Merchant Center feed specification support page to see how to create the feed. The feed contains product information including title, description, category, image URLs, etc. It is important to ensure the feed is created and formatted correctly for the products to appear in Google Shopping.

After creating and add the product feed to Merchant Center account, the feed will go under review to make sure the products listed comply with Google Ads terms of service. This usually takes about 3-5 business days. When your product has been approved at active, you see the diagnostic chart similar to below:

Next, you can create a Google Ads account. Google Ads is the advertising platform that works together with Merchant Center, the product feed management platform. Once the Google Ads account is created, you will need to link the two together inside Merchant Center. In Google Ads, you will need to set billing currency and timezone. Please note billing currency cannot be changed after.

To start selling, you will need to create a Google Shopping campaign inside Google Ads. Go to campaign section, create a campaign, choose sales, then choose shopping. If you are starting out, it is recommended to choose Standard Shopping instead of Smart Shopping as it is more straightforward to manage.

During the shopping campaign setup, you will need to pick a bidding strategy, set out an initial budget. We recommend to start with manual cost per click and set a low cost per click to test waters. We recommend to start small and gradually increase to see how your product brand and prices perform against other competitors. It usually takes a few days for impressions to pick up and if you are not seeing any, consider increasing the cost per click value amount. There are many metrics in Google Ads and we advise to run the campaign and draw some data first.

Need Assistance in setting up and optimizing a Google Shopping campaign?

At Qoo Digital, our team is highly experienced in creating, management and optimizing Google Shopping Ads Campaign that can help you maximize traffic and sales at your defined budget. Our unique and proven Google Shopping strategy can surely help you grow your online e-commerce business. Still not convinced? Here's a case study from one of our client's who recently launched their new online e-commerce business.