What is Google Shopping?
Google Shopping is a powerful ad format that is managed through Google Ads and Google Merchant Center (GMC). These ads, formerly known as product listing ads, show the product image, price, store name and rich product information. They appear at the top and on the right-hand side of the Google search results page, on the Google Shopping page and on Google Search Partner websites. Shopping campaigns are a great way to promote your online and offline inventory and boost traffic to your website.
Google Ads is where your actual campaign is located, and you can manage all the details there. You can even ensure that your campaign is optimized according to performance and information available. It’s different from a traditional text ad because of the complexities involved. Therefore, advertisers need to create a strategic approach when it comes to google shopping. With the Google Shopping platform, Google will automatically determine where your product listing appears. They look at your feed, website, and bid to figure out where to place you. They rely on competition grouping as well, so that they can get a better idea of where they can best serve your ads.
When considering Google Shopping for your product portfolio, advertisers need to focus on multiple areas of growth.
Google Ads is used to create, manage and optimize Shopping campaigns and to pull cost and performance reporting. You would also use this platform to manage bids for your Shopping campaigns and can even set up various campaigns and ad groups to organize your Shopping ads by product type and product brand in the same way you would organize your Search campaigns. You can even set up Shopping campaigns oriented towards branded and non-branded user search queries.
Note that Shopping campaigns do not use keyword-targeting in the same way that Search campaigns do, though you can choose which negative keywords to exclude in your Shopping campaigns so that your Shopping ads do not appear for queries containing or related to those negative keywords. Google Ads utilizes product data you’ve included in your product feed to decide what user search queries are relevant to your Shopping Ads. This product feed is set up and managed via Google Merchant Center.
Managing Google Shopping in Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Center is used in conjunction with Google Ads to manage product information, business information and product promotion details. It is used to set up and optimize your product feed to ensure your Shopping ads are running with your latest product and inventory information. You would also use Google Merchant Center to set up details of any promotions you’d like to promote to the public on site-wide offers or product-specific offers.
Overall, Google Shopping ads are a great way to increase the visibility of your product offerings. Some businesses even experience significantly higher clickthrough rates (CTR) with their Shopping campaigns than with their Search campaigns. You can find more information on Google Shopping in the Google Ads Help forum.
