Shopping_campaign_Keyword_Optimization_2X

How to do Google Shopping Campaign Keyword Optimization?

Google Shopping Campaign plays a key role while optimizing your selling strategies. Through Google Shopping, you can sell your products just by targeting the right search term or generic search terms that apply to your catalog. These keywords will help produce a product ad that the customers can easily access.

Google Shopping campaign not only shows products through text but also inserts a picture, name of the store, and price range of the product. Just one click will direct the customer to your website. Using this, you can boost your traffic as well as sales. Google shopping provides you with the most effortless shopping campaign keyword optimization features.

Google Shopping works based on Google Merchant Center and Google Ads. The former is where your product feed or catalog will live. Google has specifications for how products and details need to be laid out. This can be done manually into a spreadsheet, or by using a third-party plugin that scrapes data from your site to arrange it in Google’s format based on product categories and other demarcations. The latter is what you will use to create ad campaigns to promote these products.

How do Google Shopping Campaigns differ from Google Ads?

The most significant difference between Google Shopping campaigns and Google Ads is that Google ads do not have the picture support feature, unlike Google Shopping. Websites with a large variety of products are better off using Google Shopping since it will be complicated doing the same through Google Ads.

Google Shopping pays per click is better as it leads to traffic increase and revenue increase due to the high click rates. On the other hand, Google Ad’s pay-per-click is said to be better for promotions and branding. In the long run, both based on the product type have their benefits and the potential to improve the performance of your website.

Google Shopping helps in creating product ads easily and faster. The content shown in these ads has high clarity and will not confuse shoppers. The reach for your campaigns will be broader.

Google Shopping will ensure that your ads will reach interested users and the right ones while keeping them in line with the budget. The budget optimization tool will ensure that the advertisements come under the budget without disturbing their performance. Google will also ensure that you are updated on the performance of your product as well as other competitors.

Google Ads primarily uses keywords to show up in results. In Google Shopping, Google determines when to show your product listing ads based on your site, feed, and bids. It allows you to add custom labels to subdivided products.

Google Shopping is now available in countries including India, Indonesia, Australia, Germany, France, the Philippines, the UK, and the US.

How to do Google Shopping Campaign Keyword Optimization?

Why do you need to optimize your shopping campaigns?

Depending on your goal, the reason will change. But here are two possible explanations as to why you need to optimize your shopping campaigns. 

Need # 1. To fine-tune your strategy toward best-performing products

Optimizing your Google shopping campaigns through these tools and keywords helps in regulating the amount of traffic you get on your website. The number of clicks through these advertisements and campaigns determines the traffic, sales, and revenue that will be earned. Google shopping will help refine your strategy in a way that will help focus on the best-performing products as well as bring up those which aren’t performing as well. Google Shopping ensures that each and every product has the potential to get listed when a consumer searches for a product.

Need # 2. To avoid unknown spending from Google shopping campaigns

Cost control helps in measuring profitability or loss that might incur. Using Google Shopping Campaigns, you can save some money from unknown spending. Merchants can also set up tax and shipping data to save time and further costs that may occur. Google shopping also ensures that the correct marketing strategy will be adopted for your products to ensure that there won’t be a long-term loss. Categorize your negative keywords to reduce unwanted advertisement costs.

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How to do Google Shopping Campaign Keyword Optimization?

Method # 1.The default (Google) way

Once you have created your shopping feed and a merchant account, here’s a step-by-step process on how to optimize your Google shopping campaigns the default way. You will need to have a Google Merchant Center account that you can link to your Google Ads account. You can follow Google’s default settings.

If you want to customize your campaign, you can follow these steps to see which customization will best suit the advertising of your product or campaign:

Step # 1. Identifying the level of intent

The level of intent searches is based on the number of consumer searches for a specific product. Sometimes generic product searches are less in number, but highly specific searches that include the brand name and other exact specifications are high in number. Based on these, optimize and categorize your products into a certain ad group level.

Step # 2.Negative keyword-optimized products

Sort your search queries into the ones that are irrelevant to the products that are being sold by you. For example; exclude the products of the colors of the products that you absolutely do not sell. This will ensure that the negative keywords optimized products are intact.

Although you can’t wholly choose which keywords you want to use, you can use search engine queries for the same. To keep the negative keyword organized, you can add all of them to the negative keyword list and can be further used on other respective campaigns. By doing this you are reducing the unwanted costs that go into advertisements that are irrelevant to the search queries.

You can’t control the keywords and the search terms, but you can control the negative keywords. In short, optimizing your negative keywords will help benefit advertising campaigns in the long term.

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Step # 3.Boosting and checking individual products

You can check the performance of individual products through Google shopping. Through this, you can optimize certain product types to be the best performing product. You can fine-tune a strategy that will work best for that product and other similar products. You can bid higher for those products that are performing the best and, on the other hand, bid lower on those products that are performing comparatively lower in the magnitude of clicks and reviews.

You can also boost the performance of individual brands. The brands that seem to be more popular amongst all brands that are being advertised and sold can be brought to the highest level of performance. This way you can see which brand is performing better and which is not, and you can act on it as efficiently as possible.

Step # 4. Types of campaigns

There are a few types of campaigns such as a single undivided campaign where each and every search query is valued at an equal level. The single campaign with multiple groups includes groups like brands, conditions, channels, product IDs, and so on.

Numerous campaigns with different products include different shopping campaigns for different products. Multiple campaigns with a single product may be the most used form in Google Shopping, which may be confusing at first, but very important. In this, you can allocate separate budgets for specific campaigns, say a higher budget for your best-selling products, and a lower budget for the products that are not performing as well.

A good campaign structure helps you to bid on the products and enable search engine queries, hence boosting your traffic.

Step # 5.Bidding strategy

What do you bid on when there are no keywords? A bidding strategy is definitely very important while opting for Google Shopping campaigns. What you bid on is called a product group. Applying bids for specific products helps boost the performance of the products. But smart bidding is important. When Google indicates that there are low impressions and that the campaign is profitable, that is when you can increase the bids. The lower performance products can have lower bids in general, but do not overestimate or underestimate.

Google Shopping also has the option to maximize clicks bid. With this, you can optimize the bids for the products based on the number of clicks it gets. There are other bids such as enhanced cost per click bid, return on ad spend bid, and the manual CPCs bid, which will help you optimize your campaigns based on your products. Use geographic bid modifiers to modify your bid based on the region you are catering to your product to. Mobile-enabled bids may help with cheaper products.

Pro tip:- Google has an option to add promotions to your advertisements such as ‘free product’ or ‘10% discount’.

Step # 6.Strategical marketing

Strategic marketing or overseeing the competitors is another job that you may have to go through to optimize your campaigns. The search impression share will tell you the impression that your product has made in comparison to the other products in the line. This way you can modify your campaigns using the best and most efficient ways. Click share will show you the percentage of clicks your advertisement got. This way, plans can be made to boost the performance of your product or products.

Step # 7.Feed optimization

This step is by far the most crucial step. Feed optimization is based on the product title, description, product image, and price of the product. Before implementing these, check whether all the information is right on Google Merchant.

Item # 1. Product Title

Include the most popular search queries in your product title. Pay attention to the character limit in the title. Try placing the most searched keyword in the beginning so that the customer does not have to hover over the product to see the long title. Usually, customers or searchers do not hover the mouse over the product; rather, they click on the product that has the keyword in the beginning. A lower price may also improve the number of clicks (though too low is too bad). Remember, your PLA title should be keyword dense and should have the right information.

Item # 2.Product Description

Since Google allows only 5000 characters for product descriptions, try using the maximum number of keywords in the beginning, since the shopper tends to read only the first 1000 characters. Though this may not have such a significant role in selling your product.

Item # 3.Product images

The image to be displayed should be related to the product. Try to avoid pictures with titles in them, since Google tends to avoid those. Use a high-resolution picture with a white background. The product should be angled such that its best features are highlighted. Yes, high investments should be made to get the perfect picture, so make sure that you are sure about its worth.

Item # 4. Price of the product

Though this depends on product to product, their use, and how affordable it is to the customer, the price of the product plays a very important role. When you price the product, you must check your budget, the competitors, and its profitability as well as how many clicks that type of product gets.

Shoppers tend to move towards products with low rates and high ratings. Then again, if it is a luxury item, shoppers tend to move towards quality over quantity. The cost of shipping and taxes should not be forgotten. Keeping these in mind, optimize your advertisements, and finally improve performance.

Pro tip:- make sure your destination URL is working; otherwise, it won’t show up right.

Method # 2.The AdNabu way (the easier way)

Using AdNabu apps, you can improve your shopping campaigns to make them more profitable. They will help you gain control over how to optimize the bids, control your products and their bidding and regulating, improve product titles and descriptions and focus on the best products that could, in turn, make your campaign highly successful.

Since Google Shopping does not allow the use of keywords, AdNabu helps you organize your products based on search engine queries as well as the keywords and search terms. They will help you sort out the products and campaigns based on high performance, low performance, and new searches. So, with AdNabu be prepared for high ROI.

The linking of AdNabu and Google Merchant would help you sync all information based on product type, brand product, product category, and item id that are previously loaded into Google Merchant. AdNabu will then sync all the information and create a well-performing and comprehensive campaign for you. And do not worry; AdNabu has its own bid optimization algorithm tool that will most definitely look out for the performance of every single product that you have listed in Google Merchant.

AdNabu will also create new ad groups for new products, auto pauses stock products, and will automatically assign bids to newer products. With just a click of a button, you can schedule a demo with AdNabu and get an assistant to help you with it. All you have to do is just schedule the time, date, and duration of the demo. Also, find helpful videos relating to it on the AdNabu website.

Best practices of shopping campaign optimization

Best Practice # 1: Understand your goals. 

Your business goals will allow you to optimize your campaign toward certain targets. These may be target Costs Per Acquisition, an increase in conversion rate, the number of sales to be made, or simply the number of customers added each month.

Best Practice # 2: Narrow down on the right campaign subtype.

Google also offers Smart Shopping Campaigns to reach way more customers than usual. This happens by combining Smart Shopping and potential remarketing campaigns toward marketing goals. This process optimizes bids automatically and keeps a tab on the target audience and the products they’re seeing as ads.

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What to consider while optimizing shopping campaigns

Consideration # 1: Quality of images. 

A major offering of Google Shopping is the space for images- use this creatively. Avoid low-resolution or stock photos that are too generic. Title tags and alt text for images are crucial- write the most descriptive yet specific text for each image to make it SEO-optimized.

Consideration # 2: Identify your top products.

Every e-commerce business would want to sell all its products. However, some are more likely to sell than others, so identify these and promote them to increase sales. These could be consumables, lower-priced products, luxury items, or even limited-edition items. 

Consideration # 3: Narrow down on competition.

In the e-commerce world, it’s never good to forge ahead with blinkers on. Scope out your competition using manual searches or tools that take screenshots of competitors’ ads and see what they’re doing right or wrong.

Conclusion about Google Shopping Keyword Optimization

Working through the steps and tips we’ve told you about will bring you to the top of the advertisers. But to remain on the top, continuous research, optimum utilization of everything around you like the time, money and resources, and interest to continue and mostly a goal will help you set a future for you, your company, and your products. Take some time to study Google Shopping campaigns. Setting up and understanding will be a bit tricky initially, but with the help of AdNabu, you can learn and establish your product.

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Additional resources

  1. Beginners Guide to Google Shopping Ads
  2. How do Troubleshoot your google merchant center data feed?
  3. What are the Requirements for Google Merchant Center Data Feed?
  4. Tips to Optimize Your Google Merchant Center Data Feed
  5. Google Feed Software Related Articles Collection.
Author

CEO and co founder of AdNabu. Exploring the intersection of data and marketing