Why Do You Need A Successful Google Shopping Strategy
Having a good Google Shopping strategy is crucial for businesses because it helps them to reach a wider audience, increase sales and revenue, and improve their overall online presence. Google Shopping is a platform that allows businesses to showcase their products and services to potential customers who are actively searching for them. With a good strategy, businesses can optimize their product listings and bid on keywords to ensure that their products appear at the top of search results. This increases the chances of customers clicking on their products and purchasing them. A good strategy also helps businesses to track their marketing efforts and measure their return on investment. By regularly reviewing and updating their strategy, businesses can stay competitive and relevant in a constantly evolving online marketplace.
Our Tips For Creating A Successful Google Shopping Strategy
We’ve been tracking prices on Google Shopping for a long time and have seen it grow to become an increasingly important source of traffic and sales for our clients. But mastering Google Shopping campaigns requires more than just a few minutes each day adjusting bids and product feeds. Creating a winning Google Shopping strategy requires a solid understanding of how your potential customers search for products and how Google Shopping ranks you and your ads.
Even though this is not an extensive or comprehensive guide, here are some pointers and priorities you might want to consider when reviewing your Google Shopping strategy.
1. Product Focus
If you are fortunate enough to sell niche products that are not generally available, lucky you! Most sellers will be competing with many retailers, including Amazon. It means you’ll have to take a more strategic approach to how you market your products. Focus your campaigns on products where you are most competitive and where there are fewer sellers. Also, consider creating product bundles that offer value and some degree of differentiation/exclusivity. Use price tracking tools like Insitetrack to uncover the less competitive products and to track your price ranking on Google Shopping.
2. Segment your campaigns
One of the keys to a winning Google Shopping strategy is creating product groups. Many retailers don’t segment their campaigns, which is the most common and costly mistake you can make. With shopping campaigns, there are no keywords to bid on. You bid on the actual products you are selling; it gives you a huge amount of control. You can bid on individual products or groups of products. If you’re selling 1,000 items, it’s probably not practical to bid on individual products, so you’ll need to create product groups. Product groups are groups of products with similar attributes. For example, if you sell golf equipment, you could group products by brand or perhaps by category, e.g., Golf Balls, Golf Bags, Golf shoes, etc.
The key to organising your products into groups is Return on Investment, i.e., how much you can afford to spend on an ad. For products with high margins, you can afford to spend more to get the sale.
3. Optimise your Product Feed
As previously mentioned, shopping campaigns don’t use keywords to determine relevancy; they rely on the content of your product feed. Your product titles are one of the most important factors Google considers when determining whether or not your ad is relevant to the search. Make sure your product titles use ‘natural’ language that is more likely to match the way a user enters their search query. Take advantage of the Google keyword research tool when reviewing your titles.
4. Don’t bid too much – the law of diminishing returns
Bidding on Google Shopping works differently from traditional PPC bidding. Simply increasing your cost per click isn’t necessarily going to get you more traffic. You need to bid a minimum amount to get into the game, but the traffic-to-bid curve is s-shaped. It means small increases in the bid price can have a large impact on traffic. However, at the top of the s-curve, there’s a plateau where higher bids result in only a marginal increase. Not understanding this dynamic often leads companies to spend too much money on ads without seeing any additional return. It is also another good reason to ensure you segment your campaigns effectively.
5. Keep an eye on your competitors’ prices
If you sell the same products and brands as your competitors, you’ll need to monitor your competitors’ prices and price position on Google Shopping. There’s some interesting research from Crealytics that discovered that price differences on Google Shopping have a dramatic impact on traffic. The research found that products that are cheaper than the market average tend to generate the majority of traffic share in any given product feed. The research goes on to say:
“We might expect cheaper products to generate a higher click-through rate, explaining a higher traffic share, but the difference in impressions is clear proof that the Google Shopping algorithm favours products with lower prices and therefore serves those product ads for a higher number of relevant searches.”
So, the price has a big impact on how often your product ad is likely to be shown.
It suggests you need to optimise your prices as well as your bids. Bidding high for non-competitive products makes no sense. Using competitor price tracking tools like ours can help avoid bidding too high on non-competitive products.
Utilise Price Intelligence To Optimise Your Google Auction Bids
Price intelligence data is the information that helps you understand how your products and services compare to those of your competitors in terms of pricing, availability, demand, and customer preferences. By using price intelligence data, you can optimise your Google auction bids and increase your return on ad spend (ROAS).
Google auction is the process that determines which ads will show on a search result page and how much each advertiser will pay. Google uses a second-price auction model, which means that the highest bidder does not necessarily pay the full amount of their bid, but rather one cent more than the second-highest bid.
To optimise your Google auction bids, you need to use price intelligence data to:
– Identify the most profitable keywords and products for your niche and target audience.
– Adjust your bids based on the seasonality, demand, and competition level of each keyword and product.
– Monitor your competitors’ prices and strategies and react accordingly to stay ahead of them.
– Test different bid strategies and measure their performance and impact on your ROAS.
Price intelligence data can help you make data-driven decisions and optimise your Google auction bids in a dynamic and competitive market. By using price intelligence data, you can maximise your exposure, conversions, and profits from your Google ads.
A Winning Google Shopping Strategy
The good news is that you don’t have to spend a fortune in order to develop a successful Google Shopping strategy. Start with small steps and aim to build a solid foundation by getting the fundamentals right. If your time and resources are limited, consider using technology to do the heavy lifting. Insitetrack provides software tools that allow you to track competitor prices and price ranking on Google and other online markets such as Amazon. Our google shopping price optimisation service, can save you time and save you money by automating the price monitoring and price management process.
No doubt, you’ll have limited time and resources to manage this often complex part of your business. Balancing your marketing activities, product pricing, and return on advertising spend is a real challenge. Your business needs to generate profitable sales as a priority, so don’t make the mistake of pushing it down your list of priorities because you don’t have the time. Find a good agency and leverage price management tools that automate the process.
It will be worth the effort to create a winning Google Shopping strategy that will save you cost, increase traffic, and maximise your return on advertising spend.
