How to Compete on Google Shopping #BrightonSEO

Earlier this year, we did a survey to 1,000 UK retailers to find out how effective Google Shopping campaigns have been for them. The results highlighted that businesses still have a way to go to make their campaigns fully worthwhile. All the results can be found here.

My talk at BrightonSEO in September 2015 focused heavily on what eCommerce businesses need to do in order to compete on Google Shopping. Throughout the session I gave away lots of tips and advice that I hope businesses can take away and implement in their shopping campaigns to help increase the ROI from this channel.

The Slides

A short write up of the talk has been done but if you would prefer to just flick through the slides, you can do so below.

Google Shopping Tips

As promised, I have put together a list of tips to help boost ROI from Google Shopping. Hopefully you find some of them useful and if you do have any more to add, please do so in the comments below.

1. Make sure you have access to a developer who can make changes the actual data feed; this is where you will gain the biggest advantage over your competitors
2. The feed needs to contain as many completed fields as possible
3. Product titles should be formatted in the language your audience will use. For example, if you are a well known clothing brand, I would recommend including your brand name in the title as this will draw attention to the ads
4. Look at what your competitors are doing with their images and try to make yours stand out in the crowd
5. In order to help you analyse performance more easily, if you make the MPU your item number in the feed you won’t have to export and cross refer data in a spreadsheet
6. The more frequently you update the feed, the higher Google seem to rank it
7. Always keep a close eye on the Merchant Center and fix any errors that appear in the Diagnostics tab
8. The top three reasons for ad disapprovals are price availability, policy violations and broken image URLs
9. Implement schema markup on product pages to avoid disapprovals due to differences in the feed vs. the landing page
10. Make full use of the five custom labels that are available to you so you can segment your product list and bid more strategically
11. Look at the updated suite of automated bidding solutions; Google have recently launched Target ROAS which is current in Beta
12. The trend for ‘near me’ searches are dramatically increasing and advertisers should be looking at increasing bids for people searching in nearby locations
13. It has been made a lot easier to become a Google Certified Shop; look into this and see about implementing it for your business
14. Encourage customers to leave reviews on third party review sites as Google will automatically pull the star ratings into your ads
15. From the end of September Promotional Text is becoming redundant and is being replaced with Automated Extensions that pull in information from your Merchant Center
16. The more products you upload, the more chance you have of securing a sale as Google will show an advertiser multiple times if the products are relevant to the search
17. Use a mixture of ad types to secure a higher percentage of the results (ie. use text ads, shopping ads, local inventory ads etc etc)
18. Merchant Promotions can give you an edge over the competition as they are not being fully utilised yet
19. Local Inventory ads show customers stock availability from within the search results. A study by Google showed that 83% of online shoppers were more likely to visit a store if they knew the product they want was in stock
20. The Quality Score for Shopping is largely based on Click through Rate (CTR); the more relevant the ads, the higher the CTR will be which in turn will lower your overall costs
21. 26% of consumers start their Christmas shopping in October. Advertisers need to be all over this and should be thinking about their Christmas campaigns as early as July/August
22. in 2014, Black Friday was the biggest day ever in the UK for online sales
23. Don’t forget to download our guide to Getting Started with Product Listing Ads.

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