Google Shopping for Shopify

The Definitive Guide

by Joshua Uebergang of DigitalDarts.com.au v1.2 Table of Contents

1 1. The Power Of Shopping The Ultimate Advertising Platform 1. Measurable ROI 2. Control 3. Conversion Rates Of Sales And Leads The Downside Of 8 2. How Does Google Shopping Work? Where Do Google Shopping Ads Show? Google Shopping Google Partner Sites Google Display YouTube 14 3. How To Profit From Google Shopping Goals Buying Intent Competitor Research Google Search Ad Preview And Diagnosis Tool 21 4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth The Four Horsemen Of Google Shopping Setting Up The Accounts 1. 2. Google Merchant Center Business Information 3. 4. 33 5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify Why Should I Optimise My Feed? What Makes A Bad Feed? Out Of Stock Product Disapprovals Inaccurate Pricing Irrelevant Searches Unoptimised Titles Three Of The Best Ways To Keep Your Shopify Shopping Feed Healthy 1. Manual Input With 2. Shopify’s Google Smart Shopping 3. DataFeedWatch The Most Important Attributes For A Google Shopping Feed ID Title Description Link Image Link Availability Price Google Product Category Brand Identifier Exists GTIN MPN Color Shipping Tax Optional But Powerful Attributes For Google Shopping Product Type Cost Of Goods Sold Sale Price Promotion ID Additional Image Link Other Attributes Feed Submission Submit The Feed To Merchant Center How To Correct Google Shopping Errors Get The Google Shopping For Shopify Infographic Download It Embed It 66 6. Campaign Structure The First Campaign—Right The First Time General Settings Bid Settings Targeting And Scheduling Settings Strategy And Structure Common Segments Category And Product Type The King And Peasant Strategy: An Overview Of Priorities And Negative Keywords 79 7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns The Two Levers Of Growing Ad Revenue With Google Shopping Quality Score Bids The AIDA Model For Shopping Ads To Spot Growth Opportunities Get More People In Front Of The Ad—Increasing Impressions Get More People Clicking On The Ad—Increasing Clicks Get More People To Buy And Buy More—Increasing Sales And Average Order Value Bidding Optimisation “The Sweet Spot” Considering Automated Bid Strategies Promotional Periods Seasonal Bids SKU-Level Bidding Bid Modifiers To Get The Right Person At The Right Time Revisiting Campaign Structure With The King And Peasant Strategy Negative Keywords The King And Peasant Strategy: How To Structure Your Campaign For Your Most Important Searches Search Term Optimisation Tools Sniff Out The Competition Campaign Management Scripts 114 8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs The Six Types Of Google Shopping Programs 1. Seller Ratings 2. Product Ratings 3. Dynamic Remarketing 4. Merchant Promotions 5. Google Shopping Actions 6. Local Inventory Ads Infographic: Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs For Shopify Download It Embed It 136 9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping Four Channels To Expand Beyond Google Shopping 1. Video Ads 2. Google Search Ads 3. Google Display Ads 4. Advertising Conclusion Where to Next? About the Author Before you continue:

Step 1:

Know of someone who runs an online store that would be happy to turn more visitors into customers? Feel free to share with them the following link so they can download the latest version of this free book:

https://www.digitaldarts.com.au/google-shopping

Step 2:

Learn the ecommerce growth secrets of “little” online stores owning their niche to hit $1,000,000 in sales a year and beyond. Free 7-part course made for Shopify store owners wanting more sales.

Free sign-up available now: 1. The Power Of Google Shopping

Why The Advertising Platform Can Make A Store Succeed Overnight

“Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.” Howard Gossage, an advertising innovator known as “The Socrates of San Francisco” in the 50s and 60s

oogle Shopping drives 76.4% of search ad spend in the US and 82% of Gretail search ad spend in the UK, according to Search Engine Watch. It is no surprise ad spend rises as companies report greater success on Google Shopping over any other channel. The ad platform allows control and near-instant reporting that surpass traditional media.

Since 2002, Google has provided retailers a solution to boost sales by promoting online inventory and increasing foot-traffic to retail stores. Previously referred to as “Google Product Search” and “Froogle,” we now know this as Google Shopping and to a lesser extent, Product Listing Ads (PLAs). Google Shopping is one type of ad on the Google Ads platform, formerly known as Google AdWords.

From small retail startups, to major players like , businesses in the ecommerce industry take to Google Shopping to drive product sales. Google in their 2018 Economic Impact Report shares that "we conservatively estimate that for every $1 a business spends on Google Ads, they receive $8 in profit through Google Search and Ads." The Google Ads model creates 70.9% of Google’s total profit. According to Summit, Google saw spend on shopping ads skyrocket by 34% in 2017—a vast jump compared to the 2% increase for text ads. The advertising platform is growing as retailers find profit through it.

That is lovely knowing others benefit, but what do individual companies experience?

1. The Power Of Google Shopping 1 I run Digital Darts, a company certified by Shopify in marketing as part of their Experts program and part of Google’s Partner program. Every day we manage ad campaigns of Shopify stores. What are real-life results we see managing Google Ads for retailers?

We have a fashion client who averages $13 for every $1 spent. There’s a company that successfully raised money on Kickstarter to launch their pet product. They were lost at how to grow after the crowdfunded campaign. Thanks to ad campaigns that were well-built and managed, we were able to achieve a return on ad spend that smashed their goals by 4 times. A large drop-shipping company had stalled at $80k in sales for 2 years. The month we took over their Google Ads, they broke through 6- figures of revenue to reach a record month.

Shopping campaigns are used by stores and traders for good reason. Here are some important research statistics to take note of:

• 55% of online millennials turn to search engines when shopping.

• 64% of users use mobile search before visiting in store to figure out what to buy—most of them are same-day searches.

• 71% of smartphone users who search in store trust what they get from their search more than a sales assistant.

The ease, simplicity, and convenience of the model (as demonstrated by the growth of Amazon and eBay in recent years), makes Google Shopping campaigns a key tool in your arsenal for achieving greater sales.

The Ultimate Advertising Platform

Shopping ads typically appear at the top or right of search results. Other locations where shopping ads are used include the shopping tab of search results, YouTube, partner websites, and more. You will learn further about these various locations and how you can use them to grow your store.

1. The Power Of Google Shopping 2 Billions of dollars have been put into Google’s algorithms to deliver users relevant search and advertising results. Google wants advertisers to maintain this experience so its users continue to spend time on Google’s platforms. The giant gives advertisers the tools to make scientifically accurate decisions and then rewards them for relevancy in the form of lower costs and increased volume.

The data and trends show many businesses focus on Google Shopping as part of their overarching marketing plan. I love the platform for geeky reasons. Personally, I feel it is the ultimate advertising platform because the return on investment is clear, the control is hyper-granular, and it is a reliable lead-generation tool. We have many businesses thank us for doubling their total sales by using the platform.

1. Measurable ROI Marketing is seen as a necessary evil. How many times have you heard the phrase, “You need to spend money to make money?” Probably more times than you’d like. A typical store owner has to ask themselves many difficult questions such as, “How much do I need to invest in marketing?” and “How do I know it’s working for me?”

1. The Power Of Google Shopping 3 This is where the age of digital marketing—particularly PPC (pay-per-click)—has been advantageous with its ability to measure bottom-line results.

Google Shopping is a prime example of a platform that allows any advertiser to break down real results and attribute them in a granular fashion, allowing a store owner to see exactly how every penny was spent and what results it returned. Once your desired ROI is achieved, then you can increase your initial budget.

The granularity goes far deeper than seeing an overall ROI. You can break it down to incredible actionable insights including:

• Time of day: Do you want to pay more for people when the majority of searches and transactions take place? Do you know what time people browse and research, but do not buy? All is possible thanks to the level of data provided by Google Shopping and Analytics.

• Device: Do people buy from you more often on mobile because it is quick and convenient? Or do they convert later while searching on their desktop computer when they have more time to think about the item? I’ve turned unprofitable campaigns into cash-cows by simply observing how mobile users convert at half the rate of desktop users. Seeing how bids were 50% less for mobile led to a reduction of wasted ad spend and more aggressive spending on what is profitable.

• Keywords: Know what specific terms people search to find your products. The advent of Google Analytics reporting the majority of organic keywords as (direct) / (none) meant it is difficult to know what organic keywords lead to revenue. This makes a goldmine of knowing what keywords in a paid search campaign lead to a sale. You can use the data to make accurate business decisions for search engine optimisation and product naming that would otherwise be a trial-and-error scenario.

You can work on leveraging this data to your advantage with the second big benefit of the platform.

2. Control Insight is pointless without the ability to act on it. Google gives advertisers the control of how much they want to pay for a click depending on the time of the day,

1. The Power Of Google Shopping 4 and the user’s device, location, and past interactions with the website.

Advertisers can block ads from showing up for certain keywords. Alternatively, my recommended option is, if you don’t want to go as far as switching off certain attributing factors, you can chose to spend more or less on them. For example, if you have a brick-and-mortar store closed on Sunday, you could spend 50% less on that day.

Let’s look more in-depth at an example. Say you own a women’s clothing store and your target market is women aged 25-50. When looking at the demographic data, you realise that women often click on your shopping ads and browse, but men click less and turn into a sale (convert) more often than women. Male shoppers get you a higher ROI. They just do. In this case, you should pay a higher cost per click to show your ads more often to male than female users.

If someone visited your website before and conducts another Google Search that triggers your ad, most businesses will want to pay more for the user’s click because they are more likely to convert. You can take this one step further. Someone who has viewed 10 pages on your store is more likely to buy than someone who has spent less than 60 seconds. You can create audiences off any type of data in your Google Analytics to pay more or less for a click.

This takes us close to the adage of performance-based advertising:

Get the right message to the right people at the right time.

3. Conversion Rates Of Sales And Leads Other channels like display, social, or media-buys, generally speaking, see a higher number of bounces when people reach your store. Yet the user experience on the website is exactly the same compared to more targeted channels like email, organic search, and or Google Shopping ads.

The reason for the difference is intent. User intent is the most influential factor of conversion rate optimisation. By the very nature of search, people seek solutions to their problems. Some searches contain more commercial intent than others. A search for “buy lightest camping tent” is done by someone ready to handover money. You bet with over 70% of revenue coming from ads, Google invest a lot of money into their

1. The Power Of Google Shopping 5 advertising technology. They want to understand when shopping ads should show so advertisers make profit and continue to spend.

Thanks to the information provided in a shopping ad of price, imagery, and a product title, people can make an informed decision before clicking an ad. They already know the price, what it looks like, and if it is potentially what they want before you pay for their click.

Naturally having an extra marketing platform will increase the exposure of your site and products. However, many retailers in an industry where people search for their products, will tell you they see more revenue and a higher return on ad spend (ROAS)—second only to email.

The Downside Of Google Shopping

The power of Google Shopping comes with challenges. As more ecommerce businesses take to the platform, competition can be fierce. Sellers know it as an essential element to their marketing plans. In order to remain competitive, this pushes the cost per click up and companies must increase budgets to compensate. When a new store advertises in position one, everyone else drops one position while experiencing a decline in sales.

If you are a store owner and decide to run the campaigns yourself, you are up against professionals like myself that do Google Ads full-time. I regularly help shop owners in Shopify forums who wonder why they have spent $500 on ads and still have not made a single sale. The control of the platform brings with it a complexity that is overwhelming for an amateur advertiser. Meanwhile, the platform is a treasure chest of opportunities for the savvy advertiser who makes full use of its features to eliminate wasted ad spend and pay aggressively for profitable users.

When a business sees results from Google Ads, they invest more to expand its success. This includes bringing experts in-house, buying new tools, allowing more ad budget, redesigning web pages to boost conversion rates, and improving the lifetime value of the customer so the company can pay more than before for a click. The aim is never about dominating the search engine. Google Shopping comes down to who can make the most revenue per click.

There is an abundance of best practices you can follow to maximise your reach and

1. The Power Of Google Shopping 6 return from Google Shopping. You can be a more savvy advertiser. Not only will I break down how it all works, but I’ll share with you my arsenal of optimisation tips that allow us at Digital Darts to repeatedly grow Shopify store after Shopify store.

1. The Power Of Google Shopping 7 2. How Does Google Shopping Work?

And Lesser Known Ways The Channel Can Help Store Growth

“The Google model of targeted advertising is appealing because it claims to cut down on waste. We need to ask how that efficiency can be brought to [the] creative process.” Jerry Della Femina, a 1960s ad executive who inspired Mad Men, refers to Google and targeted advertising in 2013 as the second golden age of advertising

oogle Shopping begins in the Google Merchant Center where product data is Gsent. The Merchant Center is linked to a Google Ads account where campaigns, bids, and other account-level optimisations are made.

Shopping ads are different to Google search ads. For search ads, you add keywords

2. How Does Google Shopping Work? 8 that you want to target. A shopping ad will show if the product feed is relevant to someone’s search and the bid is high enough for a click.

Let’s look at the most common places where shopping ads appear so you can visualize what we’re working on. Your shopping ads can show in more places than a Google search result.

Where Do Google Shopping Ads Show?

You would have seen shopping ads at some point providing you’re in a country eligible for shopping ads. They appear in the following places:

Google Search This is what most people know as Google Shopping ads. These appear next to or above search results.

2. How Does Google Shopping Work? 9 Google Shopping People go to the primary area of Google Shopping when they click the “Shopping” link from their search results.

Google Partner Sites The full list of Google Partner websites are not disclosed. Some include Google’s own image search, internal search results of websites powered by the Google search engine, and .

2. How Does Google Shopping Work? 10 Google Display Google Shopping ads on the display network most often show through remarketing ads. In more recent tests, Google has shown such ads through Partner sites when a website has advertising space accessible to Google through the Adsense network. Below you can see remarketing ads of Google Shopping products by advertiser Kogan.

2. How Does Google Shopping Work? 11 YouTube Google Shopping ads can be coupled with any YouTube video on your YouTube channel. The following screenshot has placeholder images showing where images from the product feed can appear.

2. How Does Google Shopping Work? 12 Success on these channels through Google Shopping comes down to aligning your goals with your feed, bids, and other campaign optimizations. Let’s discover how to best do these for your store so you are ready to profit.

2. How Does Google Shopping Work? 13 3. How To Profit From Google Shopping

Aligning Your Goals With The Market

“Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.” William Bernbach, 1949 founder of international advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach

hat is success for you on Google Shopping? Chances are it is making enough W(and a little more) revenue to cover ad spend and expenses associated with fulfilling the orders. That is the most common, first goal I hear from clients. It is a good goal and the easiest goal to measure and manage.

I encourage you to look beyond last-click attribution where a customer clicks on an

3. How To Profit From Google Shopping 14 ad then buys. Advertising success is more than that. Searches on Google vary in intent and customers have more lifetime value for your store than their first purchase. The existence of competitors in Google Search results indicates other stores have a degree of success. Let’s dig into each so you are set for advertising success.

Goals

How you define success will determine how you approach your account setup and management. Goals shape your ongoing activities such as setup, optimisation and what you report on.

First of all, you need to work out your overarching goal, such as a specific return on investment (ROI) or revenue you expect. You can then work out what other key performance indicators you need to to hit your goal. Before I manage any new ad account, we define a return on ad spend (ROAS) goal. This lets me adjust bids and make other optimizations to control the shopping ad spend so it hits our target return on investment.

If the price of your products are similar, define your cost-per-acquisition (CPA). This is how much you are willing to pay for a sale. CPA doesn’t work as well if you have product prices far apart. Work out how much of your average sale is profit, and from there, calculate how much profit you’re prepared to sacrifice to achieve the sale. The lower your return on ad spend, the more volume you can drive and the greater your chance of succeeding on Google Shopping. We’ll talk more about this when we look at optimisation and bidding.

In assessing your goal, also look long-term. Would you consider spending all profit on getting a sale if it could boost your returns over time? For low-cost products, you can afford to make no profit to gain a customer on the back-end of your marketing funnels. This strategy of spending more at the CPA-level or dropping your profit margins, not only acquires a customer—they can refer-a-friend, give a product review, or build another asset like video for social proof. I know it can be hard to willingly lose profit because profit is the purpose of most business.

The fastest growing stores I work with invest their profits back into the business, whether it is to increase stock levels so they stop running out of product or to scale

3. How To Profit From Google Shopping 15 advertising platforms. The customers you acquire can buy again via email marketing over the months and years. The secret benefit in today’s digital marketing of acquiring customers is building your Facebook data. Once you hit 5,000 purchase events in Facebook and sync these customer emails into Facebook, the social platform has an amazing ability from the large data set to get your ad in-front of highly interested people.

The good news with Google Shopping is you don’t have to lose money beyond the first month if that is your choice. You are able to make profit from the beginning. Please still consider the long-term benefits of creating regular, repeat, raving customers.

Buying Intent

What does someone want when they search “Sony”? They may need product support for headphones, stock information, or the company’s history for a trivia night. I have no idea! Knowing the buying intent behind the searches people make on Google lets you reach more customers at the right time.

There are three levels of intent in search as they relate to someone’s willingness to buy:

1. Awareness

2. Consideration

3. Intention

The people at the top of your sales funnel are in the awareness phase. They are rarely ready to buy until they understand more about their problem. This usually leads to long-tail keyword searches with informational intent such as “why are my pores big” and “how can I reduce my pores?” The people conducting these searches are gathering information. They have no apparent

3. How To Profit From Google Shopping 16 knowledge or awareness of any pore-reduction cream.

The “consideration” search shows more intent to buy. It can indicate criteria, it can compare, and it can seek confirmation. Example searches include: “best skin products for pore reduction”, “(product a) versus (product b)”, and “(product a) reviews”.

Finally, the “Intention” search sits at the bottom of the conversion funnel. The searcher knows what product they are looking for or the brand they want to buy. For example, “pore minimising toner”, “(website name) reduce pores”, and “buy (product a)”.

Understanding the three levels helps you decide bid amounts. Most of the time you want your shopping ads to show for consideration and intention searches. Awareness searches can be as profitable as lower funnel searches if you pay less for their clicks. Awareness searches are also well-suited to lead people through a search ad to a blog post or piece of content that answers their question. If your campaigns have a lot of awareness and consideration searches, but few intention searches, your ROAS and volume is likely to be lower than otherwise.

Competitor Research

Chances are, you have a number of competitors in mind who sell the same or similar products. However, this list of competitors could look different to the competitors on Google Shopping. Your competitors on Google Shopping have shopping ads appear on searches that could bring you sales.

Understanding what your competitors do on Google Shopping lets you gauge another force that affects the purchase-choice of prospective customers. Even if your campaigns and feed is set up with all the best practices, not every searcher will click on your ad. Clicks will still go to a competitor.

It’s important to monitor competitor prices, the appearance of their ads, and the keywords they show for. What exactly are your competitors doing? Is there something you could do more of in your campaigns? Are they doing anything opposite to best practice that hints your campaigns could perform better? Understanding the answers to these questions and applying the findings to your campaigns gives you a competitive advantage.

3. How To Profit From Google Shopping 17 You may find a competitor neglecting one of their product ranges. They may not promote it as well as they could or be avoiding ads for it altogether. You may have found there are a lot of searches for this product thanks to the keyword planner, giving you the opportunity to tap into more search volume by optimising relevant products.

The second benefit of monitoring competitors is knowing where you stand in price wars. Stores frequently undercut competitors to stay equal or better in the eyes of customers. This is prevalent with competitors new to the market as they can value getting more seller ratings and testimonials than maximising profits, in the early stage of the business. Keep an eye on competitor’s pricing as you may be able undercut, level off your pricing with them, or at least know who is undercutting you.

With that said, let’s identify your competitors. There are some additional paid tools like SEM Rush not mentioned here, but at this stage of gauging competition for an existing store, a deep competitor dive is excessive.

Google Search The good ole Google search is the quickest way to get a snapshot of the market. Use this to identify your competitors, what they are doing, and how well their products and service compare to yours. Doing this prior to setting up Google Shopping can help you look at the images used, product titles, descriptions and most importantly, pricing. It’s also beneficial to look at the service provided by competitors. Can you provide something better such as next-day delivery, personalisation, or lower prices? These can be your unique selling propositions to stand out in the market.

Sometimes spotting your competition may not be as easy as searching your keywords in Google. If you already run ads, a Google search may bring up your products and inadvertently skew your ad data. Perhaps you want to eye-down competition in a different country, but you get served local ads. A competitor may focus on targeting only mobile devices such that sitting in your office on the laptop looking at search results causes you to miss them. To solve this, Google have a useful tool.

Ad Preview And Diagnosis Tool The Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool is within the Google Ads interface. It is version of

3. How To Profit From Google Shopping 18 the Google search engine results page. Type in your products or the keywords you may target. The tool does not skew your stats. The big advantage is you can set the location and device, which is great for discovering competitors and their prices in other countries.

Later we’ll cover ways to optimise your campaigns based-off competitor data. For now, use Google Search and the Ad Preview and Diagnosis Tool to gauge competition. The existence of competitors is not a bad thing. It can be helpful to have a number of companies marketing the same products you sell (as people may discover the products then later buy from you) as well as giving you a business model to benchmark yourself against.

Competitors are expected, especially when you can setup a business in one day using software like Shopify. If there is no competitor, this may be a red flag many have fallen before you short of profit.

3. How To Profit From Google Shopping 19 Be mindful of the time you spend analysing competitors. Look at the market on a regular basis, but keep focused on serving your customers through your company’s vision. Your customers need to be the ones who ultimately shape your business; not competitors.

To apply goals, buyer intent, and competitor research to your Google Shopping campaigns, you first need a Google Ads and Merchant Center account. Let’s set up these tools you need for success. If you have a Google Ads and Merchant Center account already, you’ll discover other tools as part of the setup that will help grow your existing campaigns.

3. How To Profit From Google Shopping 20 4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth

Be Ready To Profit From Google Ads

“Google (and Bing and Yahoo!) don’t ‘owe’ any company traffic. If a company has to spend more on advertising on Google, in addition to investing in search-engine-optimization, that is not a violation of any law.” Marvin Ammori, an American lawyer best known for network neutrality and freedom issues

re you new to Google Ads? Go through all of this chapter. Are you running Acampaigns? There are still tid-bits of gold for you in this guide to make your

4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth 21 current campaigns more profitable by using the full array of tools from the Google suite.

The Four Horsemen Of Google Shopping

Google has an armory of weapons to help you win the advertising war against competitors.

Google Shopping uses a combination of two platforms:

1. Google Ads: Control most of the levers that let you optimise for results. Most of your time is spent here to gain insights, set budgets, and change your targeting settings.

2. Google Merchant Center: Also referred to “MC” for short, the Merchant Center is where you upload and optimise the feed. The platform helps you shape the feed to satisfy Google’s guidelines.

To start you need a Google Ads and Merchant Center account. There are two optional accounts I recommend you also set up:

3. Google Search Console: Previously called Google Webmaster Tools, this informs you of the website’s performance within the search results. Google Search Console has information about how Google’s bot sees the store, backlinks, and organic search traffic. In Google Ads the tools lets you see what keywords the website ranks for in organic and paid search. This helps you improve both your paid and SEO strategies.

4. Google Analytics: The platform provides several new metrics within Google Ads about user behaviour on your store. If a campaign has 0 sales and 200 clicks, and you see user time on store is less than 20 seconds, you know there is a miss-match between your ads and search intent. By setting up Google Ads and Analytics correctly, you also get the standard website data you want about your ad campaigns within analytics like the number of users, what pages they landed on, and how many pages they viewed.

4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth 22 Setting Up The Accounts

1. Google Ads You firstly need a . If you work with Digital Darts, we will setup an account, invite you to it via email, and direct you to enter billing details. The account is yours.

If you want to create the account yourself, go to the Google Ads URL. Use your primary Google account login for ease of access. Follow Google’s on-boarding process.

If you want to create the account then campaigns prior to inputting billing details (perfect for marketing teams that need to set everything up first), skip the guided setup.

Conversion Tracking I have done over one hundred audits of Shopify stores using Google Ads and am shocked at the number of businesses who fail to setup accurate conversion tracking. Can you imagine Elon Musk hoping a SpaceX ship lands on Mars with no meters, navigation systems, or other instruments of measurements? It’s ridiculous. You cannot venture into the unknown realms of online advertising hoping you succeed without accurate measurement.

Google Ads has two ways to setup conversion tracking in Shopify. The first option is with Google Analytics by importing your transaction goal. The second option is with the Google Ads conversion code using the global site tag.

I recommend you use the Google Ads conversion code because it proves to be accurate most often across client accounts. Refer to my tutorial on How to Setup Google Ads Conversion Tracking in Shopify to configure everything you need on the tracking front.

2. Google Merchant Center The creation of a Merchant Center account is easily done like Google Ads. Visit

4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth 23 merchants.google.com then sign up using your Google account. Complete the two- step prompt to configure your account and select your location before agreeing to the terms of service set out by Google.

You also need to provide a variety of information to get your Merchant Center account ready so your ad campaigns can run and do the best they can.

Business Information Click on “Business Information” in the navigation panel then fill in every field. This information is used to setup your account with some of it like your business name being shown in your shopping ads.

1. Enter the name of your business or store. For starters, I recommend inputting your store name to get setup. Once conversions occur, you can alter your name within Google’s guidelines to potentially bolster sales.

4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth 24 For one client I split-tested different business names in the “business display name” section of Merchant Center. The original version had their business name while the new version had their country-code then the single brand of the products sold in store. The new version increased clicks and sales by 22%. I hypothesize there was a boost because the “search terms” report of Google Ads showed a large portion of people search for the country and brand name.

2. Type your website address in the Merchant Center account “Business Information” > “About Your Business” > “Website”. As the store you are setting up is on Shopify, it uses SSL technology. Include the https:// portion of the address. If this is a new account, you may see a message saying you need to verify your website. We will address this in the setup of Google Search Console (GSC). You need to claim the domain in Merchant Center by owning it in GSC.

3. Type the business address and phone number. If you have neither, you can leave it blank. The address information is used in Local Inventory Ads and maybe other Merchant programs.

4. In the “Customer service contact” section, enter the URL of your support page, customer support email, and customer support phone number. It is okay to leave these fields blank if you do not have any, but they help customer satisfaction.

5. Upload two logos. These are used in some types of shopping ads, remarketing ads, and on the display network. Both need to be in PNG or SVG format. For the 1:1 ratio image, I suggest you make it a simple version of your logo like an enlarged favicon, because it is often used in remarketing ads at a size of 32x32px. Do not include taglines in either image. The text will be unreadable in smaller formats and get declined upon manual review by Google.

6. We now want to link Merchant Center to Google Ads as it is required to pull all the relevant feed data into your ad account. From the vertical three dots button at top-right of Merchant Center, select “Account linking”. Enter your

4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth 25 Google Ads ID. The ID can be gathered from visiting your ads account.

7. Go to your Google Ads account. Then from “Tools” at the top-right, click “Linked accounts”. Confirm the Merchant Center account link.

Products The products section of Google Merchant Center is where you upload your feed. A feed is a file listing all your products grouped by attributes like price, stock status, and title. Accurate information ensures your products match what they are and helps them be found by users.

Your feed is the essential element to success on Google Shopping. Unlike Google Search, Google Shopping does not use keywords. Instead it matches the elements in your feed to a user’s search. To help Google show your products to the right searches, you must include all relevant and important information in the right places.

The feed not only helps Google, it also helps people find the product they want. Searchers will look at the image, title, and price before clicking the ad.

If a searcher clicks a shopping advert for blue suede shoes, only to reach a page that informs them the item is more expensive than originally displayed in the search results, the person will be frustrated then continue their search elsewhere. A feed that violates Google Shopping policies will have your products declined. Even worse, your Merchant Center account can be suspended.

The next chapter of this guide teaches you everything you need to get your feed setup in an excellent manner.

Tax The tax section in Merchant Center is important if you sell in the United States. If you don’t, you can select “Don’t configure tax at account level” then move onto your shipping settings.

If you do sell in the United States, you want to set your tax settings so they mirror your Shopify settings. The right tax settings makes your product prices accurate.

In Shopify, go to “Settings” > “Taxes”. If “All taxes are included in my prices” is checked,

4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth 26 within Merchant Center select “Configure no nexus for all states”.

If “All taxes are included in my prices” is unchecked and a tax rate is setup in Shopify, within Merchant Center select “Configure tax and set up nexus”. Enter the same tax rates as what is in Shopify.

For more help, see Google’s documentation on tax settings.

Shipping Your shipping settings, like tax settings, show the right price for products in the shopping ad.

In Shopify, go to “Settings” > “Shipping”. Set up shipping in Merchant Center that mirror your Shopify shipping settings.

You’ll need to setup at least one shipping table for each country you want to target in Google Shopping. An accurate handing time, delivery time, and shipping rate creates the right expectation with users.

The method of configuring your shipping tables to reflect your Shopify shipping rates will vary. Google gives you carrier-calculated rates for some countries. Setup is also quick if you have a flat shipping fee.

If you have a couple of shipping rates based on product weight, these are also quick to setup in Merchant Center. Should your shipping be more complex by depending on product weight, city, and other factors, I suggest leaving the shipping table for now. Shipping settings can be passed inside the product feed later on. DataFeedWatch, which I’ll suggest in the next chapter for setting up your feed, lets you configure your shipping settings in bulk based on rules like product weight, location, and more.

3. Google Search Console Google Search Console is jammed with useful information to boost your exposure and sales via Google. Most of the data helps bolster your SEO strategy.

It will help your advertising by giving you access to the “paid and organic report”. The report only tracks text ads, not shopping ads, but you will discover how often the

4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth 27 store’s pages show in Google’s free organic results and for what search terms. You can spot keywords you are ranking for in Google search results, then use those keywords to optimize your shopping feed. To setup Google Search Console for Google Ads:

1. Go to Google Search Console.

2. Login with your Google logins. I suggest keeping it all under the one Google account for simplicity.

3. Add a property by inputting the domain then clicking “Add A Property”. Validate with the “Domain” rather than “URL prefix” method. This future-proofs your verification more than the URL prefix method by validating all URL prefixes in one go. A URL prefix that contains http:// or no www is different in the eyes of Google and will provide different data compared to one that begins with https://www..

4. Verify the website. If you chose to go your own way and verify through the URL prefix, you cannot do so with the HTML file upload method because Shopify disallows such files to be uploaded to a store. This tutorial covers the DNS method as it is required by the domain method. I think it is the best method because it doesn’t affect your Shopify theme. It protects you from an accidental removal of code used in other verification methods, thus keeping your Google verification live. When we previously used the meta verification method, we had multiple clients update their theme and remove the verification, which automatically pauses shopping ads because the Merchant Center account is no longer verified.

5. Follow Google’s directions for the domain provider to verify the DNS. The process involves adding a TXT record to the domain. Google can do it for you with authorization for several domain providers such as GoDaddy and Name.com.

6. Return to Merchant Center. Go to “Business Information” then claim the website you entered in the third step.

7. The last step for Search Console setup is linking it to your Google Ads account. In your ads account, go to “Tools” from the top-right then “Linked accounts”. Under “Search Console”, click “details”. Link the website you entered

4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth 28 in the third step.

4. Google Analytics Why Use Analytics? Data is vital to optimising your shopping campaigns. The most important source of data outside of Google Ads is Google Analytics. When Google Analytics and Google Ads is linked, bonus data is revealed about your campaigns in both accounts.

In Google Ads you are able to add four columns to your reports: bounce rate, pages per sessions, average session duration in seconds, and the percentage of new sessions. This engagement data is gold when you have clicks but no conversions coming through.

In Google Analytics you get to see all the data about your campaign visitors that you normally get from other channels—and additional data attributes like costs and paid keywords. Secondly, Google Analytics lets you slice and dice data for greater insight to inform your marketing strategy. One last benefit of linking up the accounts is you can also setup audience lists for remarketing and campaign bid modification.

How To Set Up Analytics I have fully covered the setup process elsewhere. Refer to my tutorial The Finest Google Analytics Setup In Shopify For Splendid Data.

When your analytics is setup, link the accounts together then configure the metric settings:

1. In your ads account, go to “Tools” from the top-right then “Linked accounts”. Under “Google Analytics”, click “details”.

2. Click on the Google Analytics account you want the ad account connected to. Use the analytics account setup for the store.

3. Link all views that you want to have Google Ads data. In most cases you want to select all views.

4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth 29 4. Import site metrics of your most accurate view. You can only select one. This is how you will get the various columns in Google Ads like bounce rate and average session duration.

5. Save and you’re done. The last setup we need in analytics is to configure audiences.

Google Analytics Audiences Audiences are used in many ways for Google Ads. You can overlay audiences in observation mode on all your shopping campaigns. You can overlay audiences in target mode on a shopping campaign to create a remarketing campaign. You can remarket on the display network to different audiences based on their behaviour. You will use similar audiences, which is Google’s version of Facebook lookalikes, to better acquire people that look similar to your customers. There’s a lot you can do with audiences.

We want to collect every visitor and customer—as soon as possible, for as long as possible. You want to get your audiences setup now and use an appropriate time period to meet your goals.

Fortunately for you, I have a template that instantly sets up the most important audiences. Use this template as your cheat-sheet for getting audiences setup for your Shopify store. Be sure to select “Google Ads” once you click the template link to make the audience available in the ad platform.

You’ll notice there are visitors and customer audiences of 540 days. This is the longest time Google Analytics permits a person to be in an audience. In the template is an audience called “Smart list“, which Google creates using machine-learning so you can target your users most likely to convert. I suggest you use it, but also know how to do basic segmentation in analytics to derive your own audiences of value.

In Google Analytics, expand the date period to at least a month. The greater the time period—assuming the right data collection methods were setup—the more accurate your upcoming analysis will be. Go to “Acquisition”. Towards the top, click “Add Segment”:

4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth 30 Google includes a bunch of default segments you can use. You can also import many types from the gallery. If you want to venture out on your own, I recommend you check out Avinash Kaushik’s “Occam’s Razor Awesomeness”. For now, select the “Made a Purchase” segment. You can now see how long your customers spend on the store when buying and how many pages they view:

Cr eate an audience off this valuable data called “Non-purchasers like purchasers”. Go to “Admin” then “Audience Definitions” and “Audiences”. Create a new audience then go to “Conditions”. Use two attributes “Pageviews” (which is “Pages / Session”) and “Session Duration” (which is “Average Session Duration”). Enter values slightly less than the values you saw in your “Made a Purchase” segment. In this case, I’d enter “9” and “8” then select the “greater than or equal to” symbol (≥). Also enter in a transaction attribute of “0” to remove customers. Use “and” rather than “or” logic to ensure someone must meet the three criteria otherwise you will include disinterested click-happy people, idle visitors, and customers. Your audience should look like:

4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth 31 Click “Apply” then select “Google Ads” to make the audience available in the ad platform. Save the audience. You’ve just made an audience of highly interested non- buyers to help your ad campaigns.

With the template I provided, you now have a bunch of valuable audiences ready to use for Google Shopping and other ad types. You will learn how to use the audiences in a later chapter on optimisation.

The next step to have a great Google Shopping campaign is the feed. It’s time to learn the best way to setup and manage a crisp feed in Shopify. Do this and your campaigns will be more profitable.

4. How To Setup Key Google Products For Ad Growth 32 5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify

The Best Way To Create And Manage A Shopify Feed

“If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.” David Ogilvy, father of advertising who attributed his success to consumer research, telling advertisers in an interview the value of speaking your customer’s language

osing money unnecessarily in any business is infuriating. Yet, many businesses Lthrow money away every month by not optimising their Google Shopping campaigns and feeds.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 33 This chapter will teach you everything you need to know about setting up then optimising your Google Shopping feed in Shopify. As a 4-year Shopify Expert and 10- year Google Ads veteran for retail businesses of all types and sizes, I have developed sneaky tricks of the trade you’re about to discover.

Why Should I Optimise My Feed?

The feed is the most paramount element (followed by bidding) when advertising on Google Shopping. The goal of feed optimisation is for it to contain as much accurate data as possible, allowing Google to match your products with someone’s search. Unlike search ads, there is no option to bid on keywords to market your products. Google’s algorithm decides what to show.

An optimised shopping feed also categorises items to help searchers find what they want. The feed is for shopping ads as keywords is for search ads.

Let’s say you sell a range of running shoes. A customer searches for “red running shoes”. A fully optimised feed ensures your products come up for their search. All the shopping ads below are relevant to the search:

Showing up for the right searches will boost your total impressions. You should also see a good click-through-rate to your store because you’ve matched the product to

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 34 what the searcher has typed.

What Makes A Bad Feed?

You know the need to have a fully optimised feed. Let’s explore the dark side of Google Shopping. A bad feed is incomplete, inaccurate, or ignored.

Out Of Stock This is one of the most frustrating things as a shopper. You’ve found the perfect item on Google Shopping, but when you get to the product page, you’re hit with the dreaded “out of stock”.

Few people want to wait for things, especially when shopping online. Customers will shop elsewhere after seeing the product they want is out of stock.

Product Disapprovals So imagine this, you’ve worked on creating the perfect shopping campaigns for hours. The feed is built, you’ve implemented the right bidding strategy, your products are neatly organised into concise ad groups and campaigns, and you’ve even setup some pre-emptive negative keywords and bid-modifiers from historical data. You click the “enable” button, pushing your campaigns live and all of a sudden, the disapprovals tumble in.

Disapprovals happen for a number of reasons in shopping. Such reasons include having an unknown category, policy violations, and missing attributes.

There are two strategies to deal with product disapprovals. Firstly, read this chapter so you know the specifications of a Google Shopping feed. Secondly, work through the diagnostics inside Merchant center to fix the errors or warnings before resubmitting your products, otherwise they’ll get disapproved again.

Inaccurate Pricing The wrong prices in your shopping campaigns will get your ads disapproved. Google hates when stores make this mistake because it leads to a bad user experience.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 35 Inaccurate pricing is one of the top reasons people leave a site then shop elsewhere. What’s worse is that by the time they’ve looked at your website, you’ve already paid for a click that’s less likely to convert to a sale.

Rarely do businesses intend for pricing in their feed to be wrong. Inaccurate pricing can creep in when a retailer changers a product price, such as during a sale period. It’s important to ensure the feed is up-to-date with any changes. Price changes like during sales will always require the feed to be updated then re-uploaded. This is time-consuming when you don’t have the right software in place.

Irrelevant Searches We’ve briefly explored why it’s essential to show up for the right searches so you get in front of the right people, boost clicks to your store, and increase sales. How do irrelevant searches come about?

Search-to-ad mismatches happen when you inaccurately describe a product in the various fields of the feed. For example, if you sell children’s clothes, you need to make clear in the feed that they’re for children, not adults. You would do this by optimizing the product title (more on this below) as well as using the age_group attribute to have the value kids.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 36 Unoptimised Titles According to a study conducted by Salsify, 88% of Shoppers said that the content of the product, like title and description, heavily influences their decision to buy a product.

As mentioned, Google Shopping does not use keywords. It is crucial to optimise your titles and descriptions to get impressions for the right searches.

There are numerous tips and tricks to help you get this right such as using keywords in the product title and downloading search terms reports for your search ads to find out the exact terms people use when searching for your product. If some keywords get more searches than others, they are more important to include in the title. Nonessential keywords in a title should be removed.

Another part of title optimisation is the order of keywords in the title. For example, if you sell books, the structure ought to look something like this: Title + Type + Format + Author. I’ll give you recommended formats for products in other industries and further optimisation tips soon.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 37 Three Of The Best Ways To Keep Your Shopify Shopping Feed Healthy

To run successful shopping campaigns, you need to continually fill the feed with up- to-date information. If a new product is added every day, you don’t want to have to then add it to your feed. That becomes time-consuming and frustrating when errors occur. 95% of Shopify stores are best to rely on third-party software to do the heavy lifting of feed management.

Product feed creation has potential to be one of the most time-consuming tasks when selling online. You could spend hours every week to create then check all the information is accurate. It gets more frustrating when platforms require feeds in different formats. Your Amazon feed will look different to your Google Shopping feed, both of which look different to your Facebook products feed. That is just the setup.

You need to be optimising your feed to get more clicks and boost the ROI of campaigns. It can be worrisome if you have no time to work on it. Software solutions can help you optimise titles, and more, with recommended structures.

Many ecommerce platforms like Shopify will work with your selling and advertising channels such as Google Merchant Center, to take work off your hands. There are three options I use and recommend you consider.

1. Manual Input With Google Sheets If you have a small number of products and variables that seldom need updating, this will work for you. If you fall outside this criteria, it is not a good idea to use a Google Spreadsheet to manage your feed.

To create the spreadsheet feed, you need a file with all the necessary attributes and categories at the top, then fill out all the rows with the information that you would like to upload. I have a Google Sheet you can copy (don’t request access, I’ll ignore it) that has all the required fields mentioned in this chapter, examples filled in, and tips

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 38 to use the spreadsheet. The document looks like this:

A Google Sheet is better in every way compared to a standard spreadsheet. You can set a fetch schedule every day so you don’t have to upload the feed each time you update the spreadsheet. You can also grant team members edit permissions to a single document you manage together.

2. Shopify’s Google Smart Shopping Shopify’s Google Shopping app has changed over the years. The app today is known as a Google Smart Shopping campaign inside the marketing section of Shopify. It is the quickest way to get started with feed marketing. A lot of ad agencies like this because their account managers do not have the technical skills to directly manage and optimise feeds.

One feature of the channel is you can create Smart Shopping Campaigns. This uses Google’s automated bid strategy to set how much you pay per-click to meet your return on ad spend goals.

If you’re new to Google Shopping, this is the easiest way to start and manage campaigns. However, you need to know the risk that Google’s automated bid strategy works best on campaigns with 100 (ideally 300) conversions per month. I wish this was made clear to hopeful entrepreneurs and marketers using the software. Should your smart campaign fall short of that performance, the data set becomes small and you can expect week-to-week fluctuations.

If you or your Google Ads agency use the channel and bid strategy to manage your shopping campaign, and your conversions fall short of the recommendation, your

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 39 strategy needs to be reviewed. You can use the channel for feed management without giving Google free-reign to manage your campaign through its automated bid strategy.

Other downsides of the channel is you cannot advertise variants, customise fields like titles (though you can change this to a degree with rules inside Merchant Center), or enter information in all fields such as material which is critical for feed optimisation. Store owners who have over 100 SKUs also find the usability of the interface difficult.

3. DataFeedWatch The spreadsheet and Shopify channel solutions suit smaller feeds for business owners who have basic technical understanding and want to give Google Shopping a go. If you have a multi-channel selling strategy, want to advertise variants, or want to customise a field in your feed for optimal profit, DataFeedWatch will be better for you. You can customise anything in your feeds to help your store grow each month.

DataFeedWatch is my number one choice when it comes to managing and optimising feeds. I’ve used it for several years now to manage client campaigns across Google Shopping, Amazon, and Facebook.

Challenges like stock levels among variants are managed with the associated variants feature. Let’s say you sell heeled boots in a variety of colours but some colours are out of stock. You can filter out the specific colours until you have more of these colours. This saves you having to trawl through feeds or stop advertising the product altogether. Another example. If you sell shirts in five sizes and only one size is in stock, Shopify’s Google Smart Shopping campaign will continue to advertise it. DataFeedWatch lets you set a rule that effectively says: “if 60% or more variants of a product are out of stock, mark the product as out of stock.”

There is a lot of neat adjustments you can make to your feed in DataFeedWatch using Google Sheets, like excluding products if their name or ID is in the spreadsheet, or adding a suffix to titles. DataFeedWatch pulls all product data directly from Shopify, meaning you avoid code and having to manually update the feed each time there is a change to product data.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 40 The Most Important Attributes For A Google Shopping Feed

Whatever feed service you decide to use, there are feed attributes you must include, attributes you should use, and attributes you can ignore.

There are a number of attributes to input in your feed that are the bare essentials Google requires to run your shopping ads. Skipping must-have data will result in product disapproval where you products do not show in ads.

From the shopper’s perspective, most of the required fields are displayed to them when they search. Google Shopping works well because the searching person is presented with the main things they need to know when making a purchase such as price, what it looks like, and its name before you even get charged for the click.

ID Required attribute: id. Example: 20475822011. This is your product’s unique identifier not seen by the searcher.

For Shopify stores we setup on DataFeedWatch, we like to set the id to the variant ID because it is always available and unique for every product. You may want to use your SKU value as it can be clearer at face value what the ID refers to.

Do’s And Don’ts If you sell your products in multiple countries, use the same ID for a product sold in multiple countries.

Keep the same ID from the beginning. If you change the ID after the product has been approved, it becomes a new product in the eyes of Google and will be reviewed again.

Use valid unicode characters. Avoid private characters and functions.

If you stopped selling a certain product, do not recycle that product ID for

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 41 new products.

Title Required attribute: title. Example: MYOB Women's Summer Red Dress. This is often the product name. It is the most important attribute for optimising the feed.

Do’s And Don’ts: Front-load your most important information as your product titles might appear truncated in the shopping carousel.

Add the brand attribute at the beginning of your titles for popular brands. If the brand is not often searched you can add it to the middle or the end of the product title.

Match titles to the most popular search queries for your products. When the campaigns run, you can refer to the search terms report for your most popular search queries then adjust the titles.

Be specific. “Home Work Desk” is vague. “Red Gum Timber Office Desk 1m Long” is better.

For titles of variants, include a distinctive trait like colour, material, or size.

Use the title structure that is best suited for your product vertical. Draw inspiration from the graphic below.

Minimise or avoid character symbols like the pipe symbol (“|”) and hyphen.

No promotional text such as “free delivery”, exclamation points, or unnecessary capital letters.

Don’t use superlatives like “gorgeous” or “impressive”.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 42 5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 43 Description Required attribute: description. Example: The dress from MYOB is smooth silk-lined summer outfit in a bold shade of red. It's flattering neckline combines with a lace-up back and hidden zip closure. 100% made in the United States. Your product’s description.

The description often mirrors the landing page’s product description. It can vary word-for-word, but the description must be for the product on the landing page (what’s in the link attribute).

Do’s And Don’ts Put the most important information in the first 500 characters even though your Google Shopping description can have up to 5,000 characters. Like title, put key information early in your description.

Use keywords in your description that your customers are likely to search to find the product. If you update the product description in Shopify with this information, you will benefit from improved SEO.

HTML tags are allowed in the description but will show in the ads without the HTML tag. Standard HTML tags are supported except for unsafe ones like style and canvas. Always use XML entities or escape characters rather than symbols. As an example for an XML feed, the greater than and less than characters of Google Pixel need to be <em></em>.

Avoid overloading the description with keywords that produce poor sentences. It will sound unnatural for the customer to read then negatively impact your results.

Remove information about other products, accessories, and competitors.

If your product lacks a good description, you can create one on the spot in your feed management tool using the data already in Shopify. Here’s one example for a clothing store using DataFeedWatch:

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 44 Tips for modifying the description like this:

1. Use a space separator when creating the descriptions to stop multiple attributes combining into one word.

2. In DataFeedWatch you can check how your description will appear in Google Shopping by clicking the eye icon (seen in the top-right of the screenshot).

3. Other attributes you can add to create better descriptions include materials, special features, technical specifications, and patterns.

Link Required attribute: link. Example: https://yourstore.com/products/womens- red-dress. This is your product’s landing page and can include a tracking URL.

Do’s And Don’ts Claim the right domain in Google Merchant Center. If your claimed domain in GMC is mydomain.com, but your Product URL is mydomain.myshopify.com Google will disapprove your products. Claim your shop’s domain in Merchant Center and setup your feed to use these links rather than mydomain.myshopify.com. The regex in the screenshot provided will replace the mydomain.myshopify.com domain for all stores using DataFeedWatch. You just need to enter the store’s domain to replace the original value.

Start with https. All Shopify stores use the protocol.

Use the variant_url value in DataFeedWatch to link directly to the variant landing page that immediately shows the correct price. If you have product variants with different prices and the shopping ads go to the same URL, you will run into disapprovals.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 45 Avoid redirects where possible as it can slow down the feed.

Image Link Required attribute: image_link. Example: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1360/1125/products/red_dress_20 00x.jpg. This is the image URL which comes with requirements to ensure the image is clear and represents what you sell.

Do’s And Don’ts Use the main image of the product. You want your best product image first. All best practices of good photography apply. Use a white background, good angle, and good lighting. An image of shoes from the side is always better than an image of the shoes from above. Natural lighting saves white balance problems. If you use an unnatural light source like halogens, your products will have tinges of yellow. Even if you don’t take your own photos, every owner or marketing manager should know the elements of good photography. The Shopify Academy course Product Photography for Ecommerce covers everything you need to know.

Try to use images unique to your company. Many companies resort to manufacturer imagery, but this fails to set the store apart from competitors.

The URL must be accessible to Google’s crawlers. If you upload your product images inside Shopify’s admin, this will never be a problem because the out- of-the-box robots.txt file permits crawling of images. Sometimes you will get a disapproval for several days before Google crawls an image. This will auto-correct within the week.

Start with https. If you use DataFeedWatch, this is included in the image, image_1, image_2, etc. variables pulled from Shopify.

Use an image of at least 100x100px for non-apparel products and 250x250px for apparel products. If your product images are close to this size, you should get new photos anyway. Go for at least 1024x1024px. More tips for good product photos are in my Shopify conversion guide.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 46 Accepted formats are non-animated GIF (.gif), JPEG (.jpg/.jpeg), PNG (.png), BMP (.bmp), and TIFF (.tif/.tiff). The later two formats result in huge file sizes so avoid them.

You can include other images in the additional_image_link attribute described later.

Don’t use an image with watermarks or promotional text.

Availability Required attribute: availability. Example: in stock. Your product’s availability. Contains one of three values: in stock, out of stock, or preorder.

Do’s And Don’ts Create rules in the feed so availability is updated based on a Shopify field like quantity or stock status. You have to consider your product settings of whether customers can order the product if it is out of stock. DataFeedWatch handles this automatically with their own attribute dfw_availability.

Enable Automatic Item Updates so the availability status in your product data matches the landing page. Most Shopify themes have the schema markup to use this feature in Merchant Center. The structured data testing tool will quickly tell you what markup is on your product pages. If you need it implemented, refer to the availability schema.

If you stopped selling a product, do not set its status to “out of stock”. Create a rule to exclude it from your product data. The best way to do this in Shopify is to go to the product page then mark it as unpublished in the “Online Store”. The product will not be pushed to Shopify’s Google Shopping channel or DataFeedWatch.

Price Required attribute: price. Example: 59.00 USD. The price of your product.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 47 Do’s And Don’ts The price in the feed needs to reflect both the value and currency on the landing page.

Round the price to two decimals. If the price exported from Shopify contains more than two decimals, you can create a rule in DataFeedWatch that rounds it to two.

Use Automatic Item Updates to ensure no mismatches between the prices in your product feed and the product landing page. See the price schema used in the unlikely case your theme does not contain it. Refer to the availability attribute above for more information on this feature.

For bundles, bulk quantities, or multipacks, Google says to, “Submit the total price of the minimum purchasable quantity, bundle, or multipack.”

In DataFeedWatch, map price to compare_at_price if the value is not blank, else rename to price. This way if you have a sale price in Shopify, your Google Shopping ad will correctly show a discounted price appealing to shoppers.

Don’t submit a price with a price of 0 unless it’s a mobile phone contract.

Don’t include tax in the price for the US and . For all other countries, include value added tax (VAT) or Goods and Services Tax (GST).

Google Product Category Required attribute (for apparel, media, and software): google_product_category. Example: Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Dresses or 2271. It is the Google defined category for a product so the ad platform understands what you sell. It is not to be confused with the product_type attribute.

Do’s And Don’ts: The field is optional since 2018 for most categories, but always use it. Always.

Categorisation is similar among countries, but slightly varies. Download the

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 48 latest taxonomy list from Google for the country you are setting up. Here are taxonomy lists for United States (considered the default for English speaking countries), Australia, , and . Other countries can be downloaded from Google’s documentation on google_product_category. I have only run into one error using the US taxonomy for another English- speaking country.

Select the most specific category as you can. Though a dog kennel fits into the top-most level of “Animals & Pet Supplies”, the taxonomy ID 5094 of “Animals & Pet Supplies > Pet Supplies > Dog Supplies > Dog Houses” is more accurate. Specificity helps Google match the product to the user’s query.

Use DataFeedWatch’s category mapping to quickly categorise all products. To do so, when mapping categories in the software:

1. Select the default category.

2. Select the field that contains the “product type” attribute. In this screenshot, I’ve selected “category_0”.

3. Generate categories. DataFeedWatch will populate all your product types ready for categorisation.

4. Type in a few letters to select the best sub-category for your products. For industries new to me, I find it helpful to also open the taxonomy list in a spreadsheet so I can search all instances of a keyword and see their nearby categories.

You can use the category ID or the full category text.

Do not use more than one category.

The time spent to categorise products is well invested so you have an optimal feed to help campaign performance. If you use DataFeedWatch, a second benefit of doing this attribute is you can copy the rules into your Facebook Product Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Criteo because the platforms all use Google’s product categorisation.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 49 Brand Required attribute (for all new products, except movies, books, and musical recordings): brand. Example: MYOB. The brand of the product.

This is easy to map to in DataFeedWatch by setting the brand attribute to equal the vendor in Shopify. If you are the manufacturer, you can put your store name.

Identifier Exists Optional attribute (if your product does not have a gtin or mpn): identifier_exists. Example: no.

The default value is yes if you do not submit the attribute. If you provide a gtin or mpn value, the identifier_exists has to be yes. Most newbies setting up a feed for the first time have trouble with getting the gtin, mpn, and identifier_exists correct.

GTIN Required attribute (for all new products with a Global Trade Item Number, also known as “GTIN”, issued by the manufacturer): gtin. Example: 350398635461. Your product’s Global Trade Item Number.

Exclude dashes or spaces. If you’re struggling to verify the correct value, see DataFeedWatch’s blog on how to validate your gtin.

If a product has a GTIN, the value is critical to include because it may increase the number of impressions the product is eligible to receive. For example, if I type a search query like “Google Pixel”, there is no intent for a particular model. I receive the typical list of shopping ads with a mixture of Google Pixel phones. By searching “Google 64gb”, I narrow the search to show intent for a particular model. I get a comparison shopping experience made possible by retailers including the gtin value.

Should your shopping ads appear with a comparison shopping experience, you can build the business with a pricing monitoring tool. It will help you price match competitors to increase volume. Chapter 7 covers such tools and other optimizations.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 50 MPN Required attribute (if identifier_exists is set to yes and there is no gtin): mpn. Example: myobreddress12. It is the manufacturer part number value issued by the manufacturer.

I typically map Shopify’s SKU value to the mpn. This works well for the Stamped.io review app and Judge.me review app to get approved for Google’s Product Ratings program, a Merchant Center program discussed at the end of the book.

Color Required attribute (for apparel and all products in different colours): color. Example: gold/blue. Your product’s color.

Do’s And Don’ts Flatten colours into something a shopper would search for. Instead of using azure, indigo, ultramarine or another shade of blue, simply use blue.

The colour in your product data must match the colour on the product landing page.

If your boss simply refuses you the option to edit product colours in the store, you still need to use these values in the color attribute. You can use more popular colour terms, like “Red” instead of “Watermelon”, in the product title.

If the product has two colours, use the primary colour first then the secondary colour. Separate the colours with a forward slash (/) and no space. You can include up to three colours. For example: red/white/gold.

I have two tips for renaming colours in DataFeedWatch. If you have less than 10 colours or a list that will not change, rename them in the feed tool interface. If you have a bulky number of colour shades or your list changes each season, create a rule to rename them with a .txt, .csv, or a Google Sheets file.

Don’t use numbers like 8 or alpha-numeric characters like #0088ff.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 51 Don’t use non-colour values like see image or multi-color.

Shipping Required attribute (if you don’t create, or you want to override, the shipping table inside Merchant Center): shipping. Example: US:NY:Overnight:9.00 USD.

I use the shipping table inside Merchant Center more often than submitting shipping information through the feed. If you don’t use the shipping table or submit shipping in the feed, you will get an error when processing the feed.

If you submit shipping information through the feed, you must include a shipping price while other sub-attributes are optional. For further help, read about shipping.

Tax Required attribute (if you don’t create, or you want to override, the tax settings for the account inside Merchant Center): tax. Example: US:NY:3.00:y.

It can include sub-attributes as in the example where there are four values of country, region, tax rate, and whether tax is in the shipping cost.

Optional But Powerful Attributes For Google Shopping

Google Shopping experts go one step further like other experts do in their profession. Though the Google Shopping feed has optional fields, you should provide them if the data can be gathered.

The optional attributes help Google match search queries to your products. It may also help shoppers in the “Shopping” tab refine the products they’re looking at using extra attributes (like colour and materials) to find exactly what they want.

I will go in-depth on the most important optional fields for Shopify, reveal how I set them up, and what I think about them.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 52 Product Type Optional attribute: product_type. Example: Dress. A product category determined by you.

You can pick whatever values for product_type unlike google_product_category where Google requires you to match their taxonomy. The attribute has no direct affect on shopping campaign performance. I recommend you set the attribute to the “Product Type” field in Shopify. If a new store we work with has no product types or uses them vaguely, I refer them to the Google taxonomy to come up with a good product type.

The big benefit of using product_type is to segment your ad groups in the shopping campaigns. Products with the same product type often have similar price points, margins, and keyword goals. This helps your bid management and search term analysis.

The second reason I find this “optional” attribute so important is when you use Shopify’s “Product Type” value, it makes selecting the most accurate google_product_category simple. You can use rule-based logic in DataFeedWatch to automate taxonomy based on the “Product Type” in Shopify.

Cost Of Goods Sold Optional attribute: cost_of_goods_sold. Example: 12.00 USD. The cost of providing then selling the product as determined by you.

The cost of goods sold (COGS) attribute needs to be combined with revenue tracking (which we’ll cover later) and cart conversions. This will enable metrics in the Report Editor of Google Ads to see your gross margin and revenue for each product.

Previously in Shopify, we could do this with metafields, but Shopify introduced a cost per item field we can use in DataFeedWatch.

If the cost per item attribute is unavailable in DataFeedWatch, you have an old version of the Shopify app with insufficient permissions. Don’t uninstall then reinstall the app from the Shopify marketplace as that will not work. Uninstall the app from your store then contact DataFeedWatch support to request your shop in their dashboard be put into install mode. You won’t lose any data. This way you can

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 53 reinstall the app through the DataFeedWatch dashboard.

To setup the COGS field for Google Ads, in DataFeedWatch, map the cost_of_goods_sold attribute to the cost_per_item field. Seriously, get the software if you already haven’t.

Sale Price Optional attribute: sale_price. Example: 45.97 USD. The product’s price when it has been reduced.

Having a product on sale is an advantage in shopping ads. Below we see a jacket by “Rodd & Gunn” that has a price-drop percentage thanks to sale_price:

The price attribute must be used with sale_price. To create an accurate value for the attribute in DataFeedWatch, map sale_price to price if the compare_at_price is not blank, else leave it empty. This way your feed contains a sale price only if a discounted price exists for the product in Shopify.

Promotion ID Optional attribute: promotion_id. Example: june10off. Conveys a “special offer” message in the shopping ad.

The value of the attribute must match the ID in the promotion feed. It is case sensitive, must not contain spaces, and must not use symbols like an exclamation

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 54 mark (!) or currency symbol ($). You can submit up to 10 promotion IDs per product, but most stores will only have one promotion per product.

You can see below what it looks like for a product to have a promotion. I searched for “down lights led” then found a promotion offered by Reduction Revolution. The coupon showed when I clicked the “Special offer” link:

You’ll learn you how to setup a promotion and the best practices in a later chapter on Google Shopping Merchant Center programs.

Additional Image Link Optional attribute: additional_image_link. Example: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1360/1125/products/red_dress_si de_2000x.jpg, https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1360/1125/products/red_dress_ba ck_2000x.jpg. Comma-separated URLs of other images of the product.

If you have more than one image available for the product, use them in the additional_image_link attribute for your feed. The attribute has similar

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 55 requirements as the image_link except you are allowed graphics, illustrations, and product staging. You can include up to 10 additional images within the one additional_image_link attribute. The more imagery you provide, the more information shoppers have to help them buy what they want.

Custom Labels

Optional attribute: custom_label_0. Example: sale. Custom labels are an attribute of your choice. Custom labels have no affect on campaign performance and can only be seen by the advertiser managing the campaigns.

You can have up to five custom labels per product using the attributes: custom_label_0, custom_label_1, custom_label_2, custom_label_3, and custom_label_4. There can only be 1,000 unique values per label. Each custom label can only have one value per product.

The best practice with custom labels is to use each one as a theme, such as to describe the promotion, season, or price range of the product. The label values are optional. If you use custom_label_1 for season, its value can be empty for an all- season product.

Here are my ideas for custom labels:

• Price range. The most common custom label we use is a price range. The data is readily available; unlike profit margins which requires extra data entry. If a product is below $10, it gets a custom_label_0 value of <10. If the price is between $10-29.99, then the value can be 10-29.99. These products can then receive a lower bid than a product labeled 1000-1999.99.

• Profit margin. Use the label to assign a range in clusters (20-29%, 30-39%, etc.) like what I suggested with the price range. If instead you use exact margins for a large SKU range, you will create unnecessary work for yourself and you won’t make any better decisions because of it. The profit margin is a good label to use with price range.

• Season. Group products into summer, autumn (or fall), winter, or spring. Great for fashion, sports, and other markets influenced by the time of year. Be conscious of the countries you serve when categorising by season and the need to manage bids based on the differing seasons.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 56 • Promotions. Describe any specials for a product. Promotion ideas can be: buy one, get one free offer (BOGO); sale; clearance; and the promotion code offered through Google Promotions.

• Sell-rate. Values can be high, medium, low. Products vary in performance across channels. Something that sells well on Facebook may not on Google because no one is searching for it. Due to this, sell-rate is not a favourite label of mine, but we use a version of it (priority) when a client is desperate to push a product.

All this can be done in bulk and then automated in DataFeedWatch. I hope these custom labels inspire you to effectively segment your products.

Other Attributes The attributes shared so far are the most important for the most stores. There may be additional attributes to include in your feed depending on what you sell. Below are other attributes in an order of importance for the majority of stores:

• condition: Choose from new, refurbished, or used.

• item_group_id: Required when a parent SKU varies by one or more attributes. For example, one product in Shopify has multiple colour variants or sizes. For Shopify stores you want to set this to the ID value, not the variant ID.

• age_group: Choose from newborn, infant, toddler, kids, or adult.

• size: Needed for apparel, clothing, and shoes. Example: L. If it’s one size, use OSFA.

• material: One attribute to distinguish a product for item_group_id. For example, leather.

• pattern: Another attribute to distinguish products in a set of variants. An example is polka dot.

• gender: Required for apparel. Use female, male or unisex.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 57 • adult: If your product contains adult content, this must be set to yes.

• sale_price_effective_date: The date the sale price launches and must be used in conjunction with the sale_price attribute.

• availability_date: If your products had a preorder option, this is where you can give information as to when it will be available.

• expiration_date: Where applicable, you can choose a date that your product will need to stop showing.

• multipack: You will need to include the number of items sold together where this is needed.

• is_bundle: If you have a custom bundle, you need this attribute with either a yes or no value.

For more information on attributes, refer to Google’s product data specifications.

Feed Submission

Your feed is built. If you are yet to create a shipping table because you didn’t provide a shipping attribute in the feed, do that now in the “Shipping” section of Merchant Center (refer to the previous chapter for help.) Next you need to submit the feed to Google.

Submit The Feed To Merchant Center If you use Google Shopping inside the marketing section of Shopify’s admin, you can skip feed submission because it is handled for you with the API.

1. Inside Google Merchant Center, go to “Products” > “Feeds”. Click the blue “+” button to submit a feed.

2. The type of feed selected should be “Products”. Put the “Country of Sale” to the primary country you sell to. The language needs to be the same language in your feed, which must be the language of landing pages in the link value. Select “Shopping”.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 58 3. Enter the name of your feed. Name it anything you want as it’ll appear only to you in the “Products” > “Feeds” section. I suggest you put the URL of your store and the source of your feed. For example, “YourStore.com DataFeedWatch”. Select “Google Sheets” if your feed is in a Google Sheets otherwise select the most common option of “Scheduled fetch”.

4. Follow the remaining steps if you selected “Google Sheets”. If you selected “Scheduled fetch”, enter the file name. I like to use the same name of the feed entered in step six. If you use spaces, you need to remove or replace them.

5. Set the frequency to “Daily” so Google fetches your feed everyday. Pick the same time zone as DataFeedWatch (or whatever feed provider you use), but set the fetch time to 30 minutes after DataFeedWatch downloads your shop (if you forget what this is, login to review the shop settings in the software). By having Google fetch the feed daily 30 minutes after your feed software produces the latest feed, it will have the most up-to-date data to minimize disapprovals that can happen from a bad feed, which you learned at the start of this chapter. Copy-and-paste the URL of your feed and continue.

6. From “Products” > “Feeds”, click on your newly created feed. Go to “Settings” and set the default currency used on your Shopify store. This needs to be entered here if the currency values are not entered in every price attribute and other currency attributes of the feed.

7. In the “Processing” section, click “Fetch Now”. If you have under 100 products, Google normally takes 10 seconds. Even with 10,000 products, you shouldn’t have to wait more than one minute. This stage is the first check done automatically by Google. If your feed is setup correctly the first time, you will see no processing errors like so:

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 59 How To Correct Google Shopping Errors Errors or warnings are more common than not when first submitting a feed. Don’t worry. The good thing is you can make the changes right now, re-process the feed, and see if the issues are fixed. Review this chapter and you will not have any data issues.

Read the error message for your first clue of what to fix. Also look at the number of products the error or warning applies to. If the message applies to all products, the issue is likely a general configuration with your feed that affects every product. If the message applies to a percentage of products, look at the message and the commonality between products to diagnose what’s going on.

You can also review the “List” section then click-through to individual items for a clear view of all the values. See what values are submitted in the feed, spreadsheet, or API then view the “Final attributes” to review what Google sees as the final value:

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 60 Most warnings like “Text too short [description]” and “Incorrect value [identifier exists]” should be corrected by reviewing what products have the warnings then following this chapter for best practice.

Once you correct early data issues, Google’s team will manually review the feed within three business days. This is the second review. The diagnostics in Merchant Center will show the products under review. In the rare case your products are pending after three business days, contact Google’s item error team for support.

If your products were disapproved, review the reason for their disapproval. Common reasons I see are “Violation of Shopping ads policy” and “Invalid value [gtin]”. Use the reason to find out what is going on, look at the final attributes of the products to see where is the problem, then review this chapter to make educated changes.

Some products will be setup perfect and get automatically declined. If products are declined you should follow these steps to get a manual review:

1. In the “List” section of the “Products” page, click on the title of the item to view that particular item page. It may help to filter by disapproved products.

2. Under “Item status”, click “Request review”.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 61 3. Review the policies related to your item disapproval, and then check the box that acknowledges that you reviewed the information. I had a fishing rod client have all his tan-coloured products declined for “Partial nudity in personalized advertising”. You can figure for yourself why Google thought that. The two most common reasons I see are “Forbidden pharmaceuticals or products making misleading claims” and “Partial nudity in personalized advertising”.

4. Select “Request manual review.”

Should you have hundreds or thousands of products requiring a manual review, I’m sorry to say you’ll have to submit each one-by-one. If a product has the status of “Disapproved or invalid” and no option to request review, unfortunately that ID cannot be used in Google Shopping. It has been completely disapproved.

The only way to address such an automatic disapproval is to setup a new ID for the declined product then change feed values that you suspect are problematic. It is a long-game of trial-and-error. I recommend you use a description that is one basic sentence with no risky keywords (related to prohibited or restricted content) to minimize disapproval-potential. Even if you reach out to Google support, they will not tell you what to correct other than to re-do the whole description and hope.

If you’ve done everything described in this chapter, but you’re still getting errors and warnings, you have two last options. Reach out to Google support or work with an expert to handle all your Google Ads for you.

Should all your products get the glorious approved green in the diagnostics section of Merchant Center, you are ready to use them in Google Ads. Good job! You don’t have to wait for all products to be approved, though it’s a good idea to get as many

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 62 live as possible to increase opportunities to drive sales.

Phew. That was a lot of technical information to understand Google’s shopping feed technology. The feed is one of the most important parts to optimise for your shopping campaigns so it is worth knowing the nuts and bolts.

As you can tell, I am a big fan of DataFeedWatch because of the customisation it allows and time it saves. I encourage you to sign-up for free to give it a whirl.

Everything is now ready to create an optimal Google Shopping campaign. The campaign is quick to setup once you have a good feed.

Get The Google Shopping For Shopify Infographic

This whole chapter has been turned into an infographic! And it’s now yours to easily reference how you can optimise your Google Shopping feed.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 63 5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 64 Download It Right-click the original, full-size image link here then save it to your computer. If you do Google Ads for a living, may I suggest you get it professionally printed and hang it in your office.

Embed It You are welcome to share the infographic on your website, blog, or elsewhere online. Here is the embed code for you to copy-and-paste:

The infographic was created by Digital Darts in Google Shopping for Shopify.

5. Your Google Shopping Feed In Shopify 65 6. Campaign Structure

Save Time And Profit With The Right Structure

“If you don’t have time to do it right, what makes you think you’ll have time to do it over?” Seth Godin, author and marketer, on why hurrying almost always makes it take longer

ou have the right accounts setup, you have a strategy, and your feed is looking Ysweet. There is a fair amount of legwork to do during the setup phase (there’s a reason our agency charges a setup fee for new Google Ad clients because it takes time to do right!), but the payoff is worth it.

Everything you’ve done so far will make your products show for the most relevant searches to increase click-through-rate, reduce the cost of irrelevant clicks, and meet

6. Campaign Structure 66 your business goals. The time has come to create your first shopping campaign.

The First Campaign—Right The First Time

We’ll start from the beginning to help you know the platform inside-out. If you are to succeed at Google Shopping, you want to know every lever you can pull and its affect. At Digital Darts we know the Google Ad platform like our own child. That does not guarantee success from it, but we’re confident you will get maximum profit through us if it can happen. This is the level of confidence you want to have in your knowledge of an advertising platform and why this Google Shopping guide leaves no stone unturned.

General Settings When you click to create your shopping campaign, or when you edit your existing campaign settings, you have an option to select three goals:

1. Sales

2. Leads

3. Website traffic

6. Campaign Structure 67 The sales goal is thought of as the standard. The leads goal works to achieve leads through showcase ads where multiple products are shown in an ad unit. The website traffic goal works to achieve more visitors to your website with the “maximize clicks” bid strategy.

All campaign settings are available to you regardless of what goal you select. The goal you select makes Google recommend features to achieve that goal.

The “Maximize clicks” strategy is appropriate when you have a lot of SKUs and a low budget. The best situation for showcase ads is unclear, but it’s inappropriate for specific searches where people want an exact product like when they search a brand or model. Showcase ads are thought to be best for general searches where you have a category of products that can meet the person’s needs. I suggest you select “Sales”.

Next you’ll select the Merchant Center account you linked earlier to Google Ads. Select the country you picked for your feed. The country should have the number of products available, which includes in stock, out of stock, and disapproved products submitted to Merchant Center:

When deciding on a name for your campaign, consider how you want to split out products. How you organise the account matters. A clear, well-thought out account structure helps optimisation, avoids products not being advertised, and saves you time navigating through an unclear account.

You are unlikely to get a perfect structure the first time you setup an account. That is

6. Campaign Structure 68 okay as changes can be done later. You have to adjust your strategy as the data tells you.

I personally like the following naming convention for consistency as it tells me core information at a glance:

Website name – Campaign type (e.g. Search) – Keywords of insight (e.g. Brands)

There are other settings to consider. You can manage your product inventory and create customised product groups using your chosen product attributes. By default, all of your products within your uploaded data feed are included within your Shopping campaign. However, by using the Inventory Filter, you can limit the products you wish to advertise using different attributes. If there’s products to not be advertised, I prefer to exclude them from the feed so I don’t have to worry about inventory filtering.

The option of Local Inventory Ads is discussed later in the guide when we cover Merchant Center programs. It is useful for driving foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores. Ignore the “Campaign URL options” unless you have your own tracking software.

Bid Settings The bid settings covers how you pay for ads. There are a buffet of automated and manual bid strategies. Manual bid strategies were popular since the creation of Google Ads up to 2017. Now Google’s machine learning makes automated bid strategies superior.

The less time you spend tinkering with bids, the more time is available for strategising, writing ad copy, improving your feed, and doing other tasks artificial intelligence cannot yet do. I think about working with Google’s machine learning as letting it do the grind work with my surveillance. You still need to monitor the automation.

There are three automated bidding strategies:

6. Campaign Structure 69 1. Target ROAS: Google will automatically increase or decrease your bids every time your ad is eligible to run so it meets your defined ROAS. The bid strategy will keep bids more in-line with your ROAS the more conversions your ad groups generate. Keep an eye on a campaign using the target ROAS bid strategy as advertisers often come back to find they’ve reached lots of people but have no conversions. This happens all the time with store owners attempting to use Google Shopping in Shopify’s marketing section of the admin.

2. Maximise clicks: Google automatically pushes your ads to get the maximum number of clicks. It does not consider conversions or revenue. This strategy is favoured early for a campaign (until data comes in) with low budget and lots of products, as it does exactly what it says on the tin.

3. Enhanced CPC: Google increases a manual bid if it is more likely to convert or decreases the bid if it’s less likely to convert. Also known as “ECPC”, it is the most popular bidding strategy among advertisers. The bid strategy gives advertisers a lot of control and allows them to implement this with their manual strategies of bid modifiers. It’s not so great for those who are unfamiliar with Google Shopping or those with little time, as manual bidding optimisation is needed.

If you’re on a budget of less than $20 a day and you have a SKU range of over 100, then you can try the “maximise clicks” strategy. I suggest a ECPC strategy for new accounts. As the account matures to 50 conversions a month, then you can consider swapping to a ROAS strategy where your ROAS will remain more stable. More on these later as well as bid management when we dig into bid strategies for account optimisation. For now, select a ECPC strategy, enter your budget, and leave the priority setting to “Low”.

Selecting An Intelligent First Bid If you decide on a manual bid strategy or enhanced CPC, how do you know what amount to pay per click? One option is to select anything between $0.1 and $10 per click, then adjust it based on performance. The second option is to approach it mathematically to give your products the best chance from the beginning.

Firstly, consider the maximum bid you are willing to pay per click. To figure out your

6. Campaign Structure 70 maximum bid, you need the following:

1. Profit margin: Naturally, the only way you can make money from Google Shopping is to make sure your profit margin is more than your click costs. If you pay more on clicks than the marginal return, you’re not making money.

2. Product conversion rate: Each product is likely to have a different conversion rate, which is determined by a number of factors mainly on site. Once you understand how often your product converts, you can work out how much traffic you need to send to the store to hit your goals.

3. Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): The last step you need to know is your CPA. How much are you willing to pay for a sale? This will be determined by your profit margin mentioned above.

When you put all of these together, you get the stats to work out your maximum CPC. So, for example, let’s say you sell novelty sweaters and you want to work out the maximum CPC for your new range of sweaters with penguins on them. First of all, consider your profit margin. A simple way to figure this out is:

(Item price) – (Cost to produce & deliver your penguin sweaters) = Profit

The formula is not dead accurate given there are other costs to consider, but it’s a good start given its simplicity. If the penguin sweater costs $10 to produce and deliver, and it costs the customer $25 to buy, your profit margin will look like this:

$25 - $10 = $15 profit

You then need to use your conversion rate for the product. You can get this in Google Analytics by going to “Conversions” > “Ecommerce” > “Product Peformance” then view the “Buy-to-Detail Rate” metric. Multiply this metric for the product by your profit margin to work out your max CPC. Let’s say your sweaters convert at 3%. Your equation looks something like this:

6. Campaign Structure 71 $15 x 3% = $0.45

That means, your max CPC in this case is $0.45.

The one assumption to this strategy is that shopping ads will convert at the same- rate as existing traffic to product pages. If a lot of your traffic is from organic search, this is likely to be a safe assumption as the traffic quality will be similar.

Search ads are likely to have a lower conversion rate than your shopping ads. In shopping ads, people know the price, name, and what the product looks like before clicking. If you base the conversion rate on results from search, check the conversion rate after you receive a good month’s worth of conversions from shopping ads.

My primary point in sharing these calculations is to help you pick an intelligent first bid. You must still work on bid management as data comes in order to hit “the sweet spot” for profit.

Targeting And Scheduling Settings In the campaign settings, select to include Google search partners. The only way to tell if Google search partners will work for you is to try it. I see it work more often than not for Shopify stores. Simply checking the box is a way to drive approximately 10% more sales through shopping ads.

Add the country you are targeting for this campaign. This should be the same as the “Country of sale” setting where the products are sold. You’ll need a new campaign to target other countries.

If you want to target another country, or setup another campaign for whatever reason, use the Google Ads Editor to copy the first campaign you setup. The tool is a time-saver and a necessity if you intend to become proficient at Google Ads.

Later in the optimisation chapter, you will add more specific states and cities to the campaign. Doing this gives you the power to easily see the performance of, and modify bids for, each location you include. I have a free bonus for you when we dig

6. Campaign Structure 72 into this optimisation phase so you don’t waste time adding each country, state, or city one-by-one.

For the last few location settings in your shopping campaign, I suggest you select Google’s recommendations of including “People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations (recommended)” and excluding “People in, or who show interest in, your excluded locations (recommended)”. People can search then buy from another country they are living in even if you don’t ship to the country they search from. They may be holidaying overseas or buying a gift for a relative back home. The same idea applies for excluded locations: people may be in your target country searching for the product to buy in another country. You can review geographic reports when optimising the account to see if it’s worth changing this setting.

Strategy And Structure

When you create your first shopping campaign, you have one ad group that holds all products. Unless you have one product, we want to avoid such clustering.

The structure of shopping ads can be broken into three levels:

1. Campaigns

2. Ad Groups

3. Product Groups

Multiple shopping campaigns are done with prioritisation settings or negative keywords. Doing this lets you make a product not appear, or lets you bid less, for keywords of your choice.

Below the campaign level, we have ad groups. There are two reasons we build multiple ad groups in a shopping campaign. One is to see the search terms generated by the product(s) in the ad group. This lets you add negative keywords at an ad group level to filter queries towards other products. The second reason is these queries give you insight into the keywords you can add, subtract, or priortise in the titles and descriptions of those products.

6. Campaign Structure 73 If you create multiple ad groups, you must exclude the products that exist within one ad group within all other ad groups. For example, let’s say you have two product types: refrigerator and toaster. In the toaster ad group, exclude the refrigerator product type. In the refrigerator ad group, exclude the toaster product type.

Below the ad group level, we have product groups. There are two reasons we divide ad groups into product groups. One is the ease of reporting when looking at the division. The second reason is to customise bids based on feed attributes you setup when building your feed. If you divide by product type, you do so with the intent that the product types should have different bids because they will vary in performance. If you sell white goods, a product type of “refrigerator” should have a different bid than a cheaper “toaster”.

Common Segments When considering the segmentation of your account, be mindful of the strategy covered earlier in the guide, how you setup your feed, and the three levels of a shopping campaign. Did you use custom labels to group products in low margin, medium margin, and high margin categories? Are product types impacted by seasonal trends so you included a custom label with their most popular season? Does weather affect what you sell? Do you stock a wide range of brands? A clear strategy saves you time and energy on a bloated, difficult-to-manage campaign. It helps you zoom-in on core products and what feed data you’ll need to alter to meet those goals.

I usually recommend the most important attributes (meaning, their affect on sales) be the first level of division at the campaign level. The attribute you use to divide multiple campaigns is best done on data collected from ads running for several months. At the ad group level, we divide products by an attribute we want to see search terms to help optimisation of those products. Then at the product group level, we divide to get the bid control to meet our advertising profit goals.

You can divide an ad group up to seven levels. How far you go is a balance of management time and control needed for performance. A tiny number of advertisers have an ad group for each SKU, which involves a lot of work upfront and is

6. Campaign Structure 74 cumbersome (and possibly unnecessary) to manage if you have 100s of products.

To help you segment campaigns well, let’s delve into four of the most popular segments we use for Shopify clients and when each can be appropriate for your business.

Brand Large brands with an instantly recognisable name and product offering are easily wed into a product or ad group or even their own campaign.

Advantages to this method include budget allocation, custom bid strategies, and search-term prioritisation. Brands and models will typically convert better than generic searches so dividing a campaign by brand (using prioritization and negative keywords taught in the next section) can help sales. Remember you’d divide by brand at the ad group level if you wanted to see the search terms triggered by a brand.

With this in mind, like all segmentation, you need to adjust your bids as the data comes in. We have several clients who stock known brands yet queries for these brands convert no better than unbranded searches.

Disadvantages in segmenting first by brand can come in areas such as seasonality of products where off-season inventory might get lost behind the inventory that moves all year round. When the time comes to push seasonal inventory, the budget could be too heavy towards perennial products that seasonal inventory might not get their day in the sun. You can get around this of course by dividing the “brand” into a custom label of “season”. You may find dividing by “season” then “brand” better meets your goals.

Category And Product Type At Digital Darts, the most common segment we use for client ad groups is the product type. The Google category for taxonomy in the feed is often built from the product type in DataFeedWatch, so it is redundant to then segment by category.

You can create clean, clear separation for shopping campaigns where you may not have a strong brand offering from a widely-known manufacturer. I like separating by

6. Campaign Structure 75 product type at the ad group level for the reason we build out ad groups—to see search terms for products in that ad group to help optimisation. Another reason is product types usually have similar prices to each other which makes it easier for me to eye bid management to hit ROAS goals.

If your products have an inaccurate Google category, they may appear for irrelevant searches and waste money. If your products have an inaccurate category or product type, return to the previous chapter to optimise your feed. A refrigerator categorised as a toaster will be bid on as if it were a toaster. Your products may still show for the right searches, but you will be blinded from reality—potentially wasting money and skewing campaign results

Custom Labels A great feature of the Google Ads platform is the option to subdivide products with your own category that is the custom label. By assigning a label, you are able to use it as a filter when reporting, monitoring, and optimising. In the previous chapter I gave you the idea of using labels for the price range, profit margin, season, promotion, sell-rate, and priority. What you set them as is up to you. They have no impact on the ad and cannot be seen by the searcher.

Product ID This method of campaign set up lets you split campaigns by specific products. It is useful when a product might have variables (for example shoe size or dress pattern) that fit search demand.

Individual product targeting can lead to better return on ad spend. Segmenting by product ID also allows you to see exactly what products in the inventory sell well. For example, size 10 dresses in red are flying out, but the same colour size 8 dresses aren’t selling so well. Use this data to allocate more spend on the items that are working to get more sales.

The downside of product ID campaigns is the high level of variables to monitor. A selection of clothing in all sizes and colours is great for the consumer but requires a good deal of time and effort for you to manage in the campaign. Try to keep the ID’s as closely aligned as possible rather than having thousands of individual ID’s which could cause a data headache for you and make tracking success a daunting task.

6. Campaign Structure 76 If your inventory is seasonal, or high volume and fast moving, you might also run into difficulty with the amount of IDs. Your shopping campaigns need to be carefully planned for maximum efficiency and, of course, to improve your revenue.

The King And Peasant Strategy: An Overview Of Priorities And Negative Keywords

You’ve learned the biggest difference between search and shopping ads is the lack of keyword-targeting to run shopping ads, which relies on the feed. You may think then that whatever searches Google chooses to show your products for—aside from feed alterations—there is nothing you can do about it. That is wrong.

The King and Peasant Strategy lets you treat the precious few keywords that drive the most profit in your Google Ads kingdom, different to the majority. To grow your Google Shopping ads, you want to pay more for keywords that are Kings and less for peasant keywords, rather than treating every keyword as equal.

The first part of the strategy uses the campaign setting of priorities. This determines what campaign should appear for the eligible keywords. Let’s say for example, you have a sale campaign. The chances are some of your products will overlap between campaigns. By setting the sale campaign as high priority, you are telling Google that you would prefer this campaign to show instead of items in the other campaigns. In this case, the sale campaign is your King. By bidding more in your sale campaign compared to the lower priority campaign, you aggressively advertise products on sale.

The second part of the strategy is negative keywords. A negative keyword stops an ad from showing for that particular keyword. Much like the campaign setup, you can add negative keywords to help products show for the most relevant search terms.

When you apply a negative keyword to one shopping campaign that has a high priority, but not another that has the same products at medium or low priority, you can pay more for your best search terms and less for your lower performers. The end result is more sales and savings on wasted ad spend. The King and Peasant Strategy

6. Campaign Structure 77 is taught in-depth within the optimisation chapter. The strategy is best done using conversion data after your campaigns have run for sometime.

Spending time analysing the best structure for a Google Shopping campaign is an important step that can save you time and heartbreak compared to charging in to try everything at once. Constant maintenance and analysis of ad data in an effort to make continuous improvements leads to reduced ad spend and more revenue. By carefully segmenting the campaigns for your store, you will see results that can be quantified, data that can lead you to selling smarter, and ad success that ensures your customers find the right product for their needs every time.

Let’s dig into other optimisation strategies for your Google Shopping campaigns. I will go more in-depth on the King and Peasant Strategy.

6. Campaign Structure 78 7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns

The Inside Strategies Of Multimillion-Dollar Stores

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” John Wanamaker, an 18th century Philadelphia businessman who used novelty in advertising to promote his department stores

our shopping campaign is running. Hopefully you’ve seen sales from the ads. If Yproducts were recently approved in Merchant Center, it can take one week for impressions to run at their current potential because Google holds back new product ads as a precaution for user experience.

Now the ads are running, certain things need attention to make the campaigns an

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 79 ongoing success. Effective ongoing advertising is not set-and-forget—especially for an online store that needs to make every dollar count in a rapidly changing digital environment. One new competitor can affect your average cost per click, number of clicks, and revenue. Products previously approved can get disapproved. Ads trigger for irrelevant keywords no matter how well a campaign is setup. A savvy advertiser regularly manages his campaigns and product feed. He has his finger on the pulse of his campaigns. He knows how well they are doing in a given week.

The time required to manage shopping campaigns is less than search. Good skills to manage search ads like writing benefit-laden ad copy, building keyword themes in ad groups, and using as many ad extensions as possible, are redundant optimisation skills for shopping ads. You don’t write ad copy, you don’t build keyword themes in ad groups, and you don’t use search ad extensions. You no longer have to specify keywords for the exact product since Google works out the best product for a particular search term on your behalf.

If you want your shopping campaigns to get more sales while reducing wasted ad spend, I will teach you the optimisation methods we use at Digital Darts. These methods are used to launch stores as well as grow those who already do eight figures in sales per year. The beautiful thing about Google Ads is you have minute control to act on what gets sales and what does not.

The Two Levers Of Growing Ad Revenue With Google Shopping

The two factors—quality score and bidding—of Google Shopping success have been repeated throughout the book. It’s time to dig into each to see how they influence campaign performance.

Quality Score The quality score is pivotal to Google’s decision of where your products rank. For most of the book I’ve referred to quality score for shopping campaigns as “feed quality”. When a search query triggers a product, the highest bid does not automatically win. Google wants ads that are relevant, useful, and safe for the user. It does this by calculating a quality score. Stores with a high bid, but a low quality

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 80 score may not win the auction. How your products rank is a combination of quality and bid.

The quality score for shopping ads is vaguer than search ads. Google have kept the formula of quality score for shopping ads a secret often referring to it in their support documentation as “product history” or “feed quality”. One possible reason is to counter their own competitors like Bing from duplicating their advertising system. The more likely reason it seems is to protect their system from marketers in the same way their algorithms for organic search are blurred. However, like SEO best practices, Google educate its users so we can improve a store’s presence on the channel. It boils down to how you can better serve the person Googling.

The most important factor of quality score can be answered with this question: “Do we have a product that answers this search query?” It is an offshoot to my question of “If someone was to discover only this page on the Internet then walk away happy, what would they look for?” to come up with the perfect title and meta description for SEO. If you sell athletic strapping tape, you cannot expect to get a high quality score for general searches like “adhesive tape” where the user may want tape for crafts, school, or electrical repairs.

The best way to solve this problem is to look at high impression searches in your search terms report then see the gaps in your product range. Can you provide a product that better fits a high-impression search query? Few businesses will use this data to revisit their product range.

There are more instant ways and best practices to improve your quality score. Review all attributes of your feed to see how they can be improved. The most influential include title, description, product category, unique product identifiers, and images. These were covered in the chapter on feed optimisation.

One last comment on the quality is to not change the id of a product approved in Merchant Center that has a good click-through rate. The id contains the quality score history. If a product had a great CTR but then you amend the product’s id, all information that helped your quality score will reset. Conversely, if you had a terrible CTR and you’ve optimised everything else, a new product ID could be a fresh start. However, Google advise against changing the ID for any reason. Google says, “Once you’ve assigned an ID to a product, don’t change it. The ID you choose, in combination with country of sale and language, identifies the product, helps us to retrieve any product-specific information, and is used to track the product’s

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 81 advertising history in Merchant Center and Google Ads. If you change the ID, you’ll overwrite your product and its history.”

Bids The second major element of shopping campaign success is bidding. Pay too much for a click to gobble up your profits. Pay too little and your ad will fall short of the impressions or clicks required to get sales.

The goal is to apply the right bid to the right products at the right time. Segmentation of ad groups and product groups lets you apply the right bid to products. This is where you need to see what products get the impressions and clicks then appropriately segment your product groups so you can apply the right bids. Bid adjustments then let you apply the right bid for people at the right time.

A bid adjustment, also known as a bid modifier, lets you decrease or increase a bid based on where, when, and how people search. For example, if someone has abandoned cart on your website in the past thirty days, then they see a shopping ad of yours, would you want to pay more to get in the absolute top position for this person compared to a person who has never heard of your store? Of course yes! People who abandoned cart are far more likely to buy from you so you can afford to pay more for a click. Another example is for mobile versus desktop. If mobile users are 30% less likely to convert, then you may want to pay 30% less for a click compared to desktop users.

The four major bid adjustments for shopping campaigns are devices, locations, ad schedule, and audience lists. We see beginners and “professional” ad agencies ignore bid adjustments all the time. I suspect most people get it wrong because they simply don’t know about these levers that can be pulled to optimise accounts. Later in this chapter you’ll learn how to make these work for you.

The AIDA Model For Shopping Ads To Spot Growth Opportunities

You now know that quality score and bidding affect shopping campaign performance. A helpful way to apply them to your campaigns is with the AIDA model.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 82 The AIDA model of marketing is an acronym that stands for: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

The only way to improve the performance of your shopping ads or any digital advertising, is by increasing the attention, interest, desire, and action of people. Put aside everything you know about online marketing, then for a moment, reflect on the essence of AIDA. Any optimisation we do seeks to tweak the levers in this model for growth.

1. Attention: Get more people in front of the ad = increase impressions.

2. Interest and desire: Get more people clicking on the ad = increase clicks.

3. Interest, desire, and action: Get more people to buy and buy more = increase sales and average order value.

If you can increase each of impressions, clicks, sales, and average order value by 20%, you will have increased revenue by 207% (1.2 * 1.2 * 1.2 *1.2 = 2.0736).

Get More People In Front Of The Ad— Increasing Impressions Higher Bidding The simplest way to get more impressions is through higher bidding. You can see if bids limit impressions by looking at your impression share metric. From the columns in Google ads, select “Search impr. share” to see what campaigns, ad groups, and product groups are not 100%. Adjust the date period to see if bids in the past week are generating impressions.

If you are at 100% impression share, look at the absolute top impression share metric labelled “Search abs. top IS”. This metric is the percentage of impressions in the most prominent position on the page for shopping campaigns. In the example below, the Christmas tree priced at $289.50 would have its absolute top impression share metric of 100% if it always appeared in that first position.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 83 You can guess that always being in the first position is unlikely to be the best formula for success. It is rarely desirable to achieve for most products because you must consider the ROAS. If return on ad spend goals are met for a campaign, ad group, or product group, continue to notch up bids until they hit your goals or 100% for the absolute top impression share.

Feed Optimisation The second way you can get more impressions is through better product titles, descriptions, and other feed optimisations already discussed in the chapter on setting up your feed. We’ll go through the most important elements of titles and descriptions here again because it is only once you run campaigns to gather data, can you truly optimise the keywords in them.

Click on your shopping campaign then go to “Keywords” and “Search Terms”. You will see the search queries that your shopping campaign has shown for. If you instead click on an ad group in the shopping campaign then view the search terms, you filter down the search terms for the ad group. Here you see the primary reason we divide our shopping campaign into ad groups: you can gather keyword data related to the products in the ad group.

With this keyword data, look at how the search terms fit with the products. Our primary intent here is to increase impressions. I have two helpful questions you can use to achieve this goal of optimising for impressions:

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 84 1. Are there high-impression keywords that better match the market? If there’s variants of a keyword more popular in the product title or description, then swap it out. For example, if you sell a product that has “Shave Cream” in the title but there’s clearly more impression data for “Shaving Cream”, then use “Shaving Cream” in the product title and description. “Shave Cream” could still be used, but relegate it to the description.

2. Are there high-impression keywords not used in the title and description? Perhaps Google is throwing impressions at your products because of the Google taxonomy or another attribute in the feed. By finding these keywords then adding them to the title or description, you will increase impressions as the product achieves a better quality score for such searches.

Increased Budget The third way to increase impressions is increasing your budget. It is a joy as a Google Ads specialist to go back to a business owner to tell them we are hitting our profit target, and that the budget is limiting growth. This applies if Google gives you a warning at the campaign level that your campaigns are being “Limited by budget”.

Channel Expansion The last way to bolster impressions is with expansion. Channel expansion is covered in the last chapter, but as it relates directly to shopping ads, the most opportune ways are with locations, the partner network, and remarketing lists.

1. What locations does the store serve that are not targeted in each campaign? Perhaps you can target more regions.

2. Are you targeting the partner network? Check your campaign settings to see if

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 85 the partner network is targeted.

3. Are there negative keywords used in a shopping campaign? You can expand the reach by duplicating the campaign then apply a remarketing list in “Target mode”, so only the people on the remarketing list are targeted. This makes you appear for the less relevant searches in-front of a targeted audience. Make sure the remarketing shopping campaign has a low priority while the original is medium or high. Doing this will have the remarketing campaign run only for the keywords excluded in the original campaign.

Get More People Clicking On The Ad— Increasing Clicks Increase Impressions The methods to garner more clicks is similar to increasing impressions. Review the “Click share” metric from your columns under the “Competitive Metrics” section. Google says, “Everything you can do to increase impression share and absolute top impression share is also useful for increasing click share.”

Higher Bidding If the campaigns do not have 100% absolute top impression share and you are hitting ROAS goals, increase bids to make the ads more prominent for extra clicks. The ROAS may remain stable—therefore adding revenue and profit due to the increased volume.

Below is a screenshot from one client’s campaign over the past week. ROAS is seen by multiplying the “Conv. value / cost” column by 100%. Their ROAS goal is 900%. The first ad group is bang on target at 892%. The second ad group falls short of the goal, but due to its ad spend and potential revenue per sale, a longer period needs to be looked at to see if it is profitable.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 86 The absolute top impression share is more important on mobile devices compared to desktop because of the reduced visual space. When looking at impression share, click “Segments” then “Device” to see the difference of mobile, tablets, computers, and more recently TV screens.

If impression share is low on one device, but it has good return, you can use a device bid modifier to discriminate bids based on device type. By decreasing bids on mobile and increasing bids on computers, we can increase impressions and clicks on computers while lowering mobile to keep it profitable.

You can have a high impression share, but low click share because a product is below the number one position measured by the “absolute top impression share” metric. Google search the queries with high impression and low click share to see what the top products are doing that you are not. Chances are they are stealing a majority of clicks because their product is well-optimised or the query is a mobile- heavy search term.

Feed Optimisation Feed attributes that most affect clicks are titles, images, and price.

Titles Improving clicks through titles is about making them appeal to users. Unlike a search ad where you can write nearly anything, product titles need to be keyword- rich and relevant to the product otherwise you will get low impressions or irrelevant clicks.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 87 We’ve discussed a lot about titles already when you learned how to increase impressions. The same strategy of reviewing search terms for an ad group can be used to optimise titles. Are there high-impression keywords that can be front- loaded? Perhaps a product in the ad group already uses these keywords, but these popular keywords can be used at the start of the title.

If the product is made by an established brand, its brand is a good candidate for front-loading. Compare your titles to competitors in shopping ads for ideas. Use Amazon for another source of inspiration as Amazon sellers use keyword-rich titles. Review the chapter on setting up your feed in Shopify for best practices and ideas to optimise your titles for further clicks.

Images Images are first optimised by reviewing warnings or errors in Merchant Center. Once warnings and errors for images are solved, the next best way to optimise images is to look at them. Visit the URL of some image_link attributes to confirm what images are used. If you’ve mapped the first image of a product in Shopify to the image_link attribute, you can review the images in bulk by browsing the Shopify store like a customer to see how product images can improve. Review the do’s and don’ts of image_link for best practices of a good shopping ad image.

If you have a lot of products, get the loudest bang for your effort by reviewing the most important products. See what products get the highest impressions by going into the campaign, clicking on “Products”, then filter by impressions.

You can also view products with a high impression share and low click-through rate. Ensure the most popular products have good images.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 88 Pricing Price monitoring matters most when the product you sell is available with another online store. People often go for the cheapest deal on Google Shopping when there is no difference in value-adds like delivery time, warranties, or shipping costs. After all, the platform has been described as a comparison shopping engine.

Pricing Lab’s Price Tracker tool monitors competitor prices in Google Shopping, Amazon, and other marketplaces. The tool is soon to fully work with Shopify to manage sales using customized performance modes per product, brand, or collection, and adjusts your prices to become the top seller, while maintaining control over profit margin.

You want to avoid price wars to maximise your margin. One strategy we’ve seen work well is meeting the lowest price rather than under-cutting. Couple it with optimising your delivery time, shipping costs, and reviews to set the store apart.

Some retailers must adhere to minimum advertising pricing (MAP) in their distribution agreement. If you see a competitor selling a product below the MAP, report them to your manufacturer or distributor. For more strategies with pricing products, see the pricing chapter in Shopify Conversion Rate Optimization.

Merchant Programs There are two merchant programs that can increase interest and desire to boost clicks from shopping ads.

First is the Product Ratings program. Product Ratings provide a star-rating system inside the ad. They are a powerful trust signal when ratings are positive and can attract clicks. When ratings are negative, it can decrease clicks.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 89 Merchant Promotions is another feature for Google Shopping offered through Merchant Center that can increase the clicks and sales through ads. It presents searchers a special offer in the form of a discount. The screenshot below shows the second product using the merchant program.

Both types of merchant programs can attract attention and build interest to set your product apart from competitors. In the next chapter I’ll teach you how to setup Product Ratings and Merchant Promotions as well as best practices for each.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 90 Get More People To Buy And Buy More— Increasing Sales And Average Order Value We’ve looked at how you can get more attention, interest, and desire through shopping ads. Ads are not the be-all and end-all of profiting from Google Ads. One big step is left: all that happens on the store which is responsible for closing the sale. You will struggle to succeed on shopping if your products or store fails to build interest, desire, and action.

You’ve learned higher bids can get you more impressions. However, you cannot increase bids just to increase impression share if your return on ad spend is too high.

When you get more people to convert, you can bid more. When you bid more, you get more impressions. This is the cycle of how rapid growth happens in Google Shopping.

I have completely covered the final step of getting more people to buy and buy more, in my Shopify Conversion Rate Optimization book. In it I teach you the ultimate ways to convert a higher number of visitors into sales and get increased revenue per sale. While every store can always be improving, if a store struggles to get one sale out of one hundred visitors, that is a red flag of a poor product or website.

Bidding Optimisation

After feed quality, the second important element of your shopping feed is bidding. When you overbid, you unnecessarily cut into profit margins. On the other end, not bidding enough will stop your ads from reaching enough people.

Bidding on Google Shopping is a different ball game to search ads and having a few tricks up your sleeve will help you find that “sweet spot”—the balance between under or overbidding.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 91 “The Sweet Spot” Knowing when to bid up and when you ought to bid down is the key to success. When the campaign first goes live, you may find it struggling to get traction. This is common as Google will tentatively run your ads in the first stage of their life. When you gather data and Google has more of an idea how people react to your ads (judged by the CTR metric), the reach starts to gain momentum. After that, you now know to increase bids to gain impressions and clicks until your ROAS drops below target.

The sweet spot to aim for with bidding is to hit your ROAS goal. You can pay boatloads of cash for a click, but there’s no point if you cannot turn it into revenue. You can pay cents for a click, yet fall short of the desired volume.

Let’s say our goal is a 500% ROAS. There’s been $1000 in ad spend for 10 conversions with a total of $1000 in revenue. This gives a ROAS of 100%. For that to meet our target, ad spend needed to be $200. So given all things being equal over that period of time into the future, you should probably drop the bid by 500% to hit the sweet spot. If after a few weeks the 500% drop in CPC is too severe such that the ads are not getting any clicks, you’d want to raise the bid.

Here is another example. Your goal is 400% for a high-ticket item priced at $1000. What is the sweet spot? It is $250 in ad spend for one sale of $1000. This means if you’ve spent anything less than $250, the volume of clicks falls short to assume it is under-performing.

Bid management is like driving a car to a destination. You will constantly turn left and right, but as long as you have your destination in mind, you can get there. By raising and lowering your bids over time, you can stay on target to hit the sweet spot and make ads profitable. Constant bid work is time-consuming. Consider an automated bid strategy to save time and even improve performance.

Considering Automated Bid Strategies Once you understand the sweet spot from CPC-bidding, consider incorporating other bidding strategies into campaigns. Bidding is an ongoing challenge to get right, posing a risk, but it is an even bigger risk letting your ads run without bid adjustments as you waste ad spend, don’t get sales, or waste time unnecessarily

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 92 tweaking bids up and down.

Bidding strategies are split into manual and automated categories. Many Google Ads experts historically have taught to avoid an automated bid strategy, as you hand over control to Google’s artificial intelligence. Today though, the automated strategies can save you a lot of time for better results. It is wise to trial a mixture of manual and automated bidding to work out what is best for performance.

Google’s bidding algorithms assesses contextual signals at auction-time. These include the time of day, ad creative shown, and the user’s device, location, browser, language settings, operating system, and more. The end result is an automatic bid of more or less for a query to better reach your goals.

The less time you spend tinkering with bids, the more time is available for strategising, improving your feed, and doing other tasks artificial intelligence cannot yet do.

Maximize Clicks One automated bid strategy discussed during the campaign setup is “maximise clicks”. The strategy pushes your ads to get the maximum number of clicks. It works best in a limited budget. A business owner with half-a-brain will spend more on what’s making them money rather than focus on clicks, but early on in a campaign with unknown performance, this bid strategy can work until data comes in.

Target ROAS The automated bid strategy appealing for ecommerce is “target ROAS”. Google will automatically increase or decrease your bids every time your ad is eligible to run so it meets your defined ROAS.

The biggest challenge with ROAS bidding is fluctuations. Manual bids still fluctuate in performance so don’t let this deter you from the automated strategy. Below you see how the bid strategy will keep bids more in-line with ROAS as conversions increase:

Number of Conversions ROAS Fluctuation Initial Learning Period (in the past 30 days)

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 93 50 Medium to High Slow

100 Medium Medium

200 Low Fast

500 Very Low Very Fast

Fluctuations happen more in the first week or two of a smart bidding strategy as Google goes through a “learning phase”. Changes to a campaign or an ad group will also prompt a new phase of learning. At the campaign level, when you click on “Target ROAS” in the “Bid Strategy Type” column, Google will display a “Learning (new strategy)” message and other useful information with more insight on its learning.

To help you understand the learning phase and implement a ROAS strategy well for your shopping campaign, Google in their smart-bidding playbook have six best practices:

1. Use current ROAS from last 4 weeks as the initial ROAS target.

2. Ensure Product Groups have >200 clicks/week.

3. Do not set manual bids on campaigns/adgroups with Target ROAS.

4. Leave the product group structure untouched within the Target ROAS campaign for 15 days after the implementation, then evaluate weekly.

5. Do not make any manual bid changes during this time to ensure valid comparison of performance before and after implementation.

6. Look at conversion value to measure changes in revenue, then at conversion value / cost to verify that you’re close to your Target ROAS.

The way I think about working with Google’s machine learning is letting it do the grind work with my oversight. Monitor the automation. Intelligent bid optimisation is a keystone of any successful Google Ads campaign. Without regular, data-driven bidding oversight, you could run the risk of missing conversions and revenue.

Promotional Periods During a sale, you’ll typically see an increase in your conversion rate and a drop in

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 94 cost per conversion compared to your average. This is a temporary peak to ramp up the exposure of ads by increasing bids for more traffic. If the store participates in Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) or runs any promotion that you anticipate will increase conversions, up the bids.

Google with its automated bid strategies works to prevent hyperactivity with sudden bid increases as adjustments are made on reliable performance data rather than temporary spikes. Even so, Google recommends advertisers who use automated bid strategies to adjust their bidding for the anticipated performance fluctuation.

The challenging question is: “How much should I increase the bids?” Look at past conversion rate changes and average order volume in Google Analytics during past sales that are similar. If the store ran a 20% off sale for one week three months ago, and is about to run another 20% off sale, see how this period compares to the before and after.

You still want to bid for ROAS goals, but if the sale lasts for a few days and you wait one day to make a bid adjustment, you will already have missed one day’s opportunity. By making a performance-based hypothesis from data you can bid more aggressively to anticipate the improved conversions.

Seasonal Bids The average CPC goes up when there is a surge of competition in seasonal peaks. It is helpful to have a strategy to accommodate these peaks and dips throughout the year to meet your ROAS goal. For products with seasonal fluctuations, putting them in a separate campaign lets you prioritise then implement your bidding strategy at this time.

You’ll likely have industry knowledge if your products are affected by seasonal fluctuations. Examples include back-to school ranges, Christmas products, winter clothing, and Mother’s Day gifts. If you’re unsure about crests or troughs in traffic, peek at . A more comprehensive solution for Google Ads is to look at your keywords in the keyword planner tool.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 95 SKU-Level Bidding A SKU-level bidding strategy is done by allocating unique bids for every product— splitting out your product groups and bidding at “SKU level”. It is a time-consuming way to bid in Google Shopping. How far you go is a balance of management time and control needed for performance.

Sometimes products in a product group perform differently to one another. Getting super-granular with your bids can be hard work, but it usually delivers the best results as you get clear data to make bid changes.

A good start for SKU-level bidding is looking at product groups generating 80% of the impressions, clicks, or revenue. Isolate the best and worst performing SKUs. These are good candidates to bid at the SKU level. This gives you greater control over the CPC and ROAS. So, if for example, you notice one of your products is spending above its sweet spot, you can cut the bid. If it’s spending less than its sweet spot, you can increase the bid to see if you can reach more people.

Bid Modifiers To Get The Right Person At The Right Time A bid adjustment, or bid modifier, lets you adjust the price paid for someone’s click depending where, when, and how they search. There are four types of bid modifiers

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 96 for Google Shopping ads: device, location, ad schedule, and audience. By understanding each one, you are more able to set the right bid to the right person at the right time.

As a general rule for all bid adjustments, you want to reach $200 in spend or 20 conversions for that device, location, time of day, or audience. Less than that often means the data set is too small for a statistical-driven optimisation. It’s also a good idea to consider the relative performance of other segments before you apply a bid modifier. A significant amount of data needs to be collected first to make an informed decision.

If you see people on computers have 10 conversions after $400 in spend, while mobile has had 2 conversions after $100 spend, yes mobile is doing worse then desktop, but there’s insignificant amounts of data. The next $100 in spend for mobile could get 6 conversions and by applying a bid modifier too early you hurt performance. If people in Australia have had $100 spend for 10 conversions while United States have had $100 spend for 0 conversions, while each falls short of the rule of thumb metrics, the performance between the two is distinct that you could estimate a bid modifier to decrease bids on United States users. It’s not a one-off change as you should revisit the bid adjustment to keep it optimised.

If you are thinking critically, you may be asking why I suggested decreasing bids on United States users rather than increasing bids on Australian users? Firstly, it depends on your ROAS goals which we never talked about in the example. If Australian users were well above a target goal of 1 conversion for $20 in spend, you could increase the bids at the product group level or increase Australian bids with a bid adjustment. There are many ways to skin a cat. Personally I like to get the product group bid roughly to the average ROAS then apply bid modifiers. If you increase the product group bids, you’d want to proportionately decrease bids for United States users as you’d otherwise throw even more money at the poorer converting audience.

One final pointer I’ll make about working with bid adjustments is to constantly alternate the timelines you’re analysing. Look at the lifetime of the campaign then switch to the most recent 30 days. Perhaps the store was redesigned last month that the last 30 days is a more reliable data source for bid adjustments. Or maybe you made changes to the campaign or feed that could improve performance for all segments.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 97 Now that you understand the logic behind working with bid adjustments, let’s dig into each adjustment to optimise shopping campaigns.

Devices The device bid adjustment lets you adjust bids for people who see your ad on computers, tablets, and mobile phones. For new account builds, I like to log into Google Analytics, to see how computer, tablet, and mobile users already perform so we don’t have to throw unnecessary money on ads to find out.

In this screenshot we see mobile converts at 0.6% and desktop at 0.97%. 0.6 divided by 0.97 is equal to 62%. So we’d want to apply a bid modifier to decrease mobile bids by 62%. If you’re serious, you would also factor in average order value per device as it can differ, but as a pre-emptive modifier, it is good enough for now. Google Ads performance may differ to your other channels so you don’t have to get it perfect.

It’s rare to see computers, tablets, and mobile perform equal to each other. While mobile can convert better than computers, we typically see mobile convert 30% less than computers with tablet in between at 15% less than computers.

To review device performance for a campaign, click on the campaign then “Devices” from the left-side. Adjust the timeline from long to short and in-between to get a accurate picture of what bid modifier you can apply.

Locations Advertisers lose thousands of dollars by either showing their Google ads in the wrong location or paying the same price for everyone in each country. The mistake not only exists at the country level—sales vary between states and cities too.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 98 The first tip for location optimisation is an obvious one. You want to target the regions you serve. If the store only delivers to England, you don’t want to show ads in . People will leave the site when they realise products cannot be shipped to them. Review the locations for each campaign to ensure you ship to areas being advertised.

My second tip and one of the easiest ways to scale an ad account is to target all the locations the store ships to. If you want to target more countries through shopping ads, revisit chapters four and five as you will need to configure Merchant Center.

My third and last tip is to set granular locations for the campaigns. Few ad agencies or account managers do this. Add states, even cities or at least your most popular ones, to campaigns.

I have created the ultimate shortcut to easily add countries, or states and cities of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Google Ads Editor Bulk Locations spreadsheet lets you copy and paste locations and their ID into the Google Ads Editor. You can also copy only the name of the location to use it for adding locations in bulk to the standard Google Ads interface. The spreadsheet saves you from manually typing each location one-by- one. You can add every country in the World in 30 seconds.

Granular locations is where bid modifiers excel for locations. If you set the location only to the United States, you’d still target the same people as if you added individual states, but adding states, cities, post codes, or even radius areas lets you tinker bids so each region hits the ROAS goal. The end outcome is you reduce wasted money on poor-performing regions while growing regions that perform well.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 99 As for location exclusions, you can exclude areas you don’t serve (like a state) that are within your targeted locations (like a country). It is unnecessary to exclude all areas you don’t deliver to if the targeting settings do not include them.

A second way to use exclusions for locations is if you find search queries that contain country names you don’t sell to. That way if your campaign location settings is set to exclude “People in, or who show interest in, your excluded locations”, you won’t target these people in one country looking to buy in another country.

Ad Schedule People can be more or less likely to buy depending on the time of day or the day of the week. Your shopping campaign could reach your ROAS target, but on the weekends and from 12am to 4am on weekdays you lose money. We want the campaigns to perform the best they can at any hour or day.

You can see how a campaign performs for the day or hour by clicking on the campaign then on “Ad schedule” at the left side of the page. Look for tabs at the top of the page that say, “Day & Hour”, “Day” and “Hour”. Choose what metrics you want to look at. I suggest looking at clicks, cost-per-click (CPC), total conversion value, and conversion rate.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 100 Do people buy more from you at a certain time of day or a specific day of the week? As an ecommerce store, you are open 24 hours, 7 days a week so you never want to exclude a time of day. Create an ad schedule that lets you customise bids so the ROAS is consistent across the hour and day. Click on the blue pencil icon and set the hours you’d like your ad to appear in. Most advertisers will not have the conversion volume or ad spend to deduce insights for ad schedule because you need a large data set for each hour of the day to correctly assume correlation.

Audiences There are several types of audiences available to optimise ad campaigns. Use all types to help your campaigns the most.

Remarketing A remarketing list can be applied to your Google Shopping campaign, which is a way to show ads to people who have previously been on your site.

Remember the audiences in Analytics we setup in chapter four? Apply these audiences to your campaigns in observation mode. Click on the campaign, then “Audiences” on the left-side. Select the remarketing audiences to add and ensure “Observation” mode is selected. This way your ads will still show to people who have not visited your store and you can pay more to appear in a higher ad position for people who have visited.

The methodology for applying bid modifiers pre-emptively, rather than off actual data, to remarketing lists is this:

1. The more recent someone has visited the store, the more likely they are to buy.

2. The further someone got in the checkout process, the more likely they are to buy.

If you already have good to data to adjust bids for your remarketing lists, go ahead and use that to make your decision on bid adjustments. If you’ve just added the audiences, the absolute amount is unclear, but you know you can pay more for someone who visited the store 7 days ago compared to 30 days ago. Likewise, you can pay more for someone who made it to checkout compared to someone who

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 101 didn’t make it past a product page.

Customer Match You can upload your list of newsletter subscribers or Shopify customers into Google Ads then target these people. From there, you can bid aggressively on the audience for shopping ads or run remarketing ads to them when they are logged into their Google, YouTube, or Gmail account. If you have collected emails offline in your retail store, this lets you effectively reacquire them online.

The feature is great when you have a product that can be sold more than once or a range of products. A Customer Match audience is worth paying a higher click for as they are more likely than a cold audience to buy from you again.

The requirement for Customer Match is more stringent for retailers due to policy changes in October 2018. Previously you needed 1000 email profiles then you were able to use the platform. Now you need the equivalent spend of USD 50,000 in Google Ads, a good payment history, and at least 90 days of running Google Ads. It goes without saying, Google have strict policy requirements that you must adhere to ensure you have permission to use people’s details for marketing.

To create a Customer Match list from Shopify,:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to “Customers”.

2. Click “Export”.

3. Select the option “All Customers”.

4. Select “CSV for Excel, Numbers or other spreadsheet programs”.

5. Click “Export customers”.

Prepare and upload the CSV file:

1. Edit the CSV file in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets to only include the following columns: email, first name, last name, country, and zip. The country column needs to contain data that is the two-character country code so you may need to delete Shopify’s original “Country” column then rename the “Country Code” to “Country”. “Postcode” can also be used instead of “Zip”.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 102 Google provide further specifications and a sample CSV.

2. In Google Ads, click the tools icon in the top-right hand corner.

3. Click “Audience manager” under the “Shared library” section.

4. Create an audience. A name of “Shopify Customer Email List” is good.

5. In the “List members” options, select “Upload Emails, Phones, and/or mailing addresses”.

6. Select “Upload plain text data (unhashed)”.

7. For “membership Duration”, select “No expiration”.

8. For “Description”, add the date you upload the file so you have a record for future data updates.

9. Select “Upload and create list”.

To use this audience in Google Shopping, add the audience list as you would any other audience. Apply a generous bid modifier on it as customers convert well.

You can use the Customer Match audience for search ads, remarketing ads, Gmail ads, and dynamic prospecting on the display network. Its usefulness doesn’t stop there. You can generate similar audiences from the list. A similar audience list of your Shopify customers is the best type of similar audience.

Similar Audiences Google Ads creates what’s called “similar audiences” from your existing lists to find people that look similar in online behaviour and demographic. The feature is Google’s equivalent of Facebook’s lookalike audiences.

Google has a profile on every user based on what they search for, websites they’ve looked at, and videos watched on YouTube. If you want to know what yours looks like, head to Google Ads preferences. This information is used by Google to identify your new “similar audiences”. Google automatically creates similar audience lists from Google Analytics audiences connected to the ad account and Customer Match lists.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 103 I suggest adding what similar audiences you can to your shopping ads. Some similar audiences will be unavailable because they are not large enough. It is worth assigning audiences to each campaign in observation mode, even with no bid adjustment, so you are able to monitor their performance. From there, you can make decisions on whether or not to optimise towards the audiences or if you would benefit from excluding an audience.

Revisiting Campaign Structure With The King And Peasant Strategy

You may find yourself advertising the same products at the same time and in the same places, but in different campaigns. Or perhaps you’d like to push a product harder for some search terms by bidding more because they convert better compared to other search terms. Both of these scenarios can be handled with campaign priorities.

The “Campaign priority” setting tells Google what campaign to run first for its eligible search terms. Google says it is useful only when the same product is in multiple campaigns. That is the most important thing to keep in mind about prioritisation. The setting has three options of either high, medium, or low. When you first create a campaign, the default priority setting is low. A higher priority campaign is the first to show.

In instances where the campaign cannot be triggered, such as being outside the scheduled running time or when the budget runs out, the next highest priority campaign will run. If you have the same priority over multiple campaigns with the same product in it, the highest bidding campaign is Google’s next priority.

The King and Peasant Strategy lets you use campaign priorities and negative keywords to pay more for some search terms than others. I will show you how to use campaign prioritisation to grow profit from shopping ads. By understanding negative keywords first, you’ll get a clear picture of how priorities fit into paying more for some searches in shopping ads.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 104 Negative Keywords Negative keywords are terms you don’t want ads to show for. For example, if you sell high-end, white wedding dresses, you will not want to show for terms such as “cheap”, “second hand”, and “blue”. Setting these as negative keywords prevents your dresses showing up for such searches.

If you’re familiar with text ads, you may know match types. Google Shopping uses match types for negative keywords exactly the same way. This is a breakdown of how the four match types are used:

• Negative exact match: Implementing a negative keyword by using square brackets around the word or phrase, tells Google to not show your ad for that exact search. For example, if your negative keyword is [leather chaise lounge], your ads would not show for “leather chaise lounge”, but it would for “chaise lounge” and “blue chaise lounge”.

• Negative phrase match: Where a negative phrase is written with quotation marks either side, your ads won’t show if the search query matches the negative in the same order. The ad would not run if the search query had extra words at the start or end of the phrase match. For example, if the negative keyword is “coffee table”, ads will show for “table coffee” but not “square coffee table”.

• Negative broad-match: A negative broad-match keyword is the default used by entering the word or phrase with no other characters. It stops ads showing that contain all of the keyword terms in any order. The ad may still run if the search contains some of the keyword terms. For example, if your negative broad keyword is blue tv, the ad will show for “black television stand”. The ad will not show for “blue 50cm tv stand”.

• Negative broad match modifier: The broad match modifier is used with the plus symbol pre-pended to a word. It is similar to negative broad-match, except the negative broad match modifier option only blocks ads in searches that include the words designated with a plus sign or close variations of them. For example, +red +shoes will block ads for “womens red shoes” and “red shoe”, but not “womens shoes”.

Google note that for all match types, your ad may still show for variations of your

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 105 negative keyword term. That is why it’s a good idea to revisit your search terms report to see what search terms are coming through your campaigns.

You can add negative keywords at both the campaign and ad group level. This can help products show for the most relevant searches. For example, if you’re a clothing retailer with a campaign for men’s Nike socks and each ad group is split out by colour, you may want to add the inaccurate colours relative to each ad group as negatives. This may boost CTR and conversions. However, we find a feed with accurate data stops us needing to do extensive keyword-shaping of ad groups.

The King And Peasant Strategy: How To Structure Your Campaign For Your Most Important Searches The King and Peasant strategy lets you treat valuable keywords that drive profit differently to the majority. Similar to there being a hierarchy of Kings, Nobleman, Lords, and Peasants in medieval days that determined military and legal rights, search terms in your shopping ads should have a different hierarchy to determine what products show for what keywords at what price per click.

The first step of the strategy is to determine your Kings. These are the keywords you want to bid higher on. You should base this decision off data as many keywords will appear to be Kings but lack the true wealth. Search queries with clear commercial intent usually convert better, but I’ve seen weird queries convert better than ones with commercial intent. The keywords I typically see across industries that do better than the campaign average include:

• (brands)—examples include nike, ralph lauren, and sony

• (models)—examples include varsity compete trainer, cotton oxford sport shirt, and cybershot hx350

• (stock keeping units or SKUs)—examples include the product’s UPC, GTIN, and EAN

• buy

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 106 • online

• price

• order

• (local regions)—examples include australia, sydney, and california

The manual way to find what keywords convert well is to filter the search terms report by your chosen keyword. You will get a summary of its performance over the period of time. This is time-consuming and you may miss good-performing keywords.

If you’ve run any shopping or search ad for sometime with conversion data such that you’ve got more than 1000 conversions, use the n-gram analysis script to see the clusters of keywords that have converted well. The script is recommended below in the tools section of this chapter. I include search ads in the n-gram analysis because the queries carry similar intent for shopping ads, but you can test including only shopping ads should you have the data.

If the store is new to shopping or you don’t have data to make an intelligent hypothesis about what search queries convert, I would only use the priority structure if you have brands or models people search for. It’s a safe bet that search queries with these terms will convert better. Having said that, we have client accounts where brands have not converted better than general search terms, though I’ve not seen such queries do worse.

When you’ve decided on the keywords that convert better than the average, these will now go into a negative keyword list. In Google Ads, go to “Tools” at the top-right, then “Negative keyword lists”. Create a new negative keyword list then add the search keywords. If you have multiple categories of keywords like regions, models, and brands, use different lists to keep this data separate so it’s more easily managed.

Create a new shopping campaign. The easiest way to do this is to duplicate it in the Google Ads Editor. Set this new campaign to a priority of high. Next, apply the negative keyword list that contain queries you want to pay more for per click, to this campaign. Do not apply the negative keyword list to your other shopping campaign. The last thing you need to do is review the priority setting of your other shopping campaign to ensure it is set to medium or low—a lower priority than the duplicated campaign.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 107 With this strategy, by reviewing the “search terms” report for the lower setting campaign, you will see this campaign runs only for search terms used as negative keywords in the higher priority campaign. That is how you do the King and Peasant Strategy to discriminate bids for Google Shopping.

Search Term Optimisation While on the topic of negative keywords, it’s worth discussing how they are more commonly used for campaign optimisation. One major contributor to unnecessary ad costs is showing ads for irrelevant searches. When a user clicks an irrelevant ad, they quickly realise it’s not the right site or product for them, leaving you with a click cost but no sale. How do you manage this?

Your first port of call is your search terms report. This report should be reviewed on a weekly basis to reduce wasted ad spend. To access this, go to your campaign, click “keywords” on the left, and then click the tab at the top called “search terms”. This opens a list of search terms your shopping ads for within the selected time-frame.

With the data in front of you, you are now able to make optimisation decisions such as:

• Stopping ads from triggering from irrelevant searches. Be careful with this as irrelevant terms can still convert well. A search term with “” or “review” may not work for one store, but they do for others.

• Stopping ads from triggering on searches that don’t convert or have an unusually low CTR. If a search term is relevant but doesn’t convert, still bid on it. Do so at a lower cost per click by using campaign priorities to make it profitable.

• Shaping ad groups. Earlier in the book you learned that we build out ad groups to shape what search terms trigger for some products. You can apply negative keywords at the ad group level to direct search queries to particular products. Be cautious that these products you want to direct traffic to are eligible for such keywords by containing the keywords in the titles or description.

If a store does Google Ads and we are running their SEO, we love to use the search terms report to fuel the SEO keyword strategy. You will get more accurate data of

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 108 search volume and what terms bring in profit doing this than any keyword tool. Businesses will spend years blindly chasing organic rankings for keywords not knowing a Google Ads campaign can lead their SEO strategy.

Tools

So far in this chapter we’ve covered the tactics to optimise campaigns. There’s a lot to do. It helps to consider ways you can save time. Tools are one way to help with campaign optimisations. The right tool will save you time while others will enable you to do things you otherwise couldn’t do.

Three categories of tools we at Digital Darts find invaluable to grow Google Shopping campaigns help us to: understand competition, create or manage campaigns using third-party tools, and manage campaigns using scripts in Google Ads.

Sniff Out The Competition Every advertiser should know what is happening outside the Google Ads account in real search results. It is easy to stay in the Google Ads account, but venturing outside to understand exactly how customers see your products and potentially perceive them among competition helps you with ways to optimise your account. There are three tools anyone can use.

Google Search I often find that the best way to get an understanding of competition in the battleground is the old “Googling keywords in your product titles” method. Take note of the results that come up, the products themselves, how the product title has been written, what the image looks like, and the price. How can you improve your products from this data? Is their photography clearer? Does their title have an important keyword you overlooked? Does the coupon they’re offering in the ad through Merchant Promotions seem irresistible?

Also look at how many retailers are offering the same or relatively similar products to you. If there is a high amount, there’s a lot of competition. Where there are few or none, it could mean your competitors are not optimising their feed or campaign, or

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 109 there’s simply little competition and lots of opportunity for you to take centre stage.

With your new found in-depth knowledge of Google Shopping, when you look at search results as an everyday shopper, you may get new ideas to test. Sometimes looking at search results will make an non-optimal feed configuration so obvious you’ll slap yourself for missing it. Perhaps you’ll realise you can make better use of Merchant Promotions. Maybe your pricing for a product is too high. It is possible you’ve never searched on a foreign Google domain before that you’re advertising on, but doing so changes how you think your shopping ads are displayed.

The disadvantage of manual competitor analysis is the time it takes. Even so, a store with large inventory should still do it as another tool in their optimisation bag.

Auction Insights The Auction insights tool within the Google Ads interface shows how competitors perform in comparison to you. It is available for search ads as well as shopping ads. For Google Shopping you are able to compare impression share, overlap rate, and outranking share. The downside of Google’s Auction insights is that the keywords are not revealed so you still need to use other methods to get an idea of these.

SEMRush SEMRush helps you do all of the above and more. It identifies competitors for your keywords and tells you what keywords your competitors show for. It estimates the approximate spend compared to search ads. You can see other statistics like the

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 110 position where the shopping ads showed and their title and price. You may be able to discover popular products of competitors. This can make your research more comprehensive and effective. It is a paid service given the amount of data available. If you are unsure of its value but curious, sign up for a free trial to test it.

Campaign Management These tools enable you to do things you otherwise couldn’t do, save you time, and help you get the most out of your Google Ads.

DataFeedWatch Without a doubt, DataFeedWatch is our favourite tool for Google Shopping. The feed management tool was discussed in-depth on feed creation and optimisation. It keeps getting better every month.

Dynamic Creative A fellow Australian company, Dynamic Creative have a tool for managing Google Shopping feeds. We love to use their Shopify feed management tool for creating then managing search ads when a store has several hundred SKUs and over twenty collections. If your store matches this criteria, I strongly suggest you apply for a free technical validation with them. You can bulk-build comprehensive search campaigns to expand your search reach, use dynamic pricing in titles, and have ads paused when collections have products out of stock. These are time-saving features for large stores. I’ve left them a testimonial for a reason.

Optmyzr Newer account managers will find Optmyzr helpful for automation across the board. It is not something we use at Digital Darts. The “root cause change analysis” provides insightful suggestions as to fluctuations in performance. Using Optmyzr’s negative keyword finder can help you come up with negative keywords as well as identifying terms you may not have otherwise thought of.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 111 Scripts Scripts in Google Ads depending on the functionality helps manage campaigns in two ways. A script can make adjustments for you at the frequency you want—saving you from even logging into Google Ads. Secondly, a script can save you from manual work with mass amounts of data in spreadsheets. Each script typically has instructions to use it so marketers don’t have to call upon a programmer. I have three favourite scripts. These are designed to optimise existing campaigns or help you rebuild an optimal structure.

Competitive Analysis Script This script provides a visualisation and further segments the Auction insights report. It is filled with information such as your average position, impression share (how many times your ads showed for terms that match the search term), and your top-of- page rate. Most importantly, it shows how this compares to everyone else in the market who show up for the same terms.

While it’s important to not get stuck in too much data—getting consumed by competitor analysis with no insights to action—it’s encouraging to have an idea of how you perform within the market.

The script helps you not only see where you sit among the competition but it also visually breaks the data down over time. This is essential to see how any changes by you or competitors impact results. The script also lets you filter data. You can choose which competitors you’d like to look at to keep an eye on them. Get Competitive Analysis.

N-Gram Analysis Script My favourite Google Ads script of all time for many years. The script identifies keyword groups that have lost money or gained a profit. N-Grams are search terms with the N referring to the amount of words in a query. For example, a 1-Gram is one word, a 2-Gram is two words in the search query, and so on.

The script produces a spreadsheet of data for all N-Grams including cost, clicks, conversions, revenue, and return on ad spend. You define what campaigns to analyse, over how long a period of time, and how big or small the phrases must be.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 112 Use this report to come up with shopping campaign prioritisation using negative keywords so you bid higher on your most profitable searches. Outside of shopping, the script is pure gold to plan the structure of ad groups for search ads. For bad N- Grams, you can add them to a negative keyword list to reduce ad waste. The N-Gram Analysis Script shines brighter when there is more data. Get N-Gram Analysis.

24 Hour Bid Modifier Script The chances are, you’ll notice there are specific times of day or days of the week which perform better than others. For example, clothing retailers often see a peak in clicks on their ads around midday and a higher number of conversions in the evening. The general consensus of which being that people often browse on a lunch break or when they’re out and about, but choose to make the purchase when they’re at home. Every ecommerce store is different and these performance peaks may well be exclusive to your business.

The 24 hour bid modifier increases or decreases bids to get the optimum results throughout the week. It is most useful for high-volume ad accounts. Ad schedule bid adjustments can be done to a degree within the Google Ads interface, but you are limited to the number of time-specific bid changes you have running. The script changes your ad schedule bids every few hours to be as competitive as you like at any given time or day. Get 24 Hour Bid Modifier.

7. Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns 113 8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs

How To Use Each To Increase Profit Of A Shopify Store

“Advertising is totally unnecessary. Unless you hope to make money.” Jef I. Richards, Professor of the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at Michigan State University

he shopping feed is optimised, you continually work on bids plus bid Tadjustments, and you manage the structure of campaigns. How can you further optimise your Google Shopping campaigns?

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 114 The Six Types Of Google Shopping Programs

There are strategies to squeeze even more sales out of Google Shopping by applying for Merchant Center programs. The programs give retailers more value for shopping ads. Not all are relevant to all stores, but they often boost conversions so it is wise to implement what you can for your store.

You apply for each program by clicking the three vertical dots in Merchant Center, going to “Merchant Center Programs”, then enabling the program you wish to participate in. Some will instantly enable while others require an application form.

1. Seller Ratings Seller Ratings send a strong trust signal (providing the ratings are positive of course) to the potential customer in the form of a 1-5 star rating about the store. This can show up as a percentage rating such as “86% positive”, or as a 1-5 star rating alongside the number of reviews, in search engine results. This tells the user they can expect a certain level of quality in products and service. The ratings are different from product reviews in that they are about the store as a whole.

The seller rating changes from time to time. This is partly attributed to customers leaving ratings and partly Google tweaking the ratings feature to exclude irrelevant or incorrect ratings. That’s not to say Google can or will change existing reviews— they aim to enhance the experience by filtering out reviews they judge as questionable and working towards consistent ratings by re-scaling them from one to

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 115 one hundred.

According to Google, ratings can be collated from the following sources:

• Google-led shopping research.

• Google Customer Reviews—a free program that collects reviews from customers after they’ve made a purchase.

• StellaService—an external company to Google which collates data of your business’ quality including customer service, shipping, and returns.

• Google Consumer Surveys ratings—a platform used by Google to collect business or domain data.

• Other third-party sources.

Set Up For Seller Ratings to function, you must have 100 reviews and be in an eligible country.

The most popular way to get setup with Seller Ratings in Shopify is to follow my tutorial on implementing Google Customer Reviews. A second way is to use Yotpo then enable Seller Ratings.

2. Product Ratings Google Product Ratings show a 1-5 star rating for the advertised product in the shopping tab of Google and in search results. They are different to Seller Ratings in that they apply to individual products rather than the whole store. Three products in the screenshot below have Product Ratings.

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 116 A store with Product Ratings can grab the searcher’s attention. Likewise, a product with no product reviews among a slew of others who do, will struggle to attract the click.

Curious as to its affect on shopping ad performance, we implemented Product Ratings for a client that had over 500 reviews across a SKU range slightly larger. Most SKUs did not have a review. After 30 days, we saw a click-through rate increase of 6% and a slightly higher increase in transactions for the shopping ads.

Set Up Product Ratings is available in any country that has Google Shopping. The store needs at least 50 product reviews to be approved in the application. When approved and everything is setup right, Product Ratings will show when a product has three or more reviews.

My recommended app for product reviews that integrates with the Product Ratings program is Judge.me. Other apps we’ve successfully worked with for Product Ratings is Stamped.io reviews, Yotpo, and Loox.

Most of the apps will provide you an XML feed to upload to Merchant Center as well as an additional support page or staff to get you setup. I have found Google’s support team, who you’ll hear from when applying to the program, excellent in helping you get setup on Product Ratings. The setup with Yotpo is a little different

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 117 as you simply enable the feature inside their app for it to work.

You can view the “Product reviews” section in Merchant Center to check all reviews have the green “Ready to serve” status. Any that have a yellow or red status need your attention. The most common reason for product reviews having a yellow or red status, is the shopping and Product Ratings feed do not include a strong identifier of either the gtin or mpn attribute.

3. Dynamic Remarketing After you’ve looked at products on a website, how often do you see ads from that website following you around the web? It happens often because it is profitable.

Google’s dynamic remarketing for shopping ads allows the advertiser to create a template for ads filled with data from a feed. When a website runs ads from the Google Ads Network, Google autofills the ad space with the most recent items a user has viewed. To give you an example, I was looking at a product called the “DJI Mavic Pro Drone” on Kogan.com. I then jumped back to Google search to get some tips on picking a good drone. This lead me to read a Drone buying guide where dynamic remarketing ads displayed at the bottom:

The dynamic remarketing ad is a flexible format. Its display depends on the website, the ad location, and what Google thinks will perform best.

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 118 Set Up To create dynamic remarketing ads in Shopify, follow four steps:

1. Link your Merchant and Google Ads accounts. We have covered this earlier.

2. Setup Google Analytics for dynamic remarketing. I suggest dynamic remarketing through Google Analytics, as opposed to Google Ads, because you are able to target specific behaviours of people on your website, which leads to more profit.

3. Add remarketing code to your website. You only need one global site tag installed on each page. If you have the default Google Ads global site tag already installed, remove it and replace it with the Analytics version in this guide.

4. Create the ads.

Follow Google’s tutorial for steps two and four. What I’ll cover is the remarketing code as well as best practices to profit from dynamic remarketing.

In your Shopify theme, go to the “Snippets” folder then create a file named dynamic-remarketing.liquid. Copy-and-paste the following code:

{% assign UA-ID = "UA-PROPERTY_ID" -%}{%- comment - %}Google Analytics tracking ID.{%- endcomment -%} {%- assign AW-ID = "AW-GOOGLE_CONVERSION_ID" -%}{%- comment -%}Google Ads conversion ID.{%- endcomment -%} {%- assign product-id = "product-id_variant-id" -%}{%- comment -%}The format of the product IDs in the feed. 3 accepted values "sku" (SKU of the variant e.g. aga-012), "variant-id" (variant ID e.g. 21283160948841), or "product-id_variant-id" (product ID underscore then variant ID e.g. 28541777444969_21283160948841).{%- endcomment -%} {%- assign product-id-prefix = "shopify_AU_" -%}{%-

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 119 comment -%}Prefix to product-id. Leave blank if there's no prefix. This is likely needed if product-id_variant-id is selected so 123456_789012 becomes shopify_AU_28541777444969_21283160948841.{%- endcomment - %} {%- assign price-decimal-fs = true -%}{%- comment -%}If the decimal separator is a full stop like in USD and AUD currencies, set to true. If it is a comma like in some European countries, set to false.{%- endcomment -%} {%- comment -%}Change dimension1, dimension2, and dimension3 on line 16 to match your custom dimension number in Google Analytics.{%- endcomment -%}

{%- if template contains 'collection' or template contains 'search' or template contains 'product' or template contains 'cart' -%}

{%- endif %}

There are two adjustments you must make and two others that may be needed so the remarketing code works for your store:

1. Replace UA-PROPERTY_ID with your Google Analytics tracking ID.

2. Replace AW-GOOGLE_CONVERSION_ID with your unique numerical number that is tied to the Google Ads account. Your value can be retrieved by going to “Tools” from the top-right, “Audience manager”, “Audience sources”, then click on “Details” under “Google Ads tag”.

3. If needed, change other settings described at the top of the code so product IDs match the id attribute of your shopping feed.

4. If the decimal separator for your store, is a full stop like in USD and AUD currencies, set price-decimal-fs to true. If it is a comma like in some European countries, set it to false.

5. If your custom dimensions in Google Analytics are mapped to different numbers, change what values dimension1, dimension2, and dimension3 are mapped to.

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 123 The code is now correct so let’s make it live. In theme.liquid, insert {% include 'dynamic-remarketing' %} immediately after the tag.

With that done, your theme is setup for dynamic remarketing. However, an alternate version of the code needs to be inserted on the order confirmation page because it is not connected to your theme.

Go to “Settings” in Shopify then “Checkout”. In the “Additional scripts” section, copy- and-paste the following:

{% assign UA-ID = "UA-PROPERTY_ID" -%}{%- comment - %}Google Analytics tracking ID.{%- endcomment -%} {%- assign AW-ID = "AW-GOOGLE_CONVERSION_ID" -%}{%- comment -%}Google Ads conversion ID.{%- endcomment -%} {%- assign product-id = "product-id_variant-id" -%}{%- comment -%}The format of the product IDs in the feed. 3 accepted values "sku" (SKU of the variant e.g. aga-012), "variant-id" (variant ID e.g. 21283160948841), or "product-id_variant-id" (product ID underscore then variant ID e.g. 28541777444969_21283160948841).{%- endcomment -%} {%- assign product-id-prefix = "shopify_AU_" -%}{%- comment -%}Prefix to product-id. Leave blank if there's no prefix. This is likely needed if product-id_variant-id is selected so 123456_789012 becomes shopify_AU_28541777444969_21283160948841.{%- endcomment - %} {%- assign price-decimal-fs = true -%}{%- comment -%}If the decimal separator is a full stop like in USD and AUD currencies, set to true. If it is a comma like in some European countries, set to false.{%- endcomment -%} {%- comment -%}Change dimension1, dimension2, and dimension3 on line 15 to match your custom dimension number in Google Analytics.{%- endcomment -%}

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 124

Like before, replace UA-PROPERTY_ID and AW-GOOGLE_CONVERSION_ID. If needed, change other settings described at the top of the code so product IDs match the id attribute of your shopping feed. Also change the dimension mapping to match your custom dimensions in Google Analytics.

The code 'non_interaction': true is used to keep your Google Analytics bounce rate accurate. If it was set to false, which it is by default, anytime the remarketing code loads a bounce would not occur. We don't want that as the user so the non_interaction variable is set to true.

You may notice there are already pre-existing audiences set up for you in these campaigns like homepage viewers, product page viewers, category page viewers, cart abandoners and converted customers. It’s certainly worth going further than these five to maximise your results. I have other best practices for you to follow.

Best Practices 1. Update your privacy policy. The remarketing audiences feature in Google Ads lets you advertise to people who visited the store. The similar audiences feature uses visitor data to find and communicate to prospective customers. There is information you need to include in your privacy policy to deal with this. Of course, consult a legal professional for advice. For further information, read “What to include in your privacy policy for remarketing“.

2. Set a frequency cap. It’s great to show ads to people who are interested, after all, it can take six to eight touch points on average to get a conversion. However, bombarding the same select people in a short space of time can be infuriating for your potential customers and this can cause a negative impact on the brand. A good default frequency cap is 6 impressions per ad group. An alternative is to let Google handle what’s ideal by selecting the campaign setting of “Let Google Ads optimize how often your ads show (recommended)”.

3. Don’t run ads for products that a user wouldn’t want others to see on a shared computer. Engagement rings, creams for itchy skin, hair regrowth shampoo— these are all examples of products you may wish to exclude from your

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 126 remarketing campaign. Aside from the potential embarrassment for visitors, embarrassing product ads often violate Google remarketing policy.

4. Set lower bids for people who didn’t view products. It’s still best practice to remarket to them. However, as they haven’t been looking at specific products, they’re less likely to convert.

5. Set higher bids for cart abandoners. On the flipside to the above point, people who got as far as putting items in their basket but didn’t purchase are more likely to convert as they are in the latter stages of the buying cycle. These audiences are worth bidding a little higher for. Other candidates for higher bids are those who show other engaged behaviours like higher time, or more pages viewed, on site than normal.

6. Consider audience membership duration. This is the length of time the user will remain in your remarketing list. For product sales, you’ll likely want to set this to 30 days.

7. Use a different product title compared to Google Shopping. People have already shown interest in the product so you may want to use a different title compared to a shopping ad. Do this in DataFeedWatch by submitting the display_ads_title attribute.

8. Test various ad copy. Someone who abandoned cart is in a different mindset to someone who viewed a page on the store 30 days ago. Use various ads in the different ad groups to test what works. A coupon may do well for a shopper who abandoned cart while a message of free shipping could resonate more with someone who recently visited the store.

9. Use exclusions. Add customers to the various dynamic remarketing ad groups. If you want to remarket to these excluded audiences, create a dedicated ad group where you can customise messaging for them. Exclusions can be coupled with membership duration of audiences to target different time frames. For example, you can target people who visited the store 31-60 days ago by having a list of people who visited the store 60 days ago then excluding the 30-day audience.

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 127 4. Merchant Promotions Google Merchant Promotions showcase special offers from the store. Acceptable offers include percentage discounts, tiered discounts, BOGO, free gifts, shipping offers, and more. Retailers often see an increase in click-through rate and a boost in transactions when running a promotion. Here is an example of Merchant Promotions from Sunnylife Australia:

Not all special offers can be advertised. Exclusions include vague discounts, restrictive promotions, and some other conditions. For more help on what is permitted to get promotions approved, download then keep on hand the Merchant Promotions Quick Guide.

Set Up The Merchant Promotions program is limited to fewer countries compared to Seller Ratings, Product Ratings, and Dynamic Remarketing. You can apply for the program by clicking the three vertical dots in Merchant Center, going to “Merchant Center Programs”, then enabling the program. You will be taken to an application form.

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 128 Google strictly review each promotion. Follow Google’s guidelines to get setup on Merchant Promotions.

Best Practices 1. Allow at least 24 hours to accommodate for the review time and corrections. Disapprovals and feed errors happen all the time as Google are strict about Merchant Promotions. You should use the promotion_display_dates attribute so the promotion displays in a period after approval.

2. You can either create a Merchant Promotions feed through software like DataFeedWatch or submit a promotion directly in Merchant Center. If the promotion does not apply to all products, your shopping feed will need a promotion_id attribute that corresponds to the unique ID of a promotion so Google can match the two. One promotion_id can apply to multiple products.

3. The promotion must add value to customers. This means the discount or promotion must not already be in the product price or on the landing page of the shopping feed.

4. Avoid overly promotional text, punctuation, and capitalisation. For example, “BUY TODAY For 10% OFF!!” or “Mega Christmas Sale On!”.

5. Keep the promotion title free of redemption codes and numerical dates.

6. Double-check promotional codes. There are fewer frustrating things for a shopper than finding a promotion code only to reach the checkout to discover the offer doesn’t work or provides something of less value. This will cause cart abandonment and may hurt brand image.

7. Once a promotion is approved, you cannot edit it. If you want to change it, stop the promotion then submit a new promotion_id.

5. Google Shopping Actions People seek an easy way to purchase with relevant and meaningful assistance. Google saw this growth in their 2015-2017 query data as mobile searches for “where

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 129 to buy” grew 85% over the 2 years. How people search is also different in 2019 compared to 2018 with the growth of voice-activated systems like Google Home leading to longer search queries.

One of Google’s answers to this trend is Shopping Actions, which streamlines the purchase process by enabling people to buy directly on the Google platform through , Google Search, and . Qualities of the platform according to Google is a “shareable list, universal shopping cart, and instant checkout with saved payment credentials [that] work across Google.com and the Google Assistant.” The shopping cart works across multiple devices so someone can add makeup to their cart while on their phone. Later that night in the kitchen using Google Home, they add a spatula to their cart then purchase both items at once.

Shopping Actions is a pay-per-sale model different to other Google Shopping Ads. You only pay Google when someone completes an order. This makes it an attractive model for retailers to get on.

It is early days for Shopping Actions, but I suspect stores selling consumable products, selling a large number of commodity SKUs below $30 (as product research is minimal), or with a loyal customer-base will benefit most from the program that enables quick purchases.

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 130 Set Up At the start of 2019, Shopping Actions is available only to US advertisers. Retailers also need to ensure their products are not on the restricted policy, which is tighter than Google Shopping.

To get setup, first apply for Shopping Actions by filling in the application form. Once approved, install the Google Express integration Shopify app then follow the directions in the app to get setup. If you want to manage your own unique feed and you’re already running shopping ads, go to Merchant Center. Select your feed, go to its settings, and enable Google Shopping Actions. In Merchant Center, you will need to configure further settings like payment information and returns policy.

If you’re live on the program, learn about Google’s retailer standards. Each retailer receives an updated rating at the start of each month analyzing key performance indicators over the past 90 days. The rating considers metrics like item defect rate, shipping different rate, and item availability. High performers get prominent visibility and other benefits. The retailer standards are in the platform’s best interest because a poor customer experience may lose Google a customer for life to Amazon.

6. Local Inventory Ads Do you have a physical brick-and-mortar store? Local inventory ads drive footfall to your store as well as boosting the customer experience by letting people see what is available for purchase offline while online. Few retailers are still yet to take advantage of this program after its release several years ago. It allows brick-and- mortar stores to retain market share against ecommerce business models, but also works well for online stores with a physical store (click-and-mortar) as local inventory ads blend retail and online together.

A local inventory ad is similar to a regular shopping ad with the addition of a page known as “local storefront”. The page provides information including store inventory, opening times, and directions to the store. If the business has an online store, people have the option to click to the product page like a normal shopping ad.

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 131 Set Up To qualify for local inventory ads, the business must have a physical store in Australia, Brazil, Canada, , Germany, Japan, Switzerland, UK, and US.

If you qualify, you can get setup by following the local inventory ads onboarding guide. There is a fair bit to do like getting your Google My Business configured with Merchant Center, creating then submitting multiple feeds, verifying inventory with Google, and configuring your Google Ads to run local inventory ads. See the local inventory FAQ for further help.

When you pass the verification process, I recommend you set up Google Analytics for local storefront. This puts tracking on the local storefront page, which is a Google- hosted page, to measure pageviews, clicks, and directions and calls to the shop. The more you measure offline, the better.

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 132 Best Practices 1. Enable local inventory ads with shopping ads in the same campaign. Google says this action allows them to serve the best ad format for a shopper based on their location, device, and product availability.

2. Consider the time and day. The temptation may be to only run local inventory ads while your store is open. Running your ads around the clock is still worthwhile. The ads are crammed with information which may lead a customer to the store when it is open again, or simply purchasing online. I recommend bidding up in peak times with a customised ad schedule.

3. Set granular locations in your location settings to see the performance of difference regions. Know that you cannot change the maximum radius for local inventory ads. Google serves local inventory ads when a shopper is within a reasonable driving distance from a store’s location.

4. Experiment with the variables in your control. Like everything else in Google Ads, optimisation involves testing, testing, then testing again. Experiment with different imagery, titles, and account features. You may find a lever to pull harder.

5. Split product groups by channel. Split out items that can be bought in-store from those that are online only. Such segmentation can be done by using the “Channel” and “Channel exclusivity” subdivisions in a product group. This way you are able to bid more or less where it could be advantageous. For example, if your stores hit a peak sale time around 1pm, but your online sales peak at 7pm, you may want to bid higher for the in-store items at 1pm and online items at 7pm.

6. Segment by click type. This is done in the dimensions tab. There are two click types of local inventory ads that let you know what someone clicked on: 1) to view an ad with the online product shown and 2) to view an ad with the local product shown. The click types are helpful for Shopify stores running both local inventory and shopping ads to understand performance between the two.

7. Segment by device and store visits. First, make sure you are eligible for store visit conversions to see the influence of ad impressions and clicks on store

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 133 visits. Then in Google Ads, add the store visits data as a column. Next, click the Dimensions tab then the download icon to segment by click type and device.

8. Enhance the customer experience by directing people to the Shopify store, advertise products that are on display to order, or showing a click and collect option in the ad. More information can be found on local inventory ads optimisation.

Infographic: Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs For Shopify

This whole chapter has been turned into an infographic! And it’s now yours to easily reference how you can get setup on, and optimize, all Google Merchant Center Programs.

Download It Right-click the original, full-size image link here then save it to your computer. If you do Google Ads for a living, may I suggest you get it professionally printed and hang it in your office.

Embed It You are welcome to share the infographic on your website, blog, or elsewhere online. Here is the embed code for you to copy-and-paste:

The infographic was created by Digital Darts in

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 134 href="https://www.digitaldarts.com.au/google-shopping">Google Shopping for Shopify.

8. Google Shopping Merchant Center Programs 135 9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping

Scale Your Search Marketing

“I think of Google as a set of overlapping things. It’s a consumer platform, consumer phenomenon of which search is its fundamental activity, but there are many other things you can do than search… I think of Google as an advertising company who services the broader advertising industry in the ways that you know.” , Executive Chairman of Google from 2001-2015

ou don’t have to wait for your Google Shopping Ads to run at 100% until you Yexpand into related marketing channels. Beside, it is difficult to know if shopping ads are running at their full potential because new data lets you continually optimise bids and the shopping feed.

9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping 136 Your sales can meander right now from other sources to complement Google Shopping. When you’ve run Google Shopping for a couple of months, you will have collected search term and audience data to grow other types of marketing. If you see Google Shopping generating sales, that’s a good indicator other channels can take sales further. There are additional channels in Google Ads, and competitors of Google to use, to grow. If you only run Google Shopping Ads, there is a lot of money left on the table.

Four Channels To Expand Beyond Google Shopping

The four primary related areas to expand beyond Google Shopping for more traffic and sales is video ads (primarily on YouTube), display ads, search ads, and Microsoft Advertising. The first three channels are managed in Google Ads while Microsoft Advertising is managed on its own platform.

1. Video Ads A 2016 Nielsen study found that in an average month, people over 18 years old in the United States spend more time watching YouTube than any television network. In many markets, YouTube is a part of the buying journey because it entertains and educates through people outside the business, making it a source of trustworthy information. Video ads are a powerful tool to uplift brand awareness, traffic, and sales to the site.

Do you have videos that could be used to promote products? If not, there’s no need to freak out thinking its beyond your capacity to create them. Ads with a native appearance work best on Facebook with text-overlays and images, but YouTube ads do best with more polished ad creative. Having said that, you can make great video ads that are cheap, simple, and effective. YouTube have guidelines on how to make a great video ad without breaking the bank.

Ad options on YouTube for ecommerce companies include:

9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping 137 TrueView In-Stream Ads The in-stream ad plays before, during, or after a video. After 5 seconds, the viewer has the option to skip the ad. In-stream ads run on YouTube, partner websites, and apps. I recorded a TrueView ad by Grammarly for you to see below then posted it to YouTube, but you may get another TrueView ad before watching this example (TrueView inception).

TrueView Ads are said to get their name off the bid format because the advertiser only pays when the video plays for 30 seconds (or the video’s duration if its shorter), or when the person engages with the ads like clicking on a call-to-action overlay, a card, or a companion banner. The type of bidding makes it attractive for stores because it qualifies the audience by letting viewers skip the ad.

Particularly appealing to Shopify merchants is an in-stream ad that allows you to upload shopping cards from the Merchant Center feed. You can display and select up to 6 products. The campaign settings has an option for you to select the 6 products to advertise. If you want the shopping cards to be able to run all products in the Merchant Center account, pick the “Product Filter” setting to use no filter.

9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping 138 TrueView Video Discovery Ads Previously known as TrueView In-Display Ads, this type of TrueView ad runs on YouTube and other websites, appearing in places where people discover content. The two most popular locations are at the top of YouTube search results and near the section on recommended videos to watch when another video is viewed. The ad contains a thumbnail image from the video with text. The ad format varies in size and format depending on the content supported by the publisher.

When someone clicks the thumbnail of the ad, the advertiser is charged. The video then plays on YouTube or the channel page.

The thumbnail and title of the video is critical to make the TrueView Video Discovery Ad get viewership . The ad format is excellent for educational content as people who click on the video are interested to learn more. Be sure to build an audience list in Google Ads of people who watch the video to target them with other video content.

Bumper Ads The Bumper Ad is a 6 second or less video that cannot be skipped. It designed to build brand awareness with a short, memorable message. An advertiser is charged on a cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) basis, so you pay each time the ad is shown 1,000 times. Like a TrueView In-Stream ad, a Bumper Ad plays before, during, or after a video.

9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping 139 Outstream Ads An Outstream Ad runs on partner websites and apps. They only appear when using mobile and tablet devices. The ad type has a unique bidding model of viewable cost- per-thousand-impressions (vCPM). This means an advertiser is charged when someone sees the video ad play for two or more seconds.

Remarketing Videos Remarketing videos use audience lists in Google Analytics in the same way as shopping ads. You can combine a Google Analytics audience list with TrueView, Bumper, and Outstream Ads to target people who have been to the Shopify store. If you have no interest in running a complex YouTube ad strategy, but you have at minimum one YouTube video that is decent, at least run this video to people who visited the store in the past 7 days. A remarketing video is something we see work for nearly every store.

The key to getting remarketing videos running well is to tailor the video to each audience. Someone who abandoned cart will require a different video message than someone who viewed your product page for 20 seconds.

A video ad strategy can involve remarketing to people who have looked at a specific product, abandoned cart, or spent more than 5 minutes on the store. To these people, a video showing the product, its features, usage, and customer testimonials would be valuable. Combine this with the audience exclusion feature to create a video funnel where people who watched one video are presented with another. An alternative to achieve this is to run a video ad sequence campaign.

9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping 140 If you have any YouTube videos or run any video ads, create a remarketing list in Audience Manager of people who “Viewed any video from a channel” or “Viewed any video (as an ad) from a channel”. Throw these audiences into your Google Shopping campaign then apply an aggressive bid modifier on them. Your shopping ads will appear prominently in-front of people who watched your videos.

Other Resources For further help in running video ads, see Google’s tips for optimising video campaigns. Learn the ideal video format, discover your options with targeting, and the metrics to monitor.

If you decide to invest in organic video content, which is not required to do well with video ads, YouTube have a Creator Academy that covers production, building an audience, video analytics, and more.

2. Google Search Ads Search ads have been touched on through out the guide. Three or four of these ads sit seamlessly at the top of the Google search results page with more at the bottom. They typically have “Ad” text on their left-side.

9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping 141 These work by entering keywords you want your ads to show for. When a user searches for one of these keywords, your ads go into an auction system. The position of the ad is determined by quality score, bid, and other factors. Ads most relevant (as determined by the quality score metric) for the user are more likely to show at the top of the results page. The relevancy of an ad is determined by a number of variables including relevancy between the user’s search and relevancy of the ads to the keyword and landing page, quality score, and expected click-through-rate (CTR).

By improving your quality score, you will pay less for a click or have your ad rank higher in the auction. The result is a cost-saving or more traffic. In other words, it pays to do your Google Ads well.

9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping 142 To find the best keywords, use the data you already have from the search term report in your shopping ads campaigns. This gives a good indication as to what people already search to find your products. You can then expand upon this list by finding variations of searches that people are using to find websites like yours.

To quickly find all the keyword themes that have resulted in impressions, clicks, or sales, run the N-Gram Analysis Script (given to you in the optimisation chapter). The report produced from the script can form the full campaign and ad group structure of your search ad strategy. Best of all, if you have an abundance of conversion data from your shopping ads, you can launch search ads with confidence knowing it is based on sale-driving data.

3. Google Display Ads Shopping and search ads are fantastic for showing ads when someone actively seeks a product you sell. If you want to find new audiences, display ads can generate demand and showcase your products like video ads.

You likely see Google Display Ads every day. They sit on websites typically with a blend of image and text. The Google Display Network is made of over 1 million websites.

A benefit of display ads is the targeting options. From choosing the types of sites you want ads to appear on to targeting users with specific browsing habits, for example, “beauty mavens”, you can get granular to find the right people for your products.

Display ads can bring in sales. Nearly all Google Ads experts and marketers believe, beside remarketing ads, no one buys from clicking on a display ad. But in 2018, at Digital Darts, we saw more and more people buying directly from a non-remarketing display ad. Display ads don’t drive high volume compared to other channels, but they can yield the same ROAS as shopping ads with a higher click volume at a lower conversion rate.

There are four ad formats available to run your display ads. Some serve in unique placements while others contain unique features.

9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping 143 Responsive Ads Responsive ads can be worthwhile if you do not have the capacity to make imagery or banner ads. You input ad text and accompanying images then Google will automatically create the ads as well as resizing them to match the ad space. If needed, there is an image library available where you can select images for your ads with no copyright implications.

Image Ads As the name may suggest, these are the ads that appear as images. You create the images in a program like Adobe Photoshop. Follow the image requirements. There are over 20 image sizes so if you want the most impression reach for effort, I suggest starting with the most common sizes.

If you want more creative control of your ad creative than responsive ads, I recommend designing display ads in . The interface is user- friendly. The software will output multiple HTML5-based designs, which is friendly for web design standards and allows for animation to convey a message.

Engagement Ads Also known as “Lightbox ads”, engagement ads provide video and images people can click, tap, and hover. The ads may expand to fill the screen. You can create up to 10 cards with various ad assets. Advertisers are charged on a cost per engagement (CPE) basis. Most Shopify stores are suited to use responsive ads given it pulls feed data, but engagements ads can be worth testing.

Gmail Ads If you use Gmail, you may have noticed promoted emails. These are Gmail ads, a type of display ad. When the ad is clicked on, an expandable display ad is shown. Advertisers have similar targeting options as other display formats allowing your business to sit in the inbox of your target audience. No longer can you target people by keywords in their emails. You can learn more about Gmail Ads on Google’s support page.

9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping 144 Quick Tips • I suggest all stores do remarketing on the display network. Once search and shopping ads meet profit goals, then explore the display network.

• An excellent starting point for cold acquisition is looking at your referral traffic in Google Analytics to see what websites refer sales. Target these websites with managed placements. If you don’t know whether a website is on the Google Display Ad network, look at their website for display ads, otherwise just run the ads to see if you accrue impressions.

• Another effective strategy is going into “Audience Manager” in Google Ads, select your largest customer audience, then click on “Audience insights”. You will see in-market and affinity audiences that your customers are in. Target these traits in display ads.

• If you have at least 50 conversions on display or 100 conversions from search in the last 30 days, use a Smart Display campaign. This allows Google’s machine learning to show the ad to people who are similar to your customers. The machine learning helps to automate bidding, targeting, and creative. The more conversion data in the ad account, the better Google’s dynamic prospecting will work to acquire customers.

• My last tip is to know the display network is huge. Set a dedicated budget for display campaigns so they don’t eat into search or shopping campaigns.

4. Microsoft Advertising Microsoft Advertising, formerly known as Bing Ads, run ads primarily through the Bing search engine. According to Net Market Share, Bing sits around 10% of the search volume of Google Ads. This data mirrors most Google and Microsoft Advertising accounts we manage for Shopify stores. We see about 10% of the clicks and sales on Microsoft Advertising as Google Ads.

While Microsoft Advertising's reach is smaller than Google Ads, the performance is similar. Microsoft have an ad platform modeled off Google making it a worthwhile platform to consider within your marketing strategy.

Arguably, it can be a better platform for reaching two different audiences. One is the

9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping 145 less tech-savvy people who use Windows with Bing automatically set as the default browser. The other audience includes people unable to set a different default browser, such as users of a public library or students at university.

Other advantages of Microsoft Advertising include a cheaper cost-per-click (CPC) due to the lower amount of competition as well as an import option which allows the advertiser to import campaigns from Google Ads.

Conclusion

Google Shopping ads is a powerful channel for stores to grow. Searchers are efficiently connected to stores that sell products of interest. There is a measurable return on investment making it attractive for the data-driven business owner. There is minute control to fine-tune performance while having the machine learning and tools to manage in bulk.

The platform has been the backbone of success for many of our clients over the years. Advertising is the cornerstone of Google’s success so we can expect the behemoth to continue helping businesses connect with customers.

9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping 146 Where to Next?

If you enjoyed this guide, there are two things to do. Firstly, share it with other store owners you know. Help them grow their business. I appreciate it having spent thousands of hours learning and writing the book.

Secondly, a lot of store owners are too busy to follow this guide on Google Shopping. Then there are also search and display ads, which add another thing on your to-do list. Or perhaps you now see a lot of room for improvement in your Google Ads. If you are interested in expert help and partnering with Digital Darts to grow your store, see our Google Ads service for Shopify. If you act fast, mention you read this book and we’ll cut $300 off the setup.

About the Author

Joshua Uebergang is owner and Head of Strategy of certified Shopify Marketing Expert company Digital Darts. He helps Shopify stores rapidly get more visitors and profit. At 6’9″ , he plays basketball. To save your store from wasted ad spend and tap into growth opportunities, you can claim your free Google Ads audit. See the Digital Darts Google Ads service for Shopify. You can also contact us if you’re interested in working with a Google Partner and Shopify Expert on your Google Ads.

9. Expanding Beyond Google Shopping 147