The Benefits of a Google Shopping Campaign

The chances are at some point, you have typed a specific product into the Google search behemoth and been presented with a Google Shopping Campaign of some sort or another. You know, the boxes and images at the top of the search window that look something similar to this?:

But what exactly are they, and how can they help a business thrive?

Google Shopping or Product Listing Ads (PLAs) are displayed on a page when a user searches for a specific product on Google (the above example is a result from the search Apple MacBook Pro). They are thrust quite deliberately to the top or top-right hand panel of the search result landing page. Naturally, they can also be found in the ‘Shopping’ tab.

The holy grail of online merchant success, however, lies within those first few Google PLAs.

Success in a highly competitive market relies on the business’ capacity to attract new and valued customers at a price that doesn’t break the bank. Google Shopping ads are now one of the leading online traffic tools that give the definitive edge on competitors.

There are several reasons to be embarking on a Google Shopping campaign, and here are some of the best.. (Beware! Acronyms):

• Greater visibility on mobile devices – traditional Pay Per Click (PPC) ads are only shown in pairs on mobile devices, meaning the likelihood of claiming these two valuable spots are very slim. PLAs are shown in a carousel of 15 results at the top of a mobile search, gaining more visibility on the ever expanding mobile platform.
  
• Pictures! – While seemingly insignificant, visual content in a lightning fast and razor sharp online world grabs the attention of the reader a lot faster than text content. Their eye is pulled towards the icons and pictures of a Google Shopping Ad – hello traffic!
• Improved Click-Through Rate (CTR) – consumers are almost twice as more inclined to click on a Product Ad than a the traditional PPC equivalent. Improvements can generally be seen in the 34-45% region. When browsing for specific products, consumers have likely already decided exactly what they’re looking to buy.
• Diminished Cost Per Click (CPC) – similar to Pay Per Click advertisements, Google CPC is inversely correlated to Click-Through Rates. Hence the better the CTR, the lower the CPC. Google Shopping campaigns often result in a lower average CPC, reducing expenditure whilst also improving traffic for the money you’ve spent.
• Greater Return on Investment (ROI – they keep coming!) – The powerful concoction of improved CTR and reduced CPC naturally results in a better return on the investment. Businesses could justify the campaign from one of two ways: reducing their outgoings on marketing or improving the number of sales.
• Ease of use – when wrangling with a huge inventory of products, traditional AdWord campaigns can be a long hard slog. A Google Shopping campaign generates the ads from the supplied data such as product titles, attributes and descriptions. As long as these, and only these, are spot on, Google does the legwork for you.
• Automatic updates – after the automated product feed is generated, the inventory is updated nightly. The great benefit of this feature is that it stops businesses from bidding on ads for products that may have been discontinued or have no stock. Equally as useful, if new products are added to the merchant site, they are automatically included in the feed for the following day, alleviating the burden of updating campaigns manually.

If you are interested in starting a Google Shopping campaign, Epic New Media have been successfully delivering Google Shopping and PPC campaigns since 2010. Visit our PPC page to learn more information.