Google Shopping Has Become an Essential Ecommerce Tool
Google shopping has rapidly become the smartest and most effective way of increasing e-commerce sales. The rapid growth of the ecommerce market during the pandemic has made it clear that Google Shopping Campaigns are essential to achieve high returns on advertising investment.
There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this then you have at least a basic idea of what Google shopping is. It’s unavoidable for anyone who uses Google at even sparingly, you search for something that relates to a product listed on Google Shopping and your search results will feature names, images, pricing, and retailers of the products Google thinks you might be interested in buying.
Google shopping differs from search in one major aspect, Google will not just crawl your website for products and place them in the shopping results the way it will automatically for regular search results. You specifically have to setup a product feed in Google’s Merchant Center. This feed can be an XML hosted on a specific webpage on your site, a linked Google sheets spreadsheet or, as will be the case for many, a specific Merchant Center integration will likely be available on the e-commerce platform you use (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento etc).
The Important thing to note here is that your feed will have to be updated regularly, ideally automatically, to reflect product changes like stock levels. Just like Google doesn’t like to send users to irrelevant pages in its search results it doesn’t want to send them to Shopping results on out-of-stock products.
The benefits of setting up a shopping feed should be obvious; it gives you a change to appear organically on a whole other section of Google’s search results. If you already have good organic traffic, then it’ll be a quick and easy boost to your sales from organic searches. How much depends on many factors, your sector, target customers, competitors however the results are never unsubstantial.
For websites that could use a bit of SEO work then the benefits of implementing a Google Merchant Center feed are even greater. You see, this is where there are similarities between regular SEO search rankings and Google shopping become evident. Optimising a feed, the product tiles, the sizing and variant info, and the product descriptions for the feed has a lot of crossovers with traditional SEO practises. The keyword research, the implementation, and the goals (getting more clicks from Google searches) are all essentially the same thing. It might be tough, and it might be laborious, especially for sites with thousands of products, but optimising product pages will be doubly beneficial now that your products are also appearing on Google Shopping results.
The final consideration is Google Shopping ads, in 2021 over 80% of ecommerce sites using Google Ads for sales were implementing Google Shopping as part of their paid strategy. Further to this according to Google as much as 65% of all ecommerce-based advert clicks result from Google Shopping Ad placements. This is hardly surprising, paid shopping ads, as you likely have seen, are given the top billing on nearly all Google searches relating to consumer products.
For many E-com businesses Google shopping ads have become the backbone of their online marketing presence. The high conversion rates and returns on ad spend allow them to grow their businesses quickly and efficiently. The high profitability of shopping ads further allows for funding for brand awareness campaigns of Google, YouTube, and social media channels to further fuel long revenue growth. If you aren’t running Google Shopping ads currently or are struggling to grow your Ecommerce sales, contact the Zen Agency today.
