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Google’s Ecosystem: Shopping Explained

Google shopping is the perfect platform for product-focused ecommerce businesses. Unlike PPC which is purely text-based, it features product images, prices and customer reviews. This information is fed in real-time via an API directly from your website and its stock levels – meaning your adverts remain consistent with the status of your online store.

What is Google Shopping?

Google Shopping is a platform which allows us to reach customers who are actively searching for products via search engines. Users can view and compare products in a far more visual way to traditional text-based PPC advertising. Customers are served adverts when they search for a product for which vendors can fulfil via e-commerce, the quality of which is determined by the inventory specification being supplied from the website. That’s where we come in.

The benefits of Google Shopping

Like PPC, the benefit of Google Shopping is that it offers instant visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) for businesses. Unlike PPC, Google Shopping is visual which is a massive benefit, particularly for retail products, as a result, we tend to see a higher conversion rate via Google Shopping.vs PPC. Google Shopping operates from an inventory system meaning it is far more adept to running high volumes of products at any time.

How does Google Shopping work

Google Shopping operates between your website and two platforms; Google Ads and Google Merchant Center. Products information, categorisation and identification are set at CMS level and this is then fed into Merchant Center for validation, before being eligible to be served in Google Ads as a shopping listing. From here campaigns, ad groups, budgeting and targeting parameters can be created.

How to setup Google Shopping

The first place to start is your website, is it e-commerce enabled and if so what content management system (CMS) does it use? Most CMS’s (WordPress, Shopify, Magento) have plugins or apps to create an API or XML feed to relay data into Merchant Center. We prefer APIs as changes (eg: stock quantities) occur in real-time. Once we have Merchant Center validating information we can begin optimising them.

Merchant Center isn’t just a validation tool, we can do some pretty clever changes within it. Say you don’t want to change your products name but need to communicate what that product is more clearly to new potential customers – we can create rewrite rules or append information such as a generic keyword, age or weight to the title. To put it simply, we can create Google Shopping adverts that convert by catering to different people and the varying search queries they might use, generating higher-quality traffic to your product pages and increasing sales.

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