Google Shopping Ads are great for driving traffic that converts.
They do they require some effort to get started, but after Google automates most of the work involved in creating and showing these ads to the right people.
But this automation is also the reason why advertisers feel like they don’t have much control over what shows up where.
So in this comprehensive guide, I’ll show you how you can take back some of that control over your Shopping Ads.
I’ll cover everything from setup to optimization and share additional resources that allow you to refine your Shopping campaigns even further.
Let’s get started!
What Is Google Shopping?
Google Shopping is a comparison shopping engine, which is a service that allows retailers to advertise their products to searchers in a visually appealing way.
This means if someone searches for a product that you sell, Google will show relevant Shopping ads for your products, and those of your competitors.
If the user clicks on your ad, Google will take her right to the product page.
The image above shows product ads (formerly known as Product Listing Ads or PLAs) for the search query “jordan one white ” on the top of the page.
Each Google Shopping ad includes an image, the product title, the price, the name of the retailer and sometimes some retailer-specific information like shipping costs or reviews.
Google Shopping is currently supported in over 40 countries. It’s not the only comparison shopping engine, but by far the most popular one.
Why Should You Use Google Shopping Ads?
Many people still start their product search on Google. So advertising on Google allows you to be right there where your potential customers are.
In these search results, there are text-based Search Ads, where you have to write the ad copy and add keywords manually.
But also Shopping Ads, where Google does a lot of this work for you. Its algorithms will automatically pull the data from your store, craft ads for your products, as well as match them with relevant search queries.
While Shopping Ads can take more time initially (to set up everything), they require a lot less ongoing effort afterward.
This is the main reason why I advise stores to start with Google Shopping. There is less that can go wrong compared to Search Ads, which means you’re less likely to blow through your ad budget with nothing to show for.
Reason 1: The Only Way To Rank on Top of the Google Search Results
Another big difference between Shopping and Search Ads is visibility.
Check this screenshot of a typical Google search results page to better understand what’s going on:
As you can see, there isn’t much room left for organic results.
But Search Ads are also getting pushed further down the page.
Shopping Ads get the premium spot in the search results as their visual format attracts most of the clicks.
More clicks mean more profit for Google, but it also seems to be working for retailers.
An increased number of retailers are moving ad budgets from Search to Shopping Ads. According to research done by Merkle, ad spend has increased by 38% on Google Shopping compared to last year, while it decreased by 12% for Search Ads.
Google Shopping now accounts for 65% for all Google Ads clicks and for 89% of non-branded Google search ad clicks of retailers.
Shopping Ads have also been more profitable in the same period, netting advertisers 12% more revenue per click than Search Ads on the desktop for non-branded keywords.
Reason 2: Show vs. Tell
If you were looking to buy new Nike Air Max shoes, would you rather click on the Nike Search Ad or one of the Shopping Ads?
While Nike did a good job with the Search Ad, it simply describes the product. Shopping Ads show actual products. And if one of them is exactly what you were looking for, chances are pretty high that you’d click on one of those.
These product ads can also help when consumers aren’t exactly sure what they’re looking for. Many of them use it as a research tool to learn about different product types, models, colors, prices, as well as the stores they can purchase them from.
Reason 3: Intent vs. Interruption
For most of its history, advertising was interruption-based.
Meaning that you were doing something else, like watching a YouTube video, when a video ad pops up:
When this ad by Purple showed up, I had no intent to buy a new mattress. But I might at a later point in time. And maybe this ad will help them be top of mind when I do.
Compare that to Shopping Ads, which are intent-based. Meaning that the ads show when people are actively looking for a solution.
If I’m searching for “Nike Air Max 270”, it’s a great time for retailers to run ads about that exact shoe:
For these types of ads, click-through rates and conversion rates are a lot higher.
That’s reflected in the cost of a click on one of those ads. A view of a YouTube Ad might cost a few cents, while a click on a Product Ad can easily cost 10x more.
If all of this has peaked you interested, let’s have a look at how Google Shopping actually works.
How Does Google Shopping Work?
As discussed before, Google Shopping Ads are very different in how they work than regular Search Ads.
First, Google’s algorithms process a special file called a product feed (more on this later) that contains all of your store’s product data (things like titles, descriptions, images, price, etc.).
Google uses this data to match your products with relevant search queries as well as to create the actual ads.
People will see Shopping Ads that are relevant for their search queries, showing an image of the product, with the price and additional information (such as reviews).
If someone likes what they see, they click on your ad which will take them to your website.
In return, Google charges you for that click.
Let me show you a simple example. You sell mobile phone accessories and launch a Shopping campaign to increase your sales.
- You provide Google with your product data in a product feed
- Someone searches for “iPhone 11 wireless charger” in Google
- Google’s algorithms select an iPhone 11-compatible wireless charger from your store, create a Shopping ad for it, and show it to the searcher along with other ads
- The searcher sees the ads and clicks on yours
- The searcher is taken to your products page
- Google charges you for the click
How Much Do Google Shopping Ads Cost?
Similar to Search Ads, you pay each time someone clicks on one of your Shopping Ads.
Let’s look at the typical cost of these clicks.
The image above shows the Google Shopping’s average Cost Per Click (CPC) for each of the different niches.
Overall the average CPC is $0.66, a little bit higher compared to a Google Ads average of $1.16 for ecommerce stores.
While clicks cost much less, the average conversion rate of Google Shopping (1.91%) is also lower than the Google Ads average for the ecommerce industry (2.81%).
As Shopping Ad clicks are cheaper, the Cost Per Action (CPA) is also lower, $38.87, compared to $45.27 for all Google Ads clicks.
While these statistics here show the averages for Google Shopping, the REAL performance of your Shopping campaigns is in your hands.
Out of the box, Google Shopping campaigns may perform worse than regular Search Ads, but with the right tweaks, there’s plenty of room for improvement.
How to Add Your Products to Google Shopping?
Your first step to start advertising on Google Shopping is to turn your store’s products into Shopping ads. This process consists of four elements:
- Your store and products
- Your product feed
- Google Merchant Center Account (GMC)
- Google Ads Account
All these parts are connected and help Google Shopping Ads to work efficiently.
I like to call this whole process the “Google Shopping Puzzle” as it can be a puzzle for someone going through this the first time.
In the next sections, I’ll show you how to add your products to Google Shopping.
Pro tip: If you need more detailed instructions, check out our in-depth Google Shopping setup tutorial.
Step 1 – Creating Your Product Feed
The product feed is the heart of your Google Shopping campaign. In essence, it is is a big spreadsheet that contains your product data.
Google is pretty strict about what information to include and what format to put it in. That’s why it is pretty easy to mess up something when creating it.
When that happens, Google will disapprove those products and you’ll not be able to advertise them. But if you fix the errors by adjusting your product data, you’ll be able to advertise again.
Basically, there are two approaches to creating your product feed for Google Shopping Ads: generate the feed by using an app, extension, or tool, or do it manually by creating a spreadsheet.
If you are on one of the major ecommerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, etc.), you can download an app to speed up your product feed set up.
Let me share with you the best apps for each platform:
Shopify
Google Shopping app – link – Despite the poor ratings, the official Google Shopping app for Shopify works like a charm (they made plenty of changes to it recently).
Pro tip: Stay away from choosing the “Smart Shopping” option when configuring the app (more on Smart Shopping later).
WooCommerce
Magento
BigCommerce
While Google automates a large share of the work, the apps and extensions I’ve listed here help you to export your product data feed and usually they will tell if there’s something wrong with it.
If the product feed you get from your ecommerce back-end isn’t in great shape, you might need to make some extra changes before uploading it to Google Merchant Center.
This in-between zone is covered by product feed management tools. Here are a few examples:
Step 2 – Setting up Google Merchant Center
After your feed is ready, you can create a Google Merchant Center account.
When you are done with that, you have to claim and verify your store’s domain to prove that you own it. You can do this using Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, or adding a meta tag to your website.
Uploading Your Product Feed to Google Merchant Center
You’re now ready to upload your product feed to Google Merchant Center.
If your store’s platform is connected to Google Merchant Center via its API (it is if you’re for example on Shopify), then you don’t have to upload your product data feed as the data is automatically sent to GMC.
If so, then you can skip this section.
If not, you have to do this manually. Click “Products” then “Feeds”.
To add a new product feed, click this big blue + button. You’ll be guided through the whole process.
When you’re done and Google has processed your feed, head over to Diagnostics to see its health.
When first uploaded, most product feeds have a few errors at least.
Don’t be scared by this, but follow the instructions to clear the most urgent ones (the red ones). Don’t put this off because neglecting to provide any fixes could result in an account suspension.
To guide you through clearing those errors, I’ve created an in-depth guide to fix Google Shopping product feed errors efficiently.
In addition to uploading your product feed, you have to supply Google with your shipping and/or tax details.
Configuring Shipping Settings
Google needs to know the shipping costs to make an accurate price comparison with other vendors.
You can configure this in Google Merchant Center.
To do that, click the wrench icon in the top bar, inside select “Shipping and returns”. There you can create a new shipping service where you can define your shipping costs. Anywhere from a flat rate, depending on the order size or integrate with carrier pricing like FedEx or UPS.
Configuring Tax Settings (US Only)
Configuring sales tax only applies if you are selling within the US. If you’re not, you can skip this part.
To find this menu, click the wrench icon in the top bar, and select “Tax”. There you can set up different tax rates depending on the state you’re located in and selling to.
I’m no tax expert, so be sure to check the local sales tax regulations in the states you’re doing business in.
Step 3 – Creating a Google Shopping Campaign
Once your products are approved, the next step is to create a Google Shopping campaign inside of Google Ads.
To do this, you’ll need a free Google Ads account.
In your Google Ads dashboard, you can create a new Shopping campaign by clicking the plus sign on the “Campaigns” screen.
On the next screen, select the “Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance” option and then “Shopping”.
Standard Shopping vs. Smart Shopping Campaigns
After selecting Shopping as your campaign type, you can choose to set up a Standard or a Smart Shopping campaign.
Before you choose, let me give you a quick explanation of the difference between the two campaign subtypes.
| Standard Shopping | Smart Shopping | |
| Networks where your ads appear | Search Network | Search Network, Display Network, Search Partners, YouTube, Gmail |
| Reach | Limited | Wide |
| Bidding | Manual and automated | Automated only (Maximize Conversion Value with optional Target ROAS) |
| Level of control | High | Low |
| Campaign transparency | High | Low |
| Optimization potential | High | Low |
| Remarketing | Optional if you add the Audiences | Included by default |
| Use if | You’re starting out | Standard Shopping doesn’t work 🙈 or you’re interested in running your campaigns on autopilot |
In addition to Product Ads in the search results, Smart Shopping also shows ads on the Display Network. That means they can appear as banner ads on other sites or even on YouTube.
This results in more exposure for your ads. But it might be to people that aren’t actively looking for your products (remember our Intent vs Interrupt from the previous section).
Another difference between Standard and Smart Shopping campaigns is the bidding strategies that are available to you.
In Standard Shopping campaigns, you’re able to set the max CPC for each product. But with Smart Shopping, all of that is automated. You have to use the “Maximize Conversion Value” strategy, a bid strategy that automatically optimizes your CPC rates via machine learning to increase your conversions.
This lack of control on the bidding side also persists in other parts of Smart campaigns.
You won’t have any insights into search terms or audience data, and Google will provide little to no data on placements.
Because Smart Shopping is a black box, you can’t do much to improve its performance.
If you’d like more control and don’t want to lose out on valuable campaign data, consider going with a Standard Shopping campaign.
In what follows, I’ll use Standard Shopping. Read our Smart Shopping guide if you’d like to learn more about that campaign type.
Finish Your Campaign Setup
After you’ve selected your campaign type, you’ll have to adjust the general settings for your campaign.
This includes giving your campaign a name as well as a budget ($10/day is a good start), bid strategy (pick Manual CPC for now), and the locations where you want to show your ads.
To learn more about each setting in detail, have a look at this article I wrote on Google Shopping setup.
After you’ve configure the ad group, fill out the additional settings and hit “Save” at the bottom of the page to create your campaign.
Now, your new Google Shopping campaign is created, you’ll have one campaign, one ad group, and one product group.
That’s a solid start, but to get great results, you’ll need to do more. Read on to discover the best practices.
But before we do that, I want to clear up something that confuses a lot of people.
What Are Performance Max Campaigns?
If we’re discussing Google Shopping and the differences between Standard and Smart Shopping, we can’t ignore Performance Max campaigns.
This is a new campaign type that will take the place of Smart Shopping by September of 2022.
Performance Max can exactly what a Smart Shopping does, but it goes far beyond that:
- More placements: besides Search, Shopping, Display , YouTube and Gmail, it can also show on Discover and Maps
- Impact on existing Search Ads campaigns
Performance Max takes priority over Smart Shopping, but when you launch a Performance Max campaign, it impacts your whole account. So it’s important to understand how it will affect your other campaigns.
What Is Google Shopping Actions?
Although Google Shopping Actions and Google Shopping have very similar names, they actually are quite different beasts.
While Google Shopping is an advertising channel, Google Shopping Actions works more like a store.
Google Shopping Actions functions as a marketplace in practice, even though Google doesn’t like to call it so.
Through the program, users can purchase products straight from Google, who is hosting the cart and processes the payment.
After that, Google sends the details of the order to the retailer who then ships the product to the customer.
Google advertises these products on Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Image Search, Google Assistant, and Google Express (mobile app and website) with YouTube as an upcoming platform.
A big difference with regular Google Ads is that Shopping Actions does not charge per click. Instead, it charges a store only when it makes a sale through Google Shopping Actions.
Currently, Google Shopping Actions is available in the United States and in test mode in France.
While all the following may sound great at first, it’s cumbersome to set up, adds more complexity to your business, and the early results of my clients haven’t been very promising.
So, for now, my advice is to stay away from Google Shopping Actions.
Google Shopping Ads Best Practices
To get profitable results from your Google Shopping campaigns, you need to do more than just setting them up.
You need to discover the parts that work and put more budget behind them while cutting back ad spend in the parts that aren’t generating results.
So, in this section, we’ll explore different best practices for Google Shopping that can take your Google Shopping campaigns from losing to making money.
Google Shopping Campaign Structure
Using a good structure for your Google Shopping campaigns is one of the biggest optimizations you can make.
Improving the structure sounds a bit abstract, so let’s take a look at what this actually means.
Continuing the example from before, we have set up a campaign that looks like this:
- One campaign
- One ad group
- One product group
This means that we’re bidding the same amount per click no matter the product or search query.
So the first step to increasing control over your bids is to create new product groups using product attributes.
Google Ads gives you a bunch of default criteria you can use like brand, product type, or even the Item ID.
This is a good start. But it becomes really interesting when you start to manage your campaigns based on information like sales volume or margin. You can add that information to your campaigns through custom labels.
You can also use those same product attributes as inventory filters to set up different campaigns for a specific brand or product type. Mimicking your websites’ structure is often a good way to organize your campaigns.
When that’s done, you’re ready to implement one of the most effective Google Ads best practices, something called search query level bidding.
With this approach, you run multiple, almost identical, campaigns with the same products that allow you to target specific search terms with your Shopping campaigns.
In the screenshot above, you can see two Google Shopping campaigns. One targets branded search queries, while the other one only shows for on generic search queries. This allows you to have separate bids.
Notice the difference in CPC, number of conversions and the conversion value in that screenshot.
Pro tip: You need to tweak your Google Shopping campaign priority settings for keyword filtering to work efficiently with the Search Query Level Bidding structure.
Improving the structure of your Shopping campaigns will increase control.
But increased control comes at a price. More granular campaigns will take more time and make it a little more complex to set up and manage.
Google Shopping and Negative Keywords
If you use negative keywords, you prevent your ads from showing up for irrelevant and low-quality traffic that hurt the performance of your campaigns.
By doing this, you can increase your CTRs, conversion rates, and eventually your ROAS.
There are a couple of ways you can find negative keywords. The easiest of those is to sift through your Search Terms Report.
This Search Terms Report shows you all of the search queries your ads have appeared for including their performance.
When going through this report, you’ll want to look out for types of negative keywords.
- Irrelevant terms: Search queries that clearly are a waste of money.
- Competitor terms: Branded search queries that include your competitors’ names. It may be tempting to try and outrank them at first. But these ads often are ineffective and drag down your performance instead. Either add them as negative keywords or analyze whether it is profitable for you to rank for these terms.
- Products not sold: these are searches for products you aren’t selling (yet). You can either exclude these keywords or use them for market research.
- Very generic terms: This group contains very generic terms (e.g., shoes) that usually have very low CTRs and conversion rates. If you want to improve your profitability, I recommend excluding them as negative exact match keywords. Otherwise, feel free to (carefully) experiment with these queries.
Want to know more about how to find negative keywords and add them to your campaigns, check out my in-depth guide on negative keywords.
Optimize Your Product Titles
As mentioned before, your Google product feed is the heart of the Google Shopping campaign.
This also means that any improvements you make by providing more relevant information will increase the CTR and improve your campaign performance.
Fortunately, there are plenty of optimization techniques you can use to improve results.
You could, for example, increase your ad click-through rate by including the most popular product-related search queries in your product titles.
In our own research we found a 147% increase in impressions, and a 67% increase in clicks, just from optimizing our product titles!
Discover more tips in this video:
Optimize the Price of Your Products
In case you’re getting low CTRs and low click shares on some of your products, it could mean that their pricing isn’t as competitive as what other stores offer.
If you’re advertising the exact same products, it’s not hard to imagine that people will click on the ad with the lowest product price.
The easiest solution is to drop your prices. But not all of us can afford, want or even are allowed to do so.
Instead, here are things you can do to make better use of product pricing in Google Shopping.
- Identify the products that perform poorly (CTRs, conversion rates, impression shares, etc.) and check if the price might be an issue.
- Take a look at the prices of your competitors for those products and see whether there are big differences in the pricing
- If there is a significant gap, are you able to bridge it in any way?
- If not, consider lowering your max CPC for this item as it will be hard to compete and advertising on it might be wasteful
Pro tip: Google considers the total purchase cost, so if you can’t lower the actual product prices, make sure to check whether you can do something to decrease or eliminate the shipping costs.
Optimize Your Product Images
Product images are a crucial part of your ads.
Some stores come up with slight variations of a product image, allowing them to stand out and increase the CTRs of their Google Shopping Ads.
While this can be a rather expensive process (especially if you have hundreds of products), sometimes doing simple things like rotating a shoe (like in the screenshot above) can already make a difference.
Bidding in Google Shopping
Since Google Shopping charges for every click, you want to make sure that each click contributes to your results.
But how do you make sure that you’re not wasting money on your Shopping campaigns?
Obviously, keeping your max CPCs low prevents you from spending too much overall.
But if your bids are too low, Google won’t show your ads that often.
So, you have to find a good balance between staying cost-efficient and receiving decent traffic on your Shopping ads.
But how much money should you start with?
We’ll explore this question in the next section below.
Always Start Small
If you’re new to Google Ads, or you’re launching your first Shopping campaign, I always recommend to start out with very low bids.
The reason for this is simple.
When starting out, you will always make mistakes, and since every mistake costs you, it’s better to keep your ad spend in check.
While starting with a low bid can’t really hurt your campaign, an initial high bid could spend the budget you had set aside for testing.
To ensure that your Google Shopping campaign is profitable, you need to first focus on the QUALITY of your traffic, not the QUANTITY.
High-quality traffic means good CTRs, low bounce rates, decent conversion rates, and better profit margins.
Once you are sure that your Google Shopping Ads traffic is high-quality, then you can scale your campaign by increasing your bids.
Pro tip: If you’re curious about how your campaign can scale, check out Google Ads Bid Simulator.
Sacrificing Control vs. Time
When deciding how much you want to pay for each click, you have two options: use manual or automated bid strategies.
Manual CPC gives you the most control as you can a specific bid on a product group or even product level.
If you have hundreds of products, manual bidding can be a time-consuming process as it requires you to manage and optimize your max CPCs based on data coming on.
That’s why Google has introduced automated bid strategies that utilize algorithms and machine learning to automatically adjust your bids based on your goals and historical data.
Here are some examples of automated bid strategies you can use for Google Shopping campaigns:
- Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (eCPC): Based on the likelihood of conversion for each click, eCPC either decreases or increases your manual CPCs with the goal of increasing conversions.
- Maximize Clicks: Uses your budget to set bids automatically to get as many clicks as possible on your ads.
- Target Return On Ad Spend (Target ROAS): The goal of this strategy is to maximize your conversion value while reaching your desired target ROAS.
When talking about automated bidding, I find it important to mention the obvious conflict of interest that Google has.
On the one hand, they claim that they will get you the best possible results from your ad budget.
But on the other hand, they are a business looking to make as much money as possible.
So it’s up to you as an advertiser to keep this trade-off in mind as you go along and do things that are suggested by Google.
Pro tip: Start out with Manual CPC and gather baseline data. If you want to go automated, then experiment with Enhanced CPC first (as it allows for the most control among automated bid strategies), compare your results to the baseline, and evaluate other automated strategies in the same way.
Bidding strategy can become a complex topic, so if you’d like to learn more, check out my in-depth guide on bid strategies in Google Ads.
Google Shopping Bid Adjustments
The products you are selling, your industry, as well as your target audience and location, can all influence how much a click is worth to you.
If you are selling lawnmowers, it might not be profitable to show Shopping Ads to people living in apartment buildings in the middle of the city. It might be more profitable to target suburban locations instead.
The same can happen with:
- The hour of the day
- The day of the week
- The device searchers use
- Your target audience
With the help of bid adjustments, you can adjust your CPCs (up or down) according to your needs, which helps you in spending your budget more effectively.
You can set bid adjustments for your Shopping campaign for Locations, Ad schedules, Audiences, or Devices.
You do this by setting a percentage value for bid adjustments.
For example, if you want to attract more mobile visitors, you may decide to set a +20% bid adjustment, which increases your standard bid by 20% (e.g., from $1 to $1.20).
Using Audiences for Google Shopping Ads
Using Audiences, you’re able to target people that have been on your website but left without a purchase.
This is called Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) and allows you to increase (or decrease) your max. CPC based on what other information you have about a certain visitor.
Someone that has abandoned her cart might be a lot more valuable than a product page visitor. Through Audiences, you’re able to adjust your bid accordingly.
To use an Audience in your Google Shopping campaigns, you need a minimum of 1,000 people in that audience.
That’s quite a lot of people. So while you could create a specific campaign to exclusively target these visitors, very often these Audiences are added to existing campaigns.
To see this in your Google Ads account, navigate to the “Audiences” menu that you can find on the left side of the page.
In case you don’t have any audiences yet, click the plus icon in the middle to add a new one.
When adding new audiences, you can add them in two ways: targeting or observation mode.
Targeting: only targets people that are part of the audience that you select. You’ll only use this option if you’re creating a specific campaign to target these audiences.
Observation: this option doesn’t limit the reach of your campaigns, but you’re able to increase or decrease the max CPC based on people being part of this audience.
In case you don’t have at least 1,000 people on the lists you’ve added, then you’ll get a notification from Google.
If you have enough traffic, these warnings should go away.
Pro tip: this section has covered the basics, to learn more check out my guide on Google Shopping optimization.
What to Expect From Google Shopping Ads?
If you’re new to Google Shopping, it’s always hard to know what to expect from your first campaign.
So, in this section, I’ll show you what to expect when starting out, what is possible, and how to get there.
What To Expect
When you are starting out with Google Shopping, you won’t get the best results with your campaigns out of the gate.
But that’s perfectly fine as there’s always more room for improvement.
With time, you’ll have access to more data, which you can use to optimize your Shopping campaigns.
But before doing that, let me show you what you can expect from Google Shopping Ads when you are just starting out.
As you can see in the image above, there’s a HUGE difference between how the campaigns of various advertisers perform in Google Ads.
While low-performing advertisers have an average CTR of 1.91%, the best ones (in the 90th percentile) have nearly 5x their click through rates.
As you are just getting to know Google Shopping, you should expect your CTR to be somewhere near the 25th percentile, use > 2% as a rule of thumb.
In the screenshot above, you can see that the average advertiser has a conversion rate of 1.42% for Google Ads while top performers are hitting over 3%.
So what do these metrics mean for you? Let’s see through an example.
Let’s say you are selling $50 sunglasses with Shopping Ads.
As you’ve just started out, let’s take the lowest-performing metrics that I’ve mentioned above as well as the average Shopping CPC.
This means that you’ll have a 1.91% CTR, a 1.42% conversion rate, and you pay $0.66 per click (Google Shopping average).
Let’s say that 50,000 people have seen your ad in the first month, of which 955 have clicked through to your website.
That means a total ad cost of $630.3 as well as 14 conversions resulting in $700 in revenue.
If we factor in the product cost, $20 per pair of sunglasses or $280 in total, we come out in the red.
$700 in revenue minus $280 in product cost and $630.3 in ad spend, means a loss of $210.3.
This shows the importance of having the fundamentals in place before starting with ads. (To see if your store has potential with Google Ads, check our quiz!).
Let’s see how you can turn this around.
What Is Possible With Google Shopping Ads
After a while, you’ll get better at running ads. You might have learned new techniques, followed a great course and learned which parts are performing well.
We’ve used the lowest benchmarks to start with, but let’s say that your results have improved, and you’re now at the upper end of the benchmarks.
That means a 9.5% CTR, a 3.05% conversion rate with the average CPC staying at $0.66.
Continuing with the $50 sunglasses example and 50,000 ad impressions a month, 4,750 people have now clicked on your ad, resulting in a total ad cost of $3,135.
Due to the increased CTR and conversion rate, you’ve netted 145 sales through Google Shopping, which means a revenue of $7,250 as well as a product cost of $2,900.
But, in this case, your revenue outweighs your expenses with your gross profit being $1,215 ($7,250-$2,900-$3,135=$1,215), a profit margin of 17%.
There is not a lot of room, but you can see that these improvements can really move the needle.
Benchmark Against Competitors
Another way to figure out what’s possible is to see how your Shopping campaigns are performing compared to those of your competitors.
You can find part of that information in the Competitive Metrics columns in Google Ads:
If you’re looking at your Google Shopping campaign, you can add the “Benchmark CTR”, “Benchmark Max. CPC”, “Benchmark product price difference”, and the “Average product price” columns from the “Product Groups” overview.
Don’t focus blindly on these metrics, rather use them as indicators to see how you’re doing.
The great thing about Google’s benchmark metrics is that they are available for every product group you have in your Shopping campaign, so you can get insights for each.
What Does it Take to Achieve Success With Google Shopping Ads?
To achieve what I’ve described above, you need two essential resources: time and an advertising budget.
You need time to set up Google Shopping (converting your products into product ads), as well as to maintain and optimize your Shopping campaigns.
And don’t forget: the more granular you go with your campaign, the more time you need to spend managing them.
As we’ve discussed before, Google Shopping costs you money. So you should have some money allocated to run Shopping Ads. If it’s your first time around, try to set aside at least $300-$500 as your learning budget.
You’ll use this money to learn how Google ads work, as well as see what the visitors from Google Shopping do on your website.
Mastering Google Shopping Ads
My goal with this article was to provide you a detailed overview of what Google Shopping Ads are and what it takes to make them work for your business.
By learning how Google Shopping Ads work, how to set them up, and optimize them, you have taken your first steps towards launching your product ads.
However, your Shopping journey doesn’t need to stop there.
I’ve included further resources for all essential parts of Google Shopping Ads in this article (all the links and downloads sprinkled throughout this article), which you can use to learn more about each topic.
If you’d like to learn even more, check out Google Shopping Success: our premium course on Google Shopping.
In a series of video lessons, the course will take you through the exact steps you need to create a Shopping campaign from scratch right to having your first sale coming in via product ads.
Our main goal with the course is not only to answer the questions of “what”, and “how,” but also the “why” too, explaining the real reasons behind each step you need to take in your Google Shopping journey.
Very useful! 😀
Thanks Adela!
Hi i was wondering what happened with apes in space?
It’s still up and running (around break-even). It’s not at the level to justify spending a lot of time on it.
It needs more work to be successful, maybe in 2020 🙂
Hi! Dennis, I have a general dropshipping product store which includes mix products like home & garden, outdoor, gadgets, electronics, etc. I want to test 40-50 different products on google shopping. What campaign structure should I use? Can I test all of them in a single campaign with different product Id level bidding? or should I make multiple campaigns with 8-10 products in each campaign?
Earlier I tried to test all in one campaign but many of them don’t even get the impressions and google spends most of the budget in only few products. Any advice from you is valuable for me and appreciated.
Hi Suboh,
The best account structure allocates the right budget to the right products. That means:
Since you’re still testing products, you won’t have #1. That makes it so much more important to get #2 right.
The most important issue would be to make sure no product dominates a certain campaign/budget. It’s hard to test 40-50 products at the same time, so I’d start with a catch-all campaign that has all of the products, with a specific budget and low bids.
Next, I would test specific products or (sub)categories by putting them into their own campaigns.
That means your structure will keep evolving as you keep testing.
I can’t predict what that end-state will look like, but it will probably look very similar to other accounts. These can be organized in different ways:
Very helpful article to hone your Shopping Advertising skills. Thanks for sharing such informative and easy to understand article.
I was also seeking the same information. Here my searching ends.
Cracking article. Really useful. Many thanks.
Hi Dennis,
Article was awesome but really I am not more clear how to setup all things perfectly.
Actually I am doing this first time.
I have Women Clothing Online Shop from India. Is it great to run Google Shopping Ad? It’s give business from that ???
Let me know so I can setup everything for this thing. Actually I have Woocommerce shop.
Hi Chirag,
Those are two very different questions 🙂
1. Are Shopping Ads worth it? It depends on your store. But I’ve seen women fashion stores do very well. So it’s definitely possible
2. How to do the exact setup? Have a look at this article: https://www.storegrowers.com/google-shopping-setup/ It will guide you through the set up in a bit more detail than described here.
Good luck!
Hi Dennis,
I’m flattered by the details you have provided. This is by far the most detailed article I have seen for Google Shopping Ads. You have touched every detail and this is immensely helpful for e-commerce platforms. Keep sharing such top-notch content.
Thanks Kavita 😊
Seriously I have quality time for reading google shopping campaign thanks
Glad to hear that Jack!
Good stuff, very comprehensive and helpful. Thank you sir.
Thanks Gary!
Hey Dennis,
This is a great guide – and opening up a new online shop I followed it 100% and worked 😀
Question:
My new store has 190 products divided into 5 categories. Since I can’t have all in one feed split by product ID (I think 100 is max), should I:
a) Split it into two campaigns that test all products
b) Create 5 campaigns per category and see what products gives traffic/conversions (bid up, own campaign) and which are dead wood (bid down)?
Br,
/Wit.
Thanks for the kind words Wit!
You won’t have any problem with a 190 products into a single feed.
You can run them all in a single campaign and break them out by product category/type/whatever variable you want to split them on.
But I like your suggestion b, that will give you more control over how you split your budget across categories.
TLDR; both are possible and good options
How do I get estimates of costs and clicks?
With keyword ads I can use the keyword planner, but with PLAs what should I use?
Good question Allessandro!
I think the Keyword planner is a good estimation for PLAs as well. Not all searches with Search Ads will have PLAs, but if you’re targeting product focused searches, you get a good idea.
Thank you Dennis… Yes I am selling car spare parts. I got an estimate from the keyword tool that tells me X monthly clicks for Y € at CPC Z€ with search ads.
Now let’s say I am actually going to put that money.
But if besides that, I put also all my catalog on the Merchant feed, should I expect extra traffic, right? At a similar cost? I am quite confused about that…
Let me clarify… I am confused about how much extra traffic and extra spend. I am quite sure about getting it, but not about the quantity, compared to search ads traffic.
Hi Allessandro,
I’m afraid there is no straightforward answer.
The keyword planner tool will tell you how many people a month search for a particular keyword.
When they search for that keyword, the search results page can contain the following:
– Search Ads
– Shopping Ads
– Organic results
– Map view
– Other features
Now telling which element will get the click, is a lot harder to say.
That’s why I think you can use those same Search Ads presumptions: X monthly clicks at €Z CPC also for Shopping Ads.
Does that make sense?
I just came across your blog post and must say that it’s a great piece of information that you have shared. I’m flattered by the details you have provided on this site. It shows how nicely you savvy this subject. For Google shopping, how do we manage inventory online?
Glad you liked the article!
You have to manage your inventory via your ecommerce platfrom, which is connected to Google’s system via a product feed.
The article is very good and as I am a beginner, I really find it interesting.
Great to hear you’re learning from it Sahil!
I am wondering how I can see my shopping ads which targeted US if I am from different location?
You can try the Ad preview & diagnosis in Google Ads (in the Tools section). Or use a VPN like NordVPN to change your location to the US and see local search results.
I was wondering how many products you recommend testing on the initial testing campaign? I am thinking about testing 5 products at a $40 budget.
then i will transfer the winning products into a single campaign, and scale.
is this a good strategy, and do you think it has the potential to do well?
thank you
Hey John,
The goal is to have enough clicks on a product to conclude whether it’s worth it or not.
I don’t really have a rule of thumb for that because I find it depends on the circumstances. (mainly on the CPC)
But 5 products @ $40/d will get you valuable data.
-Dennis
Hey Dennis, I do Shopify and I was wondering do you think I could sell products and make profit by Splitting 20 dollars into 5 dollars a day on google shopping ads?
Hey Harry,
I’m afraid a total budget of $20 won’t get you very far. $5/day is possible if you keep the number of products low. But you’ll need a couple of weeks/months to see results.
Hi Dennis,
Thanks for the very detailed writeup.
One (current) limitation with Shopify’s Shopping App, is that it only sends the product’s current price and not the “compare_at_price”. This means you are unlikely to get any “SALE” annotations in Google Shopping.
The solution is to upload a supplementary feed.
Best,
Alex
What an informative post, it generalizes everything in detail . Thank-you for sharing. Its great for learning
Hello Dennis – Greetings from Boston, MA USA.
Last week I bookmarked a couple of your videos on YouTube which I found very helpful, and just now came upon this very detailed Google Shopping Guide. I am grateful that you took the time to put this together. You are a good communicator, and an asset to people like me who are stumbling and fumbling through their Google Shopping campaigns.
Today my head is spinning because I was informed by Google support of a big problem with my campaign. I have an online store that sells handmade, decorative art from Mexico. I have about 800 products, and about 60% are one-of-a-kind. My process of running the site is that when I sell one of these unique products, I replace it with something different, BUT I re-use the same SKU. Google tells me that every new item has to have its own unique SKU; I can’t reuse product IDs. Furthermore, selling one-of-a-kind products is problematic because Google needs to collect data on each product over time and if there are not multiple copies of the item, there is no point in collecting the data.
So, the message I am getting, I believe, is that I should be using Google shopping ads only for products of which I have multiple copies, and can get more when the inventory runs out. I have not become aware of this problem until today, despite all the reading and video watching and the conversations I’ve had with Google tech support over the past few months.
I am curious to know what you think. Is the advice correct? Don’t use Google Shopping to sell one-of-a-kind products?
Hi Phil,
Thanks for the kind words!
While you can use Shopping to sell one of a kind items, you’re correct that you lose the element of scale because you don’t have multiple copies.
Here is what I would do:
Use Google Shopping to drive traffic to the site rather than sell the exact product in the ad. I’m sure that once people are on the site they continue to browse and look at other items.
It’s a little bit of a different approach, which probably also requires a lower CPC to make the setup work.
(On the SKU thing, on your site I do see different SKUs, can’t you reuse those as product ids?)
Hope that helps!
Hi Dennis,
I generally never comment on blog posts, but when I found your website I bookmarked it straight away. Thank you for bringing so much value, I have read many many of your posts and they were extremely helpful. I have an online store on Shopify and unfortunately, my shopping campaign is a smart campaign (I know) and I don’t particularly like the lack of transparency. My question is can I switch my google shopping campaign from smart to standard in Google Ads? If yes, how?
Thank you,
Melu
Hi Melu,
Thanks for the nice words and I’m glad you took the time to drop a comment!
To answer your question: You can’t switch a campaign from Smart to Standard Shopping. The only way to do this is to pause the old smart one, and start a new Standard Shopping campaign. Because you’ve already set up your link with Google Merchant Center, all of your products will be automatically included there.
Hope that works for you!
Thank you for getting back to me – it’s very helpful. I will be in touch soon regarding coaching 😉
ps: I was at Dojo for a few months last year !
Thank you,
Melu
Awesome 👍
I’d love to be back there for a while right now 😅
Excuse me……
What are the STORES now showing up in the google shopping listings?
The “Add to cart” buttons inside the shopping SERP’s?
That’s a special program by Google that allows people to buy straight from Google. It’s called “Buy on Google” (formerly know as Shopping actions). You can find more info about those here: https://blog.google/products/shopping/buy-on-google-is-zero-commission
Seriously I have quality time to read the google shopping campaign details thanks for providing this!
Happy to hear it was useful for you Mustafa!
I learn a lot from this article. Thanks to giving us that kind of valuable Knowledge
Hey, It’s quite hard to find tips about Google Shopping Ads these days. Your article helps me a lot.
Thank you!
Great Article Dennis, You explain everything very nicely but I guess, am not smart enough to action all this advise. Can you recommend anyone good who could carry out these for me for my business?
Hi Dennis,
Thank you for this very useful article. I want to ask please about ‘Search Query Level Bidding structure’ and how to create two different campaigns one for branded keywords and the other for Generic keywords so how can we create these campaigns and bid on specific keywords inside shopping campaigns?
Thank you so much 🙂
very useful guide. interesting way of teaching shopping ads.
Glad it was useful Nayab!
Hi Dennis,
Thanks for the great guide.
I have a shopping campaign setup and getting impressions and click for people searching specifically for the product name.
But is there a way to show my ads to people searching for a type of product?
E.G.
Let’s say I have a book ‘How to fix a 2021 car’
My ad will show if someone searches for ‘How to fix a 2021 car’
But, I also want my ad to show when searches for ‘car books’
How can I display my ads to these wider scope type searches?
I’m guessing I have to change my product category to include the word ‘Car Books’ ?
I read that the Google Showcase Ads used to do what I want but they’re not available anymore.
Thanks!
Google uses a few elements to decide which queries to match your product with.
The most important of that is the product title. Next are the product identifiers, if you have them (gtin/ISBN, brand, etc.). Then the google category / products type. And lastly the description.
In your case, I’d have a close look at improving your products title, and also adding to the product description (keyword stuffing if you’d like :p)
Cool, thanks Dennis!
It’s a pity shopping don’t allow keyword matching like normal G ads but I guess there must be a reason. 🙂
Thanks again.
Hi Dennis,
A question, I am selling rugs though Google Shopping Ads, I have so far tested with 100 euros with all products (I have 42 products and in total 405 variants). So sales so far, click through rate is around 2%.
I set the budget to 15 euros per day.
Is it okay to have these type of metrics and should I continue to run the ads this way or could something be wrong, I followed your guide while setting it up so everything should be fine. Right now I have 115 clicks.
Thank you!
Hi Marcus,
Those metrics look pretty normal to me.
One thing you might want to consider is whether or not to advertise all your variants. If you have a large price differences, it might be worthwhile to only include your cheaper (smaller) ones in your ads.
Hope that helps!
Hello!
Can you please explain how setting a bid works in Shopping ads.
For example right now I am bidding as low as I can to get as many clicks as I can with my budget. I am getting few sales, but could be more profitable. 20 cents AVG CPC.
But if I will raise the bid to 60 cents, will I get less clicks but the traffic would be more quality? That means more profitable with sales?
Thanks!
Hi Simo,
Good question!
The bidding for Shopping ads actually is the same as for any keyword inside of Google Ads.
When you’re bidding 0.2 / click, you qualify for a number of impressions. When you raise that bid, you qualify for more impressions up to a certain point.
But how much more impressions you get, and how much more you need to bid depend on the product/keyword and the competition.
You can use the Search Impression Share metric in your account to see how much impressions you’re capturing at 0.2/click, then if you increase it to 0.6/click, you should be able to see the increase in impression share.
So overall, a higher bid should get you more clicks and sales. But I can’t comment to the profitability of those sales, as your overall cost will be higher. The only way to figure this out is to test it!
Hey Dennis, great post, thank you.
I wanted to ask how granular would you advise to go with negative keywords? Let me go into more detail and explain what I mean by that. Please bear with me and I appreciate your help.
I’ve been using search ads for many years and I’m used to going through the search term reports query by query, so I can add any irrelevant keywords into the negatives list.
However, I would argue that you really have to be careful with this approach when running Google Shopping Ads, because even when you get a click from a keyword that you would initially consider as “generic” or “too broad”, it may still end up generating a conversion. So in the other words, if you are too aggressive with eliminating broad terms, then you may end up limiting your traffic and hurting the conversions.
The reason for that would be the fact that people clicking on shopping ads are more inclined to buy (compared to search ads), especially since they see the exact product they’re clicking on as well as the price, which is NOT true for search ads.
You also have to keep in mind that some broader terms don’t always necessarily display shopping ads, unless you specifically navigate to the “Shopping” tab. When this happens, it again shows intent and people are still quite likely to buy due to the fact that they’re now browsing under the “Shopping” tab, despite their search term being generic.
If you’re still with me, let’s do an example, so hopefully you’ll see what I mean.
Say you’re selling Nike trainers, but your store is not huge and you only have a few models in stock, i.e. Nike Air Max, Nike Air Force and Nike Air Jordan.
What I would normally do, is create a separate ad group for each of those 3 products, and then add generic keywords, such as “nike trainers”, “nike shoes” or “nike footwear” into the negatives list. Yes, those terms are relevant, BUT they’re too generic and they don’t contain any model name, so that would be my reasoning for adding them into the negatives.
On the other hand, if a person searches for one of those generic terms and then clicks on your ad, then chances are they’re specifically interested in the exact model that you’re advertising, because they can see the image of it as well the price.
So I think what I’m trying to say is that people who search using broader terms AND click on shopping ads, have a higher buyer intent, so we should be less restrictive with negative keywords, and only add negatives which are obviously irrelevant, so in the above example it would be stuff like, “shirts”, “jackets” or “adidas”, etc.
I hope what I said makes sense and would be great to know what you think about this.
Look forward to your reply
Thanks
Stephan
Hi Stephen,
Thanks for your comment!
I would agree with most of your comments about Shopping Ads having a higher purchase intent.
Which keywords you choose to add as negatives really depends on your business. If you’re just starting out, I often advise stores to spend their budget on the most specific search terms. Then when they’ve maximize their presence on those searches, it makes sense to branch out.
One other thing I do want to expand a bit on is on your “Nike trainers” example, aka if you’re only selling a small number of products.
In that case, a bigger concern of mine is how effective we would be compare to other advertisers. Even though people click on the ad, if you only have that product for sale, you will lose out to advertisers with a bigger product selection.
Hope that helps!
What doesn’t seem to be spelled out with Google Shopping, is that products must be able to be delivered everywhere in a particular chosen country, say Australia in my case.
As such, you cannot limit the audience to only those that wish to have a product delivered to a specific sellers location (who offers personal delivery within that location), within say Australia.
Took me a while to work this out, because dealing with Google is far from intuitive.
Please tell me if I am wrong.
Thanks for Such a detailed and well researched post for Google Shopping Ads
Cheers
Manish Gupta
CEO
As a beginner, this article is very useful to understand.Thank you so much
I couldn’t even learn that clearly from the google ads certification course. Helped a lot.
Thanks, Dennis!
Appreciated your comment Gorish!
I appreciate the thorough research you did for this article. You covered every detail and this is extremely helpful for websites that sell physical products like clothes or jewelry. Thanks for the in-depth articles you share with us.
Hi Dennis,
Greetings from Australia.
Thanks for a great post. Quick question, you mention to “Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance” is this because you are using manual CPC, so bidding isn’t affected by a set goal?
Would this be the only circumstance where you would not set a campaign goal?
Thanks,
Jacob.
Hi Jacob,
Nice to hear from you!
The way Google phrases this is a bit confusing. “Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance” only refers to the actual setup. If you select a particular Google, Google will hide certain options for campaigns depending on that goal.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the actual goal / conversion action that you’ll use in your campaigns. So you could select “Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance”, and then set up a campaign that uses Maximize Conversions as a bidding strategy. Or a Performance Max campaign.
Hope that clarifies things!
-Dennis
Hi Dennis,
Thank you for this great article.
I have a question about products with different size (e.g. t-shirts). Does it make sense to add al product sizes (thus sku’s) to Google Merchant Center and the ad campaign or do the M-sized products suffice?
The reason for this: suppose you have 2 conversions on the S-sized and 1 for the M-sized SKU for the same product. Actually, you have 3 conversions for the product and it doesn’t matter which size, right? Only, Google will optimize for these sized more than the L sized t-shirt which doesn’t make any sense.
So my feeling would be that it would be sufficient to add the M sized products to the product feed. Is this correct or am I missing something?
Thanks a lot!!
Hi Peter,
If your customers are searching for the variation, you want to add all options.
If not, it’s easier for you (and Google to consolidate on a single variation).
In your case, people aren’t really searching for the specific size, they will do that on your site.
great one
Excellent .Thanks for all the tips!
You’re welcome Gus!