Shopping Campaign in Google Adwords.

Shopping Campaign also known as Product Listing Ads (PLA) work great for e-commerce companies. Google Shopping campaigns is different from traditional keywords and text ads as they don't use keywords, meaning in Search Campaign, your ad will not show for any search query until you add keywords to increase your targeting whereas in shopping campaign, your ads are automatically eligible to show for any search query that matches a product you sell.

Shopping ads are those ads which include rich product information, such as product image, price, and merchant name. It also uses the data attributes from the product information we submit in your Merchant Center data feed. But before that What is Google Merchant Center? This is where our product data feeds are live. A product data feed is a list of all the products you sell.This list is a format assigned by Google consisting of the following attributes:

• ID - It should be different and unique for all the products. (It is randomly selected numbers)
• Title - The name of your product, this is the text that is displayed when your ad is triggered.
• Description - It is the description about the product being displayed.
• Product Category - It is to be chosen from "Google Product Taxonomy" predefined Categories by Google.
• Condition - Is the product New, Used or Refurnished. 
• Availability Status - In stock / Out of Stock.
• Price - Price of the product.
• Link to item's page on your website.

There is no need to write text ads for shopping campaigns the shopping ads are generated automatically using the data in the feed. 

For the products to appear on Google Shopping ,need to create campaigns for your shopping ad. Shopping campaigns allows you to manage and optimize shopping ad to promote your products online.  

Shopping campaign offers a very simple and flexible way to maintain your Google Merchant Center product inventory.You can monitor and optimize your shopping campaign performances by using powerful reporting and bench-marking tools.

Product Feed

A shopping campaign without the product feeds (via Google Spreadsheet) is impossible and the products should match the website otherwise Google will not show your product ads.

As discussed earlier, shopping campaigns don't use keywords to determine relevancy, so the product titles etc. are actually keyword- rich and also appealing to potential buyer who are viewing your ad, these information are used by Google to show your products relevant to a search query. Make sure all your information provided are accurate and correct.

Images of the products are very important for your ad to look appealing, therefore make sure your product images are high-quality.The images should be only of those products that you are selling no edited or watermarked products images should be used. Make sure all your destination URLs are to live pages and not to 404 error or dead pages, as google will not show your products otherwise.

Benefits of Shopping Campaign

1. More Traffic: Business generally experience significantly higher CTR (click through rate) with shopping ads compared to search (text) ads.
2. Better Quality Leads: Increasing the quality of your leads by putting product information directly in your ads to help shoppers make informed purchase decisions. This will help shoppers more likely to complete a purchase on your site. For example, when a user does a google search for "hand bags", she can say by looking at the picture only which suites her taste best, in terms of price, product description.
3. Easy retail-centric campaign management: Shopping ads use the product attributes you define in your Merchant Center data feed to show your ad on Google searches. Scan your product inventory directly in AdWords and create product groups for the items you want to bid on. 
4. Broader presence: Shopping ads can appear for a relevant user search and, if relevant, both a shopping ad and text ad can also appear at the same time. Reaching to shoppers could be double.
5. Powerful reporting and competitive data: Seeing how your products are performing at any level you want to see. Use bench marking data to get insights and can also use the Bid Simulator tool.  

You can see Shopping ads across the Web: Google Shopping (in select countries), Google Search, next to search results and separate from text ads, Google Search Partner websites, including YouTube and Image Search in some countries (if your campaign is set to include search partners)  

Both Shopping ads and text ads can appear at the same time giving users/shoppers access to full variety of products that match their search.

So, that's an introduction to shopping campaigns. In my next post, we shall discuss how to create a shopping campaign and how to link Google AdWords with Google Merchant Center.

Stay tuned for more digital advertising!!

Thank you...