What are Google Shopping ads and how do they work?
Google Shopping ads are product listing ads (PLAs) that appear at the top of search results when someone looks for a product to buy. Instead of a text ad with a headline and description, each Shopping ad shows a photo of the product, the price, the store name and sometimes a review rating or delivery promise.
They are the ads with the product images you see when you search for something like "leather boots" or "coffee machine". Google pulls the information straight from a data feed you submit through Google Merchant Centre, not from an ad copy you write.
How they differ from text ads
A standard Google Search ad is text-only: a headline, a couple of description lines and a display URL. You write the words, you choose the keywords and the ad shows when someone searches for those terms.
A Shopping ad works differently. You submit a product feed containing each item's title, description, price, image, availability and a unique ID. Google matches that data against what the searcher types and decides when to show the ad. You do not write ad copy per product -- Google uses your product data to build the ad automatically.
Because the photo and the price are right there in the search result, Shopping ads tend to get higher click-through rates than text ads for product searches. The shopper sees what the item looks like and what it costs before they click, which also means the traffic you get tends to be more qualified.
What you need to run Shopping ads
To run Google Shopping ads you need three things:
A Google Merchant Centre account. This is where you upload your product feed. Google checks the feed against its policies and approves your products before they can appear.
A product feed. This is a file (usually a spreadsheet or an XML feed from your ecommerce platform) that lists every product with its title, description, Google product category, price, availability, image link and unique ID. Most ecommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento can generate this feed for you automatically.
A Google Ads account with a Shopping campaign. Inside Google Ads you create a Shopping campaign, link it to your Merchant Centre account and set your budget and bids. You can group products by brand, category or any custom label you add in the feed.
Budget and bidding
Shopping campaigns use the same cost-per-click (CPC) model as standard search ads. You set a daily budget and a bid strategy. Automated bidding options such as Target ROAS (return on ad spend) work well for Shopping because Google has more data to optimise with -- product price, conversion rate and the user's shopping intent.
Starting small with a modest daily budget and a handful of your best-selling products is a sensible way to learn which products perform before scaling up.
Optimising your Shopping feed
The quality of your product feed determines how well your ads perform. Google rewards feeds with accurate, complete data. A few things that make a difference:
Use clear, descriptive product titles that include the brand, product type and key attributes. "Men's Waterproof Leather Walking Boots UK 10 Brown" will perform far better than "Boots".
Set the correct Google product category for each item. This helps Google understand what the product is and show it for the right searches.
Add custom labels to group products by margin, seasonality or performance, so you can adjust bids for your best products.
Keep prices and availability accurate. If a product goes out of stock, mark it as out of stock in the feed. Showing a price that does not match the checkout page leads to a poor experience and can get your Merchant Centre account suspended.
Where Shopping ads appear
Shopping ads appear at the top of Google search results on desktop and mobile, in the Shopping tab and on partner sites across the Google Display Network. On mobile they often appear as a carousel of product images that the user can swipe through, which makes them a strong way to capture purchase intent early in the search journey.
For ecommerce businesses, Shopping ads are often the highest-converting ad format because they put the product front and centre at the moment someone is ready to buy.
If you sell products online and want help setting up and managing Shopping campaigns, our PPC team plans and manages campaigns across Google Ads. See the digital marketing packages and pricing at https://victory.digital/digital-marketing-packages.
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