Now that Google offers free placements on their shopping tab, there is no excuse for any eCommerce brand to not take advantage of this opportunity and master Google Merchant Center.
Like most new things, creating your first Google shopping campaigns may be daunting but there are a few tips to help make sure you get the most out of this tool. This article will provide 3 ways to optimize your Google Shopping feed to maximize CTR and conversions.
1. Have A Great Google Shopping Product Title
All great product titles share common characteristics: they describe the product being sold, they provide some additional details to the shopper (size, weight, etc.) and they include your brand name. A simplified formula can be remembered as:
Title = Brand + Product Type + Qualities
The Google Shopping feed product title is one of the key driving forces to get someone to click on your product, so it is best to think like a potential customer and include the qualities most relevant in the buyer’s process. Also, due to the limited characters displayed, the below Google Shopping stylistic guide will help make sure you have the most important information at the beginning of the title, reduceing the chance it will be truncated. Let’s see some examples.
- Title: Joe’s Coffee Beans – Medium Roast Columbian – 1 lb.
- Title: Lush Apparel – Women’s Summer Shorts – Blue
- Title: Zeus Electronics – 15” Titanium Laptop – Retina Display, i7 pro…
These Google Shopping product titles give the reader a clear understanding of what to expect if they click on the product – it’s crucial your title and ad copy reflect what you’re selling. This can help increase your CTR by appealing to high-intent buyers who are bottom of the funnel and looking to make a purchase.
The bottom line: Create titles that can explain the most important aspects of your product to someone who has never heard of it.
2. Utilize the Product Type Field
If you only provide the minimum fields required for your shopping feed, you may have never bothered to use this field. The product type attribute is the closest a shopping campaign can get to choosing the keywords for which the product will be served. If you’ve had any experience with Google search ads, you know how important that control can be.
If you sell decorative teddy bears for example, you might want to have your products show up in front of people looking for “plush toys”, “stuffed animals”, “kids room decor”, ”small stuffed toys”, etc., without having to somehow work all of these information phrases into your description. Instead, you could put all of them in product type in order to tell Google how to rank and when to pull your product.
It’s preferred by Google that you create a hierarchy within your product type, separating each value by a > symbol. Using our teddy bear example, your product type field could look like this:
Stuffed animals > small stuffed toys > plush toys > kids room decor
When used correctly, the Google Shopping product type field can significantly help your products appear in relevant searches which will increase your CTR and conversion rate as well.
The bottom line: Use product type to serve your ads to the most relevant customers without having to rely solely on your description.
3. Add An Image Link & Additional Links
It’s important to know that the image(s) you are using for your product is the best choice. How do you figure that out? Testing.
Within your Google Shopping feed, you are allowed to include one main image in a column with the header “image link” and up to 10 supporting images in separate “additional image link” columns. With this much room for experimentation, it is highly recommended that you try several different main images and compare how they impact your product’s performance over time.
Some examples of a simple image test could be switching the main image from the blue to the red version of a baseball hat to see how CTR and conversion rate change. Another example could be choosing to include a product diagram or size chart in your additional images to see if that additional detail affects customer purchase behavior.
The bottom line: Testing your image link and additional image links can help you improve the performance of a product listing.
In Summary
We hope this article provided you with relevant information on 3 ways to optimize your Google Shopping feed.
If your company is new to Google Shopping, struggling to generate quality traffic, or has customer data but isn’t using it to guide your digital marketing, Untitled would love to chat.
Contact us today — we’d love to give your business a competitive edge.
