Google Shopping: a beginner’s guide

Google Shopping is an advertising campaign in Ads Manager that helps you advertise online shopping through the Google search engine.Such advertisements are also called product ads.The tool allows users to find the products they need and compare prices without visiting the advertiser’s site. This feature increases the probability of purchasing in the store.

What are the main benefits of product announcements

1. The user sees the product name, price, and appearance.
2. The path to purchase is significantly reduced.
3. Data on the price and availability of a particular product is constantly updated. Accordingly, there are no extra advertising costs.
4. In the case of low prices, it is easy to compete with other stores.
5. Often, the cost-per-click of a product ad is lower than the cost of a search ad.

To run advertising in Google Shopping, you need to have:

• Google Account;
• Google Ads account;
• Merchant Center account (Google Merchant Center is a tool for publishing information about your products and stores on Google services);
• data feed with all product information. A feed is a table that stores product data.

If you’ve already set up contextual advertising, you probably already have Google and Google Ads accounts. Accordingly, you still need to register in the Merchant Center and fill the feed with data.

How to create a Google Merchant Center account

1. To get started, sign in to your Google profile and find the Merchant Center among the company’s products.
2. Enter your email address and fill in your business information. In the name, indicate the well-known brand for your customers, not the legal name. Be sure to check the box next to Adult products on my site if they are available. By the way, you can edit all the data later.
3. Agree to the terms of use.
4. Choose the Product Ads tool.
5. Connect your Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts. The connection will be automatic if you have used the same email address to register for both services.

How to create a feed and fill it

A data feed is a file with detailed information about your products in the format of special attributes. Consider some of the most important attributes:

• The title is the name of the ad. In it, enter the name of the product that the user will eventually see.
• The description is brief information about the product. The user will see it after clicking on the ad.
• Google product category. Choose this value from the Google Classifier. The attribute helps the search engine understand which products you advertise and promote them more relevantly.
• Product Type is an attribute for classifying products in the feed. It greatly facilitates the work with the trading campaign and allows you to change its structure.
• Shipping is delivery information.

If your site often changes the range of products and their prices, create an additional feed to update. Its peculiarity is that it contains only five attributes: product ID, price, product availability, discounted price, and discount validity.To download the data feed, you have to go to the Merchant Center in the Products section and select the Feeds tab.

• Specify the country of sale, and display the language and services in which you will promote the goods.
• Choose where the data will be downloaded to the Merchant Center and set the update time to update the product data.

How to run ads on Google Shopping

Basic settings are no different from other types of advertising campaigns. To start, sign in to your Google Ads account and select the Trading Campaign type when creating new ads.Next, select the destination Sale, the country of sale, and the previously downloaded data feed from Google Merchant Center. Decide on the type of campaign — regular or Smart Shopping — and your budget.And another important step in launching a selling ad is campaign priority. If you set up multiple campaigns for the same product, users will see ads with a higher priority.