Google Shopping campaigns are a great tool for e-commerce businesses that want to increase their online visibility and generate more profits. Through these campaigns, online retailers can promote their products directly to potential customers in the most efficient way possible. Helping them to reach the right audience at the right time with relevant product information.
There are a number of efficient bidding strategies that can be used within traditional Google Shopping campaigns. These range from the simple Maximise Clicks, to the more sophisticated Maximise Conversion Value and Target Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). In addition, there is now a different type of Shopping campaign altogether called Performance Max. This uses machine-learning models to optimise bids and placements to drive conversions or conversion value for your goals automatically. This can be a good option for those who want to take a less “hands on” approach to the campaign management, and are happy for their ads to appear wherever Google deems them to be likely to gain a sale.
Whichever type of Shopping campaign you opt for though, and whichever bidding strategy you make use of (with the exception of the very straightforward Maximise Clicks), the key thing is that there needs to be a good and accurate flow of e-commerce data coming in to your Google Ads campaign in order for the bidding algorithms to work efficiently.
The Importance of Google Analytics
Google Ads takes its e-commerce sales data from Google Analytics. Therefore, it needs to be linked to the Analytics property that you are using for your site. The conversion action for the transactions (labelled as “purchase” under GA4) then needs to be imported into Google Ads. This can easily be done via the Conversions screen under the “Tools and Settings” menu in Google Ads.
Of course, the e-commerce data needs to be recording correctly within Google Analytics first though. It’s important that the site is accurately sending the details of every sale that the site records to Google Analytics. For sites using platforms such as WooCommerce or Magento this is fortunately something that is quite easy to achieve. This can be done by using one of the well-established and trusted plugins or modules.
Once sales data is flowing into Google Ads this can be used by the various bidding strategies to optimise and set your bids automatically. The more e-commerce data there is available within Google Ads, the more efficient this process is likely to be. This should lead to greater sales and return on the cost of the ads. For this reason, if you are thinking of running a Google Ads Shopping campaign you should make sure that the first thing you do is ensure that your sales data is being tracked fully within Google Analytics and this is linked to your Google Ads account so that data is already available whenever you decide to make your Shopping campaign active.
One additional consideration is that as the deadline for the switch off of Universal Analytics approaches (currently set for 1st July 2023) it is also important to make sure that your Google Shopping campaign is ready for this changeover too.
GA4 Implementation
This means that once you have a GA4 property set up for your site you should go through the same process of ensuring that e-commerce sales data is being recorded accurately within here too. The GA4 property will then need to be linked to your Google Ads account so that the GA4 “purchase” conversion action can be successfully imported into Google Ads. There is no reason not to do this now rather than waiting until nearer to July. Google will automatically detect if you are currently using transaction data from Universal Analytics. If so, it will set the newly imported GA purchase action as a “Secondary” conversion. This means that it will be starting to build up data from the GA4 source. However, it will not yet using this for any of the automated bidding processes.
Google recommends that after 28 days you can switch the conversion actions around. This means that the GA4 one becomes the “Primary” conversion source that your Google Ads campaign uses the data from.
In a recent article, we explored how Google Ads can help local businesses achieve a greater level of online visibility.
Google Shopping Management:
Jump 2 IT Media have ran highly effective Google Shopping campaigns for clients throughout the UK and worldwide. We are Google Partners and a Google Ads Certified company.
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