Category: Google Ads & PPC

Navigating the intricacies of setting up a Google Shopping Ads Campaign can be challenging.

This comprehensive guide simplifies the procedure, detailing everything from the initial establishment of a Shopify store and Google Merchant Center, to linking these with your Google Ads account.

It further explores setting up a new campaign, defining goals, optimizing, and connecting to your Merchant Center account.

The guide also discusses campaign settings, location targeting, and ad group creation.

The final step involves refining product groups for differentiation and regular performance tracking.

This resource is an indispensable tool for anyone seeking to effectively set up and manage a successful Google Ads Campaign.

Key Takeaways

• Fully set up a Shopify store before setting up Google Shopping Ads
• Connect Google Merchant Center with the feed and link it to the Google Ads account
• Create a new campaign without a goal’s guidance and choose the shopping option
• Set up conversions and optimize for purchase, and link the campaign to the desired Merchant Center account

Understanding Google Shopping Ads

The Google Shopping Ads platform is a powerful tool that enables online retailers to display their products directly within Google’s search results, thereby substantially increasing visibility and potential sales. It is a pay-per-click model, where advertisers are charged each time a user clicks on their ad.

Understanding how to use this platform is key to unlocking its potential. To start, retailers need to set up a Google Merchant Center account, which serves as a repository for product data. This data is then pushed to Google Ads to create shopping campaigns and advertisements.

Creating a successful campaign involves careful planning and execution. Retailers need to select appropriate keywords, set competitive bids, and create compelling product listings. It’s also crucial to monitor the campaign’s performance regularly and make necessary adjustments to maximize return on investment.

Moreover, Google Shopping Ads allow for advanced targeting options. Retailers can specify the geographic location, demographics, and even the time of day their ads will appear. This level of precision can lead to more relevant ad placements and ultimately, higher conversion rates.

Understanding Google Shopping Ads is the first step towards leveraging this powerful tool for e-commerce success.

Setting Up Shopify Store

An integral first step in setting up your Google Shopping Ads campaign is establishing a fully functional Shopify store. This is the foundation upon which your campaign will be built, and thus, it requires careful attention to detail and strategic planning.

1. Create Your Store: The first step is to create your Shopify store. Choose a professional, easy-to-navigate theme that suits your brand and products. Populate your store with high-quality product images and detailed descriptions.
2. Add Payment Gateways: Add the necessary payment gateways to your store. Shopify offers a variety of options, including credit card processing and PayPal.
3. Configure Shipping Settings: Configure your shipping settings based on your product’s weight, location, and delivery method. Shopify provides flexible shipping options, enabling you to cater to a broad range of customers.
4. Set Up Analytics: Lastly, set up Shopify analytics to track your store’s performance. This will provide valuable data such as visitor behavior and sales trends, which can be used to fine-tune your Google Shopping Ads campaign.

Creating Google Merchant Center Account

Having set up your Shopify store successfully, the next crucial step involves creating a Google Merchant Center account which will allow you to manage your product feed and make your products available for Google Shopping ads.

To create the account, visit the Google Merchant Center homepage and click ‘Sign Up’. You will be prompted to enter your business information accurately. This includes your business name, website URL, and location. It’s important to ensure the data matches the information on your Shopify store to avoid discrepancies.

After providing your business details, you will have to verify and claim your website URL. This process is essential to authenticate your ownership of the website and can be done via Google Search Console.

Once your website is verified, you will need to set up your product feed. This can be done by linking your Shopify store to Google Merchant Center. Ensure that your products are accurately categorized and described to meet Google’s product data specifications.

Lastly, connect your Google Merchant Center account to your Google Ads account. This linkage is crucial to allow your products to appear in Google Shopping ads.

With this, your Google Merchant Center account setup is complete, and you’re ready to create your first Google Shopping Ads campaign.

Structuring Google Shopping Ads

Once your Google Merchant Center account is successfully linked with your Google Ads account, the subsequent step involves structuring your Google Shopping Ads effectively. Proper structuring of your ads is pivotal to reaching your target audience and achieving your marketing objectives.

1. Creating Campaigns: Start by creating a new campaign. Click the plus icon, select ‘Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance’, and then select the shopping option. Link the campaign to your Merchant Center account, and optimize for conversion.
2. Setting Campaign Preferences: Name your campaign appropriately, set the budget, and select your bidding strategy. Initially, start with manual CPC and consider using Target ROAS when you are more experienced.
3. Targeting and Location Settings: Choose your desired locations for advertisement. Target people in, or who show interest in, these locations. Create ad groups based on your campaign structure strategy.
4. Refining Product Groups: This involves adding subdivisions to the product group and selecting specific products to display. You can refine these groups using categories or other product attributes.

Creating a New Campaign

Now that we’ve looked at how to structure your Google Shopping Ads, let’s delve into the process of creating a new campaign.

The first step is to log into your Google Ads account and switch it to expert mode. From there, you will see a plus icon that allows you to create a new campaign.

Select the option ‘Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance’, then choose the shopping option. You will need to have your conversions set up and optimized for purchase and link the campaign to your desired Merchant Center account.

In setting up your campaign, it’s crucial to choose an appropriate name, start with a manual CPC, and optimize for conversion value. You can consider using the Target ROAS feature later on. Set a daily budget based on your monthly budget goals and ensure to untick the option to show ads on the search network.

For targeting and location settings, select the desired location where you wish to advertise. Prefer targeting people in, or those who regularly visit the targeted locations.

Configuring Campaign Settings

Configuring the settings of your Google Shopping Ads campaign is a crucial step to ensure its success and optimization. This process allows you to determine the specifics of your campaign, such as its name, bidding strategy, daily budget, and network settings, which all contribute significantly to the performance of your ads.

1. First, you should name your campaign accordingly. This will help you easily identify and manage it later.
2. Secondly, start with manual CPC and optimize for conversion value. This will give you full control over your bids and enable you to maximize your return on ad spend.
3. Thirdly, set a daily budget that suits your monthly budget goals. This will prevent overspending and ensure your ads run consistently throughout the day.
4. Finally, untick the option to show ads on the search network. This will focus your ads on Google Shopping, which is more relevant and effective for your campaign.

Setting Targeting and Location

The fifth step in setting up your Google Shopping Ads campaign involves carefully deciding on your targeting and location settings. Accurate targeting plays a pivotal role in reaching the most suitable audience for your products. Location setting, on the other hand, aids in focusing your advertising efforts in the regions where your potential customers reside.

Google Ads offers the opportunity to choose your desired advertising location. This could be a country, a specific area within a country, or even a radius around a location. Your choice should be guided by your business coverage and target market demographics.

Once your location is set, it’s important to refine your target audience. Google Ads allows you to target people in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations. This feature enables you to reach not only local customers but also those who might be interested in your products even if they aren’t currently in your chosen region.

Creating Ad Groups

Initiating the process of creating ad groups, it is essential to strategically categorize your products to optimize visibility and cost efficiency in your Google Shopping Ads campaign. This process can be broken down into four key steps:

1. Identifying Product Categories: Start by identifying the different categories your products fall into. This step involves grouping similar items together to create a cohesive ad group that targets a specific set of customers.
2. Naming Ad Groups: Give each ad group a descriptive name that represents the products within it. This makes it easier to monitor performance and make adjustments as needed.
3. Setting Bid Amounts: Determine the maximum amount you’re willing to pay per click for each ad group. This should be based on the potential return on investment (ROI) of the products within the group.
4. Refining Over Time: As your campaign progresses, analyze the performance of your ad groups. Make necessary adjustments to improve their effectiveness. This could involve changing bid amounts, adding or removing products, or even creating new ad groups.

Refining Product Groups

Refinement of product groups is a crucial step in optimizing your Google Shopping Ads campaign. Proper segregation of products into specific groups allows for a more focused advertising approach, thereby enhancing the efficiency of your campaign.

To start refining your product groups, consider adding subdivisions. This can be achieved by selecting specific products you wish to highlight in your ads. The key is to ensure that the feed in your Google Merchant Center has the necessary settings for differentiation. You might need to adjust these settings depending upon the products or services you offer.

Another effective strategy for refining product groups is to utilize categories or other product attributes. These could include elements such as brand, condition, product type, or custom labels. Categorizing your products based on these attributes allows you to create more targeted ads, leading to improved performance.

Regular monitoring and adjustment of product groups is also recommended. As your campaign progresses, you may discover that certain products perform better than others. In such cases, make necessary adjustments to your product groups to maximize the effectiveness of your Google Shopping Ads campaign.

Monitoring and Adjusting the Campaign

After successfully setting up and refining your Google Shopping Ads campaign, it is critical to regularly monitor and make necessary adjustments to ensure optimal performance over time. Campaign performance should be reviewed on a weekly basis at minimum, but more frequent reviews may be beneficial depending on campaign goals and budget.

The following four steps are essential in the process of monitoring and adjusting your campaign:

1. Analyze Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Regularly check the KPIs like Click-through Rate (CTR), Cost per Click (CPC), Conversion Rate, and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). These metrics will give you insight into the effectiveness of your campaign.
2. Adjust Bids: Based on KPIs, consider adjusting your bids. If a product is performing well, you might increase the bid to get more visibility. Conversely, lower the bid for underperforming products.
3. Review Search Terms: Review the search terms that are leading users to your ads. Add irrelevant terms as negative keywords to improve ad relevance and reduce wasted spend.
4. Test and Refine: Regularly experiment with different settings, ad group structures, and bidding strategies. Monitor the results, learn from them, and refine your campaign accordingly.

Conclusion

In conclusion, comprehending and applying Google Shopping Ads Campaign requires a strategic approach. Starting from setting up a Shopify store to monitoring and adjusting the campaign, each step bears significant importance.

Detailed understanding of campaign settings, ad group creation, and product group refinement can lead to optimal outcomes. Regular monitoring is pivotal for successful execution.

This guide provides valuable insights to navigate through the complexities of Google Shopping Ads Campaign, ensuring increased efficiency and success.

In this video I show you the easiest way to set up Google Analytics 4 (GA) using Google Tag Manager.

We all know that GA4 is not easy to use by any means when you are just starting out, but I will solve that for you in this video.

Go here for the next step of how to set up conversion tracking on Google Analytics 4.

Google Analytics: analytics.google.com

Google Tag Manager: tagmanager.google.com

For my tutorial on setting up conversion tracking, go here:

When setting up a Google Ads campaign, you’ll need to select a bidding strategy. A bidding strategy is essentially how you want Google to spend your budget. Basically, the goal with any bidding strategy is to keep the ad costs as low as possible and make as much money in return, and selecting the right bidding strategy is going to help you do this.

The two most common options are Maximise Clicks and Maximise Conversions. I’m going to cover these two because you are likely to be using one of them. There are a couple of other options, but they can be a bit more complex, and odds are if you don’t already know what they are you don’t need to use them.

Maximise Clicks

First let’s go over Maximise Clicks. When you set your bidding strategy to Maximise Clicks, you are telling Google to get you as many clicks as possible for the money.

Maximise Clicks is a basic bidding strategy that often works well. It’s goal is to bring the most amount of traffic to your site, which is perfect for when you are starting out the campaign and want to see what kind of response you’ll get.

You are also able to set a cap on the cost per click, so you won’t spend more than your cap per click. This can be useful to ensure you don’t blow through your whole daily budget too quickly.

Maximise Conversions

The goal with maximise conversions is that Google will try to get as many conversions as possible. This could come at the expense of clicks, because Google may put more money into each click they think is likely to convert, so you can end up with less clicks but more conversions.

Google does need some data to make this work, so usually if you are just launching a new campaign, Maximise Conversions can be hit or miss. Sometimes it works well, but other times you need to let your campaign run for a while before Google is really able to optimize.

So Which Bidding Strategy Should You Use?

That really depends on your goals, but I’m going to assume for the purpose of this post that you just want to get the most leads or sales.

With that being the case, my recommendation is to start with Maximise Clicks, and let the campaign run for a few weeks. Ideally you want to start seeing some conversions, because this will give Google data to work with.

Once that’s happening, you can make a duplicate campaign and set the bidding strategy to Maximise Conversions, and then compare the results.

Many times you’ll find that the Maximise Conversions will work better and get your more conversions. But I have had the odd instance where it didn’t work as well and I had to switch back to Maximise Clicks. This is why I recommend testing Maximise Clicks first – so that you have a benchmark to compare against.

Also, if you just launch a Maximise Conversions campaign right away, unless Google manages to hit the nail on the head right at the beginning, you can end up spending a lot of money with little results before Google figures it out, and often that means people can’t afford to keep going and have to stop the campaign.

How Do You Set The Bidding Strategy?

If you are making a new campaign, you’ll get the select the option once you have completed the first step of creating a campaign. You will see this screen:

Click on the drop down where it says Clicks, and you will be able to select from the list:

Now, if you haven’t set up Conversions yet (see my post about How to Set Up Conversions in Google Ads here) you won’t be able to select Maximise Conversions (You can see it is greyed out in the screenshot – this is because I am using a new account). Once you set up conversions you will be able to select it.

If you already have a campaign running, you can set the bidding by going to Campaigns and clicking on your campaign from the list:

And then click “Settings” on the left, and then click on “Bidding”:

That section will drop down and you’ll see a blue link “Change bid strategy”, click that:

Then click on the drop down:

And now you’ll be able to select one of the other bidding strategies:

Summary

So, to summarise, if you are just starting out, I recommend going with Maximise Clicks, as that’s going to give you a good benchmark to work with as well as feed Google data that it will need to optimise for conversions.

Once that’s been running for a couple of weeks and you’ve had some success, try duplicating the campaign and set the new campaign to Maximise Conversions, and compare the results.

Last month Google got rid of the option to create Expanded Text Ads which were the basic, plain old text ad, and instead replaced them with “Responsive Search Ads”.

Expanded Text Ads allowed you to set exactly which headlines and descriptions you wanted in which positions. Responsive Search Ads, on the other hand, give you the option to input a number headline and description variations, and Google will rotate them to find the best combination.

Expanded Text Ads were much loved by marketers because they allowed you to have complete control over your ads, and test variations yourself so you know what gets the best results.

Why Google decided to remove them is anyone’s guess, but since they both have been heading in the direction of giving users less and less control over their ads for some time, it is not entirely surprising.

However!

It is still possible to create ads that behave in the same manner as Expanded Text Ads in Google Ads, giving you control over how your headlines and descriptions show. In this post (Video) I will show you how.

How to Create “Expanded Text Ads” in Google Ads

Here is how you can achieve the same result as Expanded Text Ads using Responsive Search Ads:

Create a campaign and an ad group if you don’t have one already, then go into your ads and click on the big blue “+” icon:

And then select “Responsive Search Ad”:

Now you’re in the ad creation page. Add your URL, and then go down to the headlines. Write your first headline, and then click the little pin icon next to it. This will open a pop up which gives you the option to pin this headline to a position. Select “Show only in position 1”:

Now do the same thing for headlines 2 and 3:

Once you have done this successfully, you will see the little pin icons appear in blue next to the headlines with the respective pinned position number:

Now do the same thing with the descriptions:

And, again, the pins will show with the respective position number:

And that’s it, now just hit “Save ad” and you are done.

What we’ve done here is we have only given Google one variation to show for each position of headline or description, and pinned it to that position so that is HAS to show that variation. Now that ad will always display in that order, basically resulting in an Expanded Text Ad.

You can make up to 3 Responsive Search Ads per ad group in Google Ads, so you can test up to 3 variations manually at a time. You can also use their Ad Variation tool if you want to do other variation tests.