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Whiteboard Wednesday #13: How to make the most of Google Shopping | Clearhaus Learning

Google is one of the ultimate platforms for advertising online - and one of their options is Google Shopping.

But how do you get your ads shown on top of the search results?

It’s all about the feed you send to Google - the better it is, the higher the chance that YOUR ad will be shown.

In this video Dennis Cassøe from WakeupData shares 7 ways to improve your product feed - enjoy!

Hi, and welcome to Whiteboard Wednesday. My name is Dennis Cassøe, and I’m the co-founder and CEO of WakeupData.

Today, I would like to give you some tips on how you can optimise Google Shopping. But to give you an idea about the context and about Google Shopping, I’ll give you a short introduction to it.

Google Shopping is those ads you see on top when you search for something on Google. It’s paid ads. It means that you don’t get shown there unless you’re paying for Google, which means that they take a cut every single time someone clicks on one of those images that you see on the top. To be able to be seen there, you need to send a feed of information to Google on a daily basis that explains what items you have on sale and how you wish to get them displayed.

The problem is, there’s hundreds of merchants trying to get those 5 spots on top of the Google Campaigns. And to be able to be one of those 5 that are being shown, you need to make sure that Google understands the context of your product, and understands when should your products be shown and when they shouldn’t be shown. To be able to do that, there’s a way of optimising the feed of data you send to Google, and I’ll show you some of the tips you can use to improve your conversion rates and the ability of you to be seen on the Google Shopping Campaigns.

First and foremost is that you can optimise your titles. That’s hugely important because a big part of those ads at the top is the titles. There’s a lot of ways to do it, but there’s general consensus that you should add the brand in the front of your title and then have the product title, the colours, other factors. There’s a lot of articles on this topic, but it’s really important that you define what is it that will be relevant for any user that wish to click on my product, so that they see the right context of it. And of course, to make certain that it can be seen within that limited space you have available in Google Shopping.

Second part is to include GTINs. GTINs are the Global Trade Identifiers that are a unique stamp that is on any product. It’s that number or barcode that you see on the back of each product, and by including that into your feed, Google will know what type of products it is, and be able to show you in the right context, based on other competitors’ products that have the same GTINs. It is something that is of tremendous value, but very few actually add them in the feed. If you don’t have them in the feed, a tool like ours can enable you to put them into the feed from other sources, so it’s a really, really big thing to get those added.

Third part is optimising descriptions, and it might sound a bit strange because you don’t see descriptions in the Google Shopping ads. But Google is really good at understanding context and it looks at every single detail of information you send to the Google Campaign. So by adding a good description in the ad you’ll enable Google to show you based on that context. What is the right context to add in the description? Well, that might be brand names, keywords that are relevant for people looking for that type of item. So, think about what would be relevant for me, if I wanted to be shown up here, what would be the search terms that people use, and add that to the descriptions.

The fourth thing you should look into is proper categorisation. You can do a categorisation in Google. Google actually has around 5 or 6,000 categories of items, that they push into those ads up here. And they show that long list on their site, where you can see all the categories that you can add to your feed. The problem is, of course, finding the right ones. And it might seem a bit foolish to spend time on “this product is in this category” or whatever, but the relevance is huge because Google shows the search based on the keywords that people add at the top and by adding the right category, they will know that if they’re in the right context, your items will be more likely to be shown.

You might just choose the main category Google has or take some that goes into different depths, but in general, it’s a really good idea to go as deep as you can, because by going as deep as you can, you give Google an even better context of your item. And as I’ve said, I’ve used context quite often because in the end, the ability of Google to understand your item compared to everyone else’s, is what decides if they’re willing to show you on top. Then we have clear and clean images.

And it might sound simple - it often isn’t. One of the problems that we see is that people might have an image that they use on the website, but it has a transparent background or it has a border or whatever. And Google does not allow it. If you do that on your images, you might not get shown. Transparent background will go through here, but will be converted to black backgrounds in other places, and it really, really looks awkward. So, it’s important to keep them clean and very simple. That’s complete opposite to Facebook, where doing a lot of things on top of the images will have a lot of impact. But here, keep them simple.

Then we have the context. I’ve used context a lot, this is another type of context. This is the context about when would a person be interested in my product. If you have an item that sells better when it’s sunny outside think about adding weather information, so that you can bid differently if it’s sunny or rainy. If you have a product that you know is really good as being a high sales product on your website and is a recommended product, try to bid that up compared to the other ones. We all know that you might sell 10 different shirts, but in the end there’s probably only one of those shirts that is the really big seller. So, being able to push that one on top have a huge impact.

Then there’s competitor data. If you know your price is way above the competitors’ there’s no reason to bid higher, because you’re not likely to get the click anyway. If you know you’re cheap, it’s gonna have a tremendous impact on your ability to be shown.

And then the last thing is split test. We all have ideas of what works and what does not work. But split-testing your feed, dividing the items into two groups and say “okay, in this group, I’ll write this type of title and then in this group, I’ll write another type of title,” will enable you to understand what type of title works best, how should my description be build, and all of the things that we have an assumption about, but we honestly don’t really know, because in the end, it’s not us who decides it.

This is a lot of things you can do, and it can be a really tiresome thing to do in your feed, and this is kind of why we built WakeupData. Because through WakeupData, you’ll be able to do these kind of things without having to do any code on your own.

Thank you for listening.

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