Google Product Ads: The perfect guide to understand what’s their purpose and how they can benefit your business

• Appear above text ads

Google allows more than one of your Product Listing Ads (PLAs) to appear for a given search query. PLA and a text ad can also appear at the same time. You could reach double the number of potential customers and the overall result through one search query.

Think about it, if someone’s search query simply says laptop, the person can easily find out which laptop suits their needs or their style. How? Just by looking at PLA images, possibly in the goodville. While scrolling through Google’s catalogue, the customer has easy access to the price of the product, therefore they can choose whichever product fits their budget. By the time they click on the ad, the client has a good sense of the product and its price, which further places it at a lower level of sales narrowing.

If you are competitive in your sales’ category, your products have a higher chance of being visible through shopping advertising.

We know different types of ads, such as: product ads, search ads and display ads. Let’s take a closer look at each one of them for a better understanding on how they differ from one another.

Product or in-store ads help advertisers to promote their products through the visual aspect of advertising. Product ads are best used for items that are visually pleasing to potential customers. These ads are located at the top of the screen, above the results of the searched product.

Product ads can be distinguished from text ads very easily. Whilst a text ad deals with text, product ad has it all – product name, price, image, etc. These ads draw product information directly from Merchant Center. After that, gathered details are used to match the products with relevant search queries.

Search ads are text-based search results containing the title, description text and product URL. Your ads are shown based on search phrases that match the advertiser’s keywords. For example; free shipping, fast delivery and so on.

They are mostly used to promote service and products that emphasize the benefits of the e-Shop.

Display ads are the ones that appear while you’re watching a video, browsing the Internet, looking through different websites, in mobile apps or even in your Gmail account! These ads can be set up to appear to potential customers at a certain time or in the right places.

This way, advertisers can approach new customers or reach out to their existing ones. Through remarketing they can reach out to visitors who have viewed a specific product in their e-Shop.

Advertisers have various options on how to distribute their display ads.

Advertising allows you to promote your products, find the most suitable customers and increase e-Shop’s traffic.

• The top of Google Search results

• To the right of Google search results

• On the Shopping tab in Google search results

• In the picture tab

• On Youtube
• On Google partner sites

Look at the pictures above. What do you notice first? Images.

Let’s think about it this way; I want to make ads for camera lenses. If I want to offer a single product, I am not going to include cameras, bags or a camera strap in my image. Why? Because I only want to sell the camera lens. (This example does not apply to bundles/kits)

The image should only show the product/bundle and nothing else. What you could do though, is to provide images of different angles of the product. Or, if your product comes in different colors, you can indicate it by putting small color dots/squares at the bottom or to the side of the image.

To get a better sense of what’s allowed and what’s the best way to capture your products, look at the Google official guidelines.

In order to use Google Shopping Campaigns, you have to own an e-Shop. To make it easier for you, this article will follow each one of the steps to explain their purpose and what you will need while creating your e-Shop.

Google Merchant Center will help you upload data of your products from your e-Shop. This will make information about your product available on Shopping for other Google services.

1. Sign up for Google Ads

To sign up for Google Ads, you will need an email address and a website where you advertise your products. Registration is easy and fast. Make sure that you set up billing after signing in. It’s necessary to choose the country and currency in which you’ll advertise your products.

If you’d like a visual step-by-step guide, check out the video below!

2. Create a product feed

In order to have your ads active, you need to verify the web address in Google Merchant. Subsequently, it’s desirable to create a product information channel. The product name then replaces the keywords and ad headline. Therefore, it’s very important to clarify the product information channel as clearly as possible.

3. Optimize product supply

Product information affects the performance and behaviour of your Shopping ads. Thus, the goal is to always take care of the quality of data of your products and always check if they are accurate. To increase your chances of appealing to customers, you can add various attributes to your products.

Brand, gender (when it comes to clothing), size, type or other custom options are available. Don’t forget to upload high-quality images as well, so the customer has a clear idea of how the product really looks like. This way, you provide potential customers with the most relevant product information!

4. Send an optimized product feed to Merchant Center

5. Create a Shopping campaign in your Google Ads account

Campaigns can be found on the left side of your Google Ads account. Select the plus button, then click New Campaign. In the Campaign Type section, select Purchases and move on. The next step is to set your advertising preferences - from the campaign name, the country of sale, your daily budget to devices.

The next step is to choose what kind of ad group you want to create. Once you’ve saved all your campaign settings, go to the product groups page to see all the products in your campaign.

6. Optimize your campaign to achieve higher overtime ROAS and reduce non-profitable products

The optimization score is very important because it tells you how well your campaign is doing in meeting its potential. Machine learning calculates this number from historical data and simulation auctions. Your goal is to ensure that this score is as high as possible.

If you’re having trouble and can’t get a high optimization score, you can take advantage of Google’s real time recommendations based on your advertising data. You can read more about how Google recommendation engine works here. Recommendations can help you learn how to optimize your campaign. Maybe you haven’t even thought or considered some of them.

Product title
Product title is required and should be a maximum of 150 characters. Don’t include keywords, such as “free shipping”, capital letters or foreign characters in your title. For different types of products, indicate the distinguishing mark - color, size, etc.

Product description
It’s very important to work on the description of every product as it should not exceed 5,000 characters. Information included in your description have to relate to a specific product and not to your e-Shop or other products.

Product image
The product image should be at least 100 x 100 px. The size should not exceed 16MB. Text, watermarks or anything that doesn’t directly relate to the product or isn’t a part of it is not allowed.

Product rating
Only appears in ads with a 5-star rating system. A product must have at least 3 reviews to be eligible. Evaluation of products provides important information to customers while deciding to make a purchase.

Ad rank is calculated based on the ad’s quality price at the time of auction (including expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience) and ad competitiveness.

It’s also affected by:

Google uses the format of Cost-per-click, also known as CPC, which can vary in different campaigns. For campaigns supporting CPC, you set max. CPC which is the highest amount you’re willing to pay. The cost of CPC is also dependent on the client that clicks on your ad. Therefore, the price can differ.

To show you an example of this:
Over a period of time, a client may have an average CPC of 0.09€ and a conversion rate of 2.15%. The average price over the same period of time for display campaigns can be 0.04€ with a conversion rate of 0.07%. Ads in purchases may have CPC of 0.07€ with a conversion rate of 1.43%. However, the price of ads in purchases is very individual and depends on the segment, the price of products and on the quality of the e-Shop.

Ideally, the best thing for advertisers is to run all kinds of campaigns and evaluate their profitability, such as; cost-per-action (CPA), return on ads spend (ROAS) and turnover cost (PNO).

1. Advertising without understanding profit margins

It’s strongly encouraged for advertisers to develop a total return on investment (ROAS) and not to forget to break it down by product category.

Based on the ROAS results, you can optimize the strategy to perfectly suit your e-Shop and thus achieve your expected results. It’s very important for the advertiser to understand the revenue opportunities, so they can measure ad performance and optimize their campaigns properly.

Don’t be discouraged by the time it’s going to take you! It’s a time consuming process, however it’s worthy of your time.

2. Remember to track your search queries

To refine your account performance, you need to regularly look for searched terms and see the phrases in Google ads that triggered clicks on your ads. Use the search term report to identify negative keywords that you can add to your account to prevent your ads from showing on irrelevant phrases.

3. Don’t bid for position 1 just because you want to be number one

Unless you consider the potential customer’s price or return on advertising investment, trying to be in the first position in search is pretty useless. A lower price will help you to increase your clicks and conversions.

Try to understand top position pricing and balance the trade-off between lower cost, clicks and conversions.

4. Remember to set up conversions

The most common mistake in Google ads is to forget to set up conversions. Without them we are not able to measure your return on investment.
Also, you really want to understand the profit margins for your products to set a CPC price that works for you.

Custom product names are significant in improving your ads on Google Shopping. Potential customers only read the beginning of your product name.

Names should always include keywords and information about your product.

If you’re having trouble creating product names, try to be inspired by the competition or you can read up more about it here.

In-store ads use a very visual format. Without friendly visual products, they are unlikely to be effective.

Always pay attention to the quality of your images! As mentioned before, they should be simple and clear. The most effective is white background with the displayed product. Of course, your goal is to stand out, so use something simple, such as displaying the product using different angles.

! Please note that Google will not display your product if the product is missing an image or does not meet the set conditions.

As in the headings, product descriptions must contain key information and keywords. Descriptions should be a maximum of 5,000 characters as mentioned before.

Potential customers read a maximum of 1,000 characters or less. Therefore, make the most out of the product description that customers are most likely to read. Optimizing your descriptions will improve the placement of your ads on search queries.

There are many ways to optimize your ad. You can use negative keywords to exclude your ads from searches unrelated to your product.

Imagine you are selling tennis balls, but the search also shows other balls that are related to sports. Creating negative keywords will help to prevent your ads from showing on unrelated searches and reduce unnecessary costs.

Similarly, you can prioritize your campaigns to favor better-converting product groups. Geo-targeting is also a powerful tool. If you find that the demand for products has significantly increased in Slovakia, it’s important to take advantage of location-based bids or even run a campaign specifically targeted at Slovakia.

When you are offering your products as a whole or in product groups, it is possible that certain products are more successful in sales compared to others. In this situation, you can adjust the product ad to avoid advertisers spending relentlessly and unnecessary on products.

Focus on the strategy of products that have better sales. You need to create individual ad groups for each product. Adjusting bids and product segmentation are great ways to minimize losses and maximize conversions.