Google Shopping Optimization Tips & Best Practices

If you are running a Google Shopping campaign you are running it for one reason & one reason only and that is to sell more of you products.

But unfortunately this is not always the case as many Google Ads shopping campaigns do not achieve this goal and are barley breaking even or even worse costing the business money.

If this is a situation that you currently find yourself in, you are in the right place as in this video I am going to take you through the top 5 ways that you can optimise your Google Shopping Campaign.

 1. Review Your Product Titles & Search Term Audits

We know that for Google Shopping Campaigns rather than entering in different keywords that you want to use to target your products. Google uses:

•  Your Product Title
•  Description
•  And Product Page Content

To trigger your Google Shopping ads for relevant searches. 

However the issue with this is that Google will use these elements the same way as a Broad Match keyword, meaning that your shopping ads will trigger for searches that Google thinks are similar or related to your products. 

Even if we know that they are not the same thing and that your products are very unlikely to sell from these search terms.

 2. Optimise by Locations & Devices

Once you have 60 days of data in your Google Ads campaign you can start to review the location and device data from your Google Ads Shopping campaign. 

 What you are looking for here is to see if there is any large differences in the conversion data between the locations that your ads show and the devices that users are using to complete their searches.

If you see any significant performance differences you can either:

• Add in some bid optimisations to focus more traffic on the better performing locations & devices
• Or in some cases even exclude under performing devices & locations

 3. Review & Optimise Audiences 

 For all Google Ads campaigns but especially Shopping campaigns you need to always remember that you are not just targeting & optimising your campaigns by products because you can also request for Google to give you the Audience & Detailed Demographic data so that you can then add in your own optimisations. 

With the goal of focusing your traffic to the best performing audiences & demographics, let me show you how to request this data and then make the required optimisations 

 4. Clean Your Shopping Feed (Exclude Under-Performing Products) 

Cleaning you shopping feed is a very similar process to what you would complete by running a search term audit in your search campaigns. 

This is the process where we review your products and exclude any products that are taking up a large proportion of your spend while also not giving you a high level of conversions.

5. Check Your Competitors Pricing 

 One thing to always remember with Google Shopping campaigns is that they are very heavily driven by price, so if you have a competitor or large reseller that is running a current sale or promotion a difference in price as little as $5 can mean that people choose your competitor or resellers ad instead of your ad.

Now I am not saying that you should join the race to the bottom on pricing BUT you just need to be aware that with Google Shopping people only see your:

•  Product Image
•  Product Title
•  And Price

So if you have suddenly seen a massive decrease in your shopping performance it could be due to a competitor or reseller using a lower price. 

 In this case it may be worthwhile to divert some of your ad spend to search and display ads and then focus your Google Shopping budget for when you know you have the best or competitive pricing active in the your specific market.