What are Shopping Ads?
If you are a retailer, you can use shopping campaigns and ads to promote your online business. Shopping ads feature detailed information about specific products that a business sells. There are three types of shopping ads. ‘Product’ shopping ads which feature just one product. On the other hand, you can feature several products that are similar to each other with the ‘Showcase’ shopping ads. Shopping ads use your existing Merchant Center product data instead of keywords. Or use feed data provided from local inventory ads to engage users with ‘Local Catalog Ads’.
What is Shopping feed optimisation?
Feed optimisation is the process of improving and optimising the data within your product feeds in order to serve product ads for highly relevant search terms.
Why should I optimise my feed?
Optimising your feed can help to improve reach, relevancy and segmentation. Often, feeds are created with many attributes missing. They only include the mandatory fields; if you’re missing the colour attribute, you can’t bid on products based on their colour. If you’re missing the size attribute, you can’t bid on products by their size. Missing attributes in your product feed can have a huge impact on performance.
How can I optimise my feed?
The potential for feed optimisation with Google Merchant Centre is often overlooked. Manipulate your feed for free using the Rules function. Using the information already provided within your feed. Below are some examples of how you can use Google Merchant Centre’s feed rules to optimise your feed.
1.Product titles are the single most important area that can be optimised in your feed. If your title doesn’t contain key information such as size, colour or brand, then you could be missing out on a huge volume of impressions, clicks and conversions
2. Product_Types have huge potential in improving your results from Google Shopping. By being granular with your product types, it will help to set your products apart from the rest. Granular product types will help Google to understand your product better.
3. Product Description: The text that appears below your product title and to the right of your product image in Google’s shopping tab. A common misconception is that you can use your product description to be more descriptive, using colloquial language, similar to that used on their social media. In reality, Google crawls a product’s description for relevant keywords. Using the merchant centre’s feed rules, you can ensure that all of your product descriptions contain at least the very basic keywords. For example, {Product Title} by {Brand}, available in {Colour}, size {Size}.
For example, if your product does not have the term ‘Summer Dress’ within the title, but the Product_Type is set as ‘Clothing> Womens > Dresses > Summer Dresses’, it will be much more likely to appear for terms including ‘summer dresses’.
Feed Rules
Using Feed Rules in Google Merchant Centre, you can extract key attributes from your feed, and insert them into the product title.
For example, {Product Title} by {Brand} in {Colour}. Using a rule in Merchant Centre can allow you to inject the Brand and Colour from the attributes in your feed, into the product title – this will help to expand your reach on shopping to searches that contain the brand name and the colour.
There are also rules available to help with restructuring your product titles. For example, if your product title is structured as follows: {Brand – Product}. You can use feed rules to split the title, and reverse the order so that it reads {Product – Brand}.
In addition to improving your performance, granular product types can help to improve the management of your shopping campaigns. The additional product types will allow you to further segment your products into sub categories. By adding a ‘Summer Dresses’ segmentation, you can increase bids during the Summer season for this sub category in shopping.
This rule ensures that all your product descriptions have the basic keywords in place, improving your reach, relevancy and potential traffic.
These three simple examples can have a huge impact on the performance of your shopping campaigns. So what are you waiting for? For more advice on shopping optimisation, contact us today on: 020 7993 9853
