If you run an e-commerce business, there’s a good chance you’re running Google Shopping Ads. But given the limitations on your ability to customise the ads, it’s tough to distinguish yourself from your competitors.
That’s why in this video we share some powerful but sometimes overlooked strategies for making your Google shopping ads stand out from the crowd.
Episode Highlights
- The basic differences between Google Shopping Ads and Google Search Ads
- A live look at some Google Shopping Ads for socks where Raph analyses which advertisers are doing a good job and which ads need improving.
- What you can do within Google’s Shopping Ad limitations to stand out from your competitors and the elements of a winning Ad
Transcript
Joel (00:02):
Hi I’m Joel, and this is my colleague Raph at Digital Autopilot, and we are going to explore an interesting topic today. We’re going to look at this question of your Google shopping strategy and in particular, how you make your Google shopping ads stand out. There’s not that much that you can customise. So how do you stand out from the crowd? I’m going to pass it on to Raph to give us a few insights.
Raph (00:31):
Thanks, Joel. So like Joel said, there’s not that much that you can do to stand out. It’s not like Google search ads where you can write a headline and a description, customise that based on what the search intent is. So, whereas with shopping ads, you have a feed that provides all the information to Google from your website, or however, you’ve set up the feed. That’s another topic for another time, but Google then uses that information about the product and then puts out the ad. And so there’s different elements of that. Obviously there’s ways to try and improve the quality of your feed to try and make your products more relevant and found for more relevant searches. But there’s also little techniques that you can use to make your ad stand out from the other ads out there.
Raph (01:22):
So let’s just take a look at a couple of examples that I’ve got up. Let me just share the screen here. So, you know, I recently bought some socks for, for our 14 month old, as many parents out there. I know socks fall off all the time. So it was important to find some good socks. We did find some good socks by the way. Let us know the comments, if you wanna find out where that came from, but you can see here that you’ve got the Google search ads, but you’ve got the Google shopping ads. Now what’s interesting is that some of these don’t actually look like socks. Okay. So that could be a problem in here. They still call them, you know, Walker, socks, but they kind of look like boots. So it’s Important to probably get the word sock shoes probably higher up in the title so people can see straight away, oh, this is relevant.
Raph (02:11):
Whereas these ones here, they actually do look like socks. What’s generally good is to make sure you get the best photo of the image, not to try have anything distracting in their, like in this case here, this image, whilst everybody knows the bonds brand, that could be a good thing, but it’s very hard to see what it is. Whereas this here looks like, oh wow, I’m getting different colours, sorts of socks. Maybe it’s a better value packet or something like that. So that I thought that was interesting. Another thing we see here is sort of more annotations to the ad as well, which you can put into the setting within the Google merchant centre. Okay. There are some conditions that you have to fulfil. For example, this here, this you know, was $9. Now’s $5.40. There are conditions to have that appear in your ad.
Raph (02:57):
For example, you need to run the special for at least 30 days. And there’s a range of other conditions, which we’re not going to go into the technicalities of now. But that’s a good thing to make it stand out as well. Other annotations, such as, you know, maybe free shipping or minimum order to get free shipping, things like that. Whereas these other ones, they’re just sort of basic, it’s the image, the title of the product and the price and the brand. Okay. Things here sale. Okay. So that’s also connected as well. So sale can be overlaid onto the ad as well. You don’t do it manually. It has to be done by Google, but again, there are conditions for that. Just let’s look at a few other examples here. They’ve got sale as well. Big W they’re using the discount here.
Raph (03:41):
This is a fantastic one. It really stands out firstly, the colour, the amount of stars and that’s the seller rating. So you should definitely sign up for those programs within Google merchant centre to stand out and here, free delivery. This is all, you know, good stuff to make it stand out. So, you know, just to look at another example here, generally the best way is to have like a clean white background and have the image speak for itself. It depends on the product. You have to look at what other players are doing out there in the market as well. So as you can see here that the Sox is a bit more varied. There’s not so many white backgrounds, there’s a few more, you know, maybe more in situ type backgrounds with other sort of things like this one here. I find that very distracting.
Raph (04:22):
Like it might stand out, but it’s not a very good quality image. If you ask me this, one’s cute. And so again, you, you want the sock, you want the product to stand out. This one here clearly doesn’t look like socks. So there’s something going on with the Iconic’s feed there, you know, maybe we should give them a call and see if they need some help with their Google Shopping Ads. You know, this one’s quite nice. This one, you know, is it gloves or is it socks? It’s cute. And obviously you always have to try and bring this back to results. What are the results showing in terms of your ads as well? But you know, going back to these sorts of, you know, new sunglasses, you know, very clean backgrounds, very hard to stand out from the crowd in this case, it’s pretty much probably comes down to pricing in this case.
Raph (05:08):
Like which ones look cheaper or which ones actually look good. So you know, whatever you can do. So here Catch, they’ve got the seller ratings then discount. So that’s a good thing to have, cause everyone else here has free delivery. Sunglass Hut is doing, but they, I think do a lot better if they had things like accelerating ratings in there as well. So anything you can add in there. So look at the image, look at the title and then look at other extra things, within Google merchant centre that you can add in to, the shopping ads to make your ad stand out. Okay. So those Joel, those are some of the things, that you can do. Obviously there are other aspects in terms of trying to get your ad appearing more often, but that’s more bidding budget and other factors that come into it. Does that make sense?
Joel (05:57):
Um I find that those are really helpful suggestions. Can I make an offer on your behalf?
Raph (06:05):
Um sure.
Joel (06:06):
To our listeners and, and viewers that if you have an an eCommerce store and you want some specific advice, you know, we, and I, we, I mean, you would be more than happy to jump in and give a bit of a, a review, a customised review and, and some suggestions for optimising it and, and helping it achieve better results.
Raph (06:29):
Yep. Definitely, definitely get in touch.
Joel (06:31):
Thanks very much. And yeah. Good luck in optimising and growing in your store.
Raph (06:37):
Have a great summer.
