Google Shopping Ads Hit South Africa

South Africa has had to wait well over 5 years for the release of Google Shopping ads and now that it's here digital marketers in the retail space will have a new tool at their disposal. Released in 2011 Google shopping ads are Googles take the Product Listing Ad (PLA) and over the last 5 years, it has gone through some considerable changes. The most prominent being the 2015 release of expanded mobile shopping ads giving PLAs a major retail space in SERP (Search Engine Results Pages). Before you get carried away note that it is currently being pushed out in a phased approach and being served to around 5% of searchers on both desktop and mobile SERPs.

What are google shopping ads

Shopping ad campaigns are active product listings that are displayed in search results with:

• Product image
• Product name
• Product price
• Retailer name

Shopping Ads are meant to promote your online and local inventory, boost traffic to your website or local store, and find better-qualified leads.

Reasons to use shopping ads

If you need any more convincing of shopping ads, then here are the top 6

1. More product focused
2. Improves Non-branded search reach
3. Mobile growth with larger real estate in SERP
4. More granular control with custom labels and campaign priorities
5. Access to competitive metrics
6. More advanced reporting capabilities

Considerations for shopping ads

While Google shopping ads are a great new feature for the South African SEM industry and digital marketing as a whole. It's not a one size fits all and should be used strategically, you may want to hold off on shopping ads for the following reasons.

1. If you sell under 500 products, you may have trouble getting visibility on Google Shopping
2. Google emphasizes site quality and links as part of its algorithm to determine site and merchant quality, Even more so recently with Penguin so get your site up to scratch first
3. You sell products in a highly competitive category and margins are extremely tight
4. You have very limited spend to spread across your Adwords, remarketing etc

Shopping ads require real commitment

PLAs are probably the single biggest vehicle of paid search growth for e-commerce brands and will continue to drive major growth for first time purchases and mobile user first-time purchases. But to get the most out of the medium it will take a rather large commitment on your part.

1. Optimizing product feeds to meet and exceed all of Google’s requirements
2. Keeping feeds up-to-date in terms of product selection, availability and pricing
3. Structuring Shopping campaigns intelligently to bid products and manage negatives effectively
4. Using negatives and campaign priorities to segment campaign traffic by query type, such as forcing all brand traffic to a single campaign to bid this traffic differently from non-brand traffic
5. Using a smart bidding platform capable of bidding products and devices to efficiency targets
6. Timely management of any feed errors or other advertising violations; a disapproved text ad/keyword might shut down some text ad spend, a disapproved feed will shut down your entire PLA program.
7. Consistent search term report monitoring to inform negative keyword additions and guide structural campaign changes to help
8. funnel queries to the most appropriate product groups with the most appropriate bids

Setting up shopping ads

Setting up your first shopping campaign is all done within your AdWords account but be warned it is a long and arduous process. Even with the vast amount of resources available online, set up is long-winded and clunky and if it's your first time be prepared to struggle.

Contact us

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Tags: Google Adwords, SEM, Tools