How to get your products noticed on Google Shopping

Google has thrown a welcome hand grenade into the midst of the search-engine marketing world, with what, on the face of it, looks like a minor tweak to its product-comparison service.

Since 2002, with the launch of Froogle, the search-engine giant has struggled to find a way to integrate a shopping-comparison service into its front page. By 2012, Froogle had metamorphosed into Google Product Search, but the sheer number of matches for common search terms meant that its results were rarely what the buyer wanted. This is less of a problem with text results since a user can simply scroll down the browser page to find the one they’re looking for, but products are confined to a small box, so Google needed to find a way to make them as relevant as possible.

It now makes financial sense for Google to put product photos front and centre

The solution was to launch Google Shopping – a service identical to Product Search except that shop owners must now pay to have their product included. Not surprisingly, this has caused much gnashing of teeth among online marketers, but it presents an opportunity to those willing to exploit it. In my view, it’s the most significant change to search-engine marketing in the past five years for product sellers: miss it and you’ll cede ground to your competitors, with perhaps disastrous results.

Shopping: what’s the deal?

In fairness to Google, all the other major price-comparison services already charge merchants a fee – either a flat fee per listing or a price per click. What’s more, by giving such a prominent position to shopping results, Google risked customers clicking a product listing for which it received no revenue, rather than a paid-for text ad. For my small online retail business, it’s always been impossible to get into the top four or eight products because of the sheer quantity of competitors. I welcome the switch to paid-for inclusion because, at a stroke, the number of products listed in Google Shopping has been slashed.

I also believe this is part of a bigger plan. Look at the changes to Google Search over the past couple of years and it becomes obvious it’s gently moving away from the complete dominance of text and towards a wider variety of media types. A typical search phrase will now yield images and videos as well as text results, enhanced by author thumbnails and Wikipedia entries, especially on mobile devices. If you want evidence that photo-based product listings clearly fit this trend, pay attention the next time you search for a product on your smartphone and you’ll see only a single text ad followed by a row of photos.

This increased prominence of visuals coincides with the change to paid-only listings. It now makes financial sense for Google to put product photos front and centre, since it can squeeze so many more of them into the space previously occupied by a second text ad. The task for today’s marketeers and online retailers is to ensure their product appears in that tempting little row.

Product Listing Ads

To get started with product ads, you’ll need three things: a compatible product feed, an account at Google Merchant Center and an AdWords account. Merchant Center accepts delimited text or XML files, which can be either manually uploaded or automatically generated. Some e-commerce packages, such as Bigcommerce, can be set up to create files in the appropriate format for Merchant Center to find, while Volusion offers the same function on its more expensive packages. Unless you have only a few products, I wouldn’t recommend attempting to create a file manually – although you can do this in Excel and export it, creating a rich, fully populated feed is complicated and likely to result in errors.

The first step, then, is to decide how you’re going to generate and supply your product feed. If you’re using an e-commerce package, you’ll need to begin by mapping your product categories to those in Google Shopping and specifying which products you’d like to include in your feed. You also need to make sure that all the fields Google requires are included or else your products won’t appear.

Setting up a Google Merchant account is pretty straightforward. Once you’ve verified ownership of your online shop, you can import the product feed and have it automatically updated using the information provided by your e-commerce service. You can also manually export a test feed from your shop and upload it to Google Merchant’s feed debugger, which will let you know if any information is missing.

Google is particularly fussy about the unique product identifier, so if you don’t have a UPC, EAN or ISBN for a particular product, make sure you add the brand and manufacturer’s part number. Failure to do this may send Google into a hissy fit and disqualify your entire catalogue. The final step is to link your Merchant and AdWords accounts together by going to Settings | AdWords and entering your customer ID.

Now that you have your shop, Merchant Center and AdWords all talking to one another, you need to set up a Product Listing Ads campaign. Fortunately, this is also incredibly simple – far easier than text-based campaigns – largely because you don’t need to specify keywords for Product Listing Ads. Instead, Google works out which of your products it should show for a particular search term.

Your product must appear among those four to eight thumbnails

You read that right: with Product Listing Ads, the keyword research and optimisation skills you’ve earned by years of sweat and toil have become redundant. Well, almost, because it isn’t quite that clear-cut, as we’ll soon see. Essentially, though, setting up a product listing campaign is a simple matter of selecting which Merchant Center feed you want to advertise, setting a budget, and then optionally creating ad groups for specific products, brands or categories, each with their own bid price.

Getting your products on the front page

There’s little point in going through this rigmarole if potential customers never see your Product Listing Ad. Your product must appear among those four to eight thumbnails (Google alters the number depending on the search phrase) or it might as well be invisible. In practice, this means doing your level best to appear in one of the first four slots.

As usual, Google doesn’t reveal details of how it decides in which order to present products, as if it did the system would be wide open to abuse. However, it seems to me that at least six factors influence your rank position:

1. Relevance – the closer Google thinks your product matches the intentions of the searcher, the higher your ranking.

2. Bid price – the more you bid, the better your chances of appearing in the top window. How much the bid price affects your position within that window is less clear. Google suggests that you can expect the bid price for a Product Listing Ad to be higher than for a text ad, but that this will be compensated by a higher conversion rate, since clickers have already selected their product visually before arriving at your site. We’ll see…

3. Location – if I search for scooters, for example, Google will tend to boost the ads of shops near to my physical location.

4. Completeness of data – while there’s a relatively small number of mandatory fields in a valid product feed, providing all the optional data makes it more likely Google will match you.

5. Data freshness – Google will reward more recent data, which it expects to be more relevant. This is another reason why it’s so important to automate this through your shopping platform.

6. Merchant credibility – the longer you’ve had your active Merchant account, the happier Google is. Google also uses various independent review sites to establish your reputation, so now might be a good time to sign up.

Relevance is by far the most important of these six factors, and requires a different approach from text-based ads, an approach that has much in common with SEO techniques for boosting organic Google rankings.

While effective SEO was important for a text ad, since it affects the page’s Quality Score (which in turn influences the amount you must pay to achieve a particular position in the sponsored listings), for a Product Listing Ad it determines whether you’ll appear anywhere at all. So where for text ads you’d spend most of your time polishing keywords in the AdWords interface, for Product Listing Ads you’ll concentrate your effort within your e-commerce package, working on the product page itself.

Let’s take the example of an online retailer with a couple of hundred products. Using text ads, it’s unlikely they’d want to invest the effort to create a separate ad group for each product, so in practice they’d bid for keywords that suggest a customer is interested in a whole range of products.

In my case, I use text ads for broad search phrases such as “candle making kit”, and direct potential customers to our main website, from where they can select the exact kit they’re after. With Product Listing Ads, one or more of my kits might appear in response to the same search phrase, but I can’t directly control which unless I heavily restrict the number of kits I add to my feed. However, when a kit does appear as a thumbnail, it’s linked directly to the product page, so rather than optimise the ad text, keywords and landing page, I now need to take into account that a visitor might arrive at any product page.

This makes each product’s description page critical, since it not only affects relevance, but must also work in isolation from the rest of the site, as you can’t assume that a visitor has seen any other page. You can influence the final appearance of your ad by making sure the product name works for the space available. You can also add an optional “promotion” field, which the searcher will only see if they hover over your ad and so is of limited importance. Finally, and most importantly, you can specify which photo is used.

You may have picked the perfect image for your shop, but does it look as good as an ad?

You may have picked the perfect image for your shop, but does it look as good as an ad? In my case, this is a major issue as, after all, if the ad doesn’t look tempting the product page will never be seen. Those of our product shots that have been taken against a white background look great as ads, very eye-catching, but all the rest will have to be reshot, which is a pain but necessary to achieve a decent clickthrough rate.

To get the most out of Product Listing Ads, you must treat the whole of your product’s catalogue page as an ad in itself. The little thumbnails Google shows are simply tasters – the visitor’s eye is drawn to your lovely photo, but it’s only when they arrive at the full product page that the job of converting them into a customer begins.

There are plenty of whingers complaining about the fact that Google Shopping is no longer free, but I welcome the change. With further testing and experimentation, I’m confident I’ll achieve greater prominence for my business on the front page of Google. This will drive more hot traffic to my site, where hopefully I can convert enough to make the exercise profitable.

By exploiting the reluctance of other retailers to pay, along with continuing my text ad campaign and plugging away at SEO for organic listings, I multiply the opportunities to bring customers to our site. Some of these methods are free, such as blogging and social media, while others require an investment, but the beauty of pay-per-click in all its forms is that I pay only when a potential customer has been sent to my site, where it’s up to me to convert them to a buyer.

I’m confident that Product Listing Ads will prove a profitable addition to my online marketing arsenal, but if I can’t make them pay I’ll drop them like a stone. Early signs are encouraging, and I can see great potential in finely segmenting my product range by using different bids for different product categories.

For the first time in years, Google has opened up virgin territory for search-engine marketers, and the spoils will go to those who discover the best practice first. I have until September, when our busy season begins, to experiment and get them right, or else turn them off. The more places our products appear, the more chance we have of attracting potential customers. The price must be right, though, and the only way to reveal that is through hard evidence. Excuse me while I find my abacus…