Generate more sales for your webshop with Google Shopping

E-commerce is booming in our little country. Online purchases of clothing, gadgets and entertainment products have increased by more than one-third by 2021 (an increase of almost 35%!).

Online purchases of goods and services have skyrocketed thanks to the recent lockdown period. Does this mean our online purchasing will fizzle out after this record year? Absolutely not; E-commerce and online shopping are here to stay! The confidence and success of Belgian E-commerce act as a flywheel effect for merchants who initially missed the boat.

What is Google Shopping?

Via Google shopping you can redirect online search traffic with visuals of your product and convert it into online purchases. In essence, Google Shopping is a Comparison Shopping Service (CSS), or a price comparison site such as bigshopper.com or booking.com.

Google Shopping allows you to compare different providers at a glance and has become a proper best practice among experienced online shoppers. It will enable you to find the item you've been looking for within your specific requirements.

You have undoubtedly seen the results of Google Shopping. You can find them at the top of the Google Search results or in the separate Google Shopping tab.

The benefits of Google Shopping

1. The Power of Google
2. Engaged Buyers - High Intent
3. Free product listings in Google Shopping
4. Easy to use
5. ROAS
6. Dynamic remarketing campaigns

1. The power of Google

Even though Google has only been around for 23 years, the search platform has changed our lives tremendously by providing us with free information at all times.

Our loyalty to the well-known search engine is extremely strong, with a market share of 87.72% worldwide and 98.64% in Belgium. For years, Google has been leading the way in the expert verification of 'facts' that tipsy uncles share with the at family gatherings

Each month, Google Servers receive 60 billion searches worldwide. This treasure trove of consumer information can be utilized by any company thanks to advertising through Google Ads, including Shopping Ads.

2. Engaged Buyers — High Intent

Why still advertise to potential target groups hoping that someone would show any interest? Through Google Ads, you reach people who are further along in the buying process: they are deliberately looking to buy the item they are looking for or are showing a high interest in the product/service.

3. Free product listing in Google Shopping

Since 2020, the Google Shopping tab has also displayed free product listings. These results unfortunately do not appear in the Search tab but result in more reach and traffic to your products. So uploading your product feed (for free) to the Google Merchant account is an absolute no-brainer for those who want to generate more sales with their webshop.

4. Easy to use

Those who want to use Google Shopping Ads must first upload their products or catalogue in the Google Merchant Center. This is a Google tool that allows you to manage your product feed easily, update it and use it as paid advertising through Google Ads. Do you already have a Google Ads account? Then link both tools with a few clicks. This way, you can start advertising your products with Shopping ads in no time.

You can manually upload your product feed in Merchant Center in several ways: through a spreadsheet tool in Excel or Google sheets, through a website crawl or by entering a content API.

Do you have a Shopify webshop, Woocommerce, Magento or another popular CMS? Then you can easily integrate your product feed using built-in links or plug-ins.

5. ROAS

Thanks to the available data from your product feed, the merchant center and the associated Google Ads account will extract sales data from your campaigns. This gives you a clear picture of how much revenue you are generating from the advertising budget spent. From this data, the ROAS or Return On Ad Spend is calculated:

In essence, ROAS is a method of determining the effectiveness of an advertising campaign. For example, if a campaign generates $5,000 and costs $1,000, the ROAS is 5X or a ratio of 5:1.

This means that for every media budget we spend on ads, we generate five times as much revenue. It is crucial to consider the hours spent setting up these ads, as these costs have to be deducted.

The significant advantage of ROAS as a key metric is that you get a very good idea of the effectiveness of your campaigns, which makes optimization and scaling easier. On the other hand, the cost per conversion in a Google Search campaign is sometimes less transparent as it is sometimes difficult to put a price on the quality of a lead/conversion.

6. Dynamic remarketing/retargeting ads

Why do those sneakers you clicked on a few days ago on Zalando follow you everywhere? In the end, you don't have much choice, because just when you decide to keep your wallet closed, you see that particular pair of sneakers pop up again with a discount.

This is of course no coincidence, it's because Google gets all the data from analytics and stores it for a while. When you set up a dynamic remarketing campaign within Merchant Center, Google targets those visitors on your website who showed interest in specific items again, thanks to remarketing ads.

All E-commerce giants use this effective strategy with great confidence. Therefore, deploying this type of ad only has advantages:

• All the products in your product feed automatically appear when they match the personal interest of the website visitor.
• It dramatically increases the Customer Life Time Value for goods purchased periodically.
• It provides excellent exposure and creates brand loyalty.
• It attracts doubters back to your website to complete the purchase and completes the entire customer journey in your online marketing strategy.

You don’t have to search intensively to come across a dynamic add. For example, I recently searched for an Apple Watch on Coolblue, a product with a slightly higher price threshold which isn't an impulse buy. The result? I am typing this sentence with the same product on my left wrist, guilty as charged ...

Is it effective to use Google Shopping Ads and the Google Merchant Center?

If after reading this article, you still have doubts about the power of Google Shopping ads, you should reread it. Do you have a webshop with products and do you want to generate more sales like the big players such as bol.com, Zalando or De Bijenkorf? Then these kinds of ads can play a huge role in your success.

Google Shopping ads are accessible with relatively small budgets or even completely free. Would you like to see if these ads can take your store to another level? Then contact with us or send us an email for a further explanation!