The 10-Minute Summary — Google Shopping Ads course.
Whether you want to have a quick guide on what is Google Shopping ads or look for a quick study exam guide before taking Google’s assessment, here you go. Below is my summary of 7 key points that will help you ace the exam like a boss and get certified as you wish.
As you may know, SkillShop with Google is a platform where you can grow your skills using Google advertising tools to advertise your business online and get certified which is usually valid for a year. And yes it’s totally free which is a great thing for a student like me.
Google Ads is one of the most widely-used Google advertising tools industry-wide. Under Google Ads umbrella, they offer courses like Ads Search, Ads Display, Ads Video, and Ads Measurement.
Google Shopping Ads is one of them.
Who is this course for?
Either student like me who or retailers who wants know the benefits of using Google tools.
What is the objective of this course?
Of course, it helps you to (1) understand about Shopping ads, (2) know how to set up a campaign, (3) when to use what bidding strategy to use and (4) how to utilize Google Ads Performance Planner to plan ahead your budget.
Summary of Study Shopping Ads course:
- Grow your retail business with Google
- Reach more customers with Shopping campaigns
- Drive customers in-store with Local Product Ads
- Promote your brand with Showcase Shopping ads
- Grow your business with Google Ads
- Increase efficiency with Automated bidding
- Increase conversions with Performance Planner
For the sake of a 10-minute article, please excuse me to jump to part 2.
2. Reach more customers with Shopping campaigns
Shopping campaigns promote the retailer’s online and local inventory.
Shopping ads show a photo of your product, title, price, and store name. The retailer uses Merchant Center product data to decide how and where to show her ads. Google uses the google datasheet to match a shopper’s search keyword to her ads to ensure the relevancy. It can appear on top ad placement (desktop, mobile), right-side ad placement on google.com (desktop), and google shopping property.
3. Drive customers in-store with Local Product Ads
The goal is to drive nearby shoppers to your physical store. This is done via Local Inventory Ads (LIA) which displays the local inventory to the shoppers googling the relevant keywords
On top of that, Local Catalog Ads (LCA) helps you to reach more mobile shoppers by highlighting store deals and inventory. To do so, LCA pulls product feed data from LIA to reach viewers of Display ads.
4. Promote your brand with Showcase Shopping ads
Showcase Shopping ads capture broader queries where shoppers are not sure about the brand they want to buy and where. It presents a collection of products to introduce shoppers to your brand so that you can influence them at the start of their shopping journey. It can appear on mobile, desktop on Google Search.
5. Grow your business with Google Ads
Google Ads help you advance your business goals
- by driving online, in-app, in-person, and over-the-phone sales
- by building awareness of your brand
- by influencing consideration of your products/services
4 Campaign Types
- Search: ads show up next to Google search results, on other Google partner sites like Youtube, when people search for products/services you offer.
- Video: ads appear on their own or within other streaming video content on Youtube & across Google Display Network.
- Shopping: ads promote your products by giving users detailed info about what you’re selling; appear on Google Shopping & next to search results.
- App: ads drive engagement, app installs, and in-app purchases; appear across the Google Search, Display Network, Google Play & Youtube.
6. Increase efficiency with Automated bidding
What is Automated Bidding?
Automated Bidding is a bidding strategy that automatically sets bids for your ads based on that ad’s likelihood to result in a click or conversion. Unlike Manual CPC bidding, there’s no need to manually update bids for specific ad groups or keywords.
4 benefits
Machine learning, time saved, auction-time bidding, depth of signal used & cross-analysis.
Choose the right bidding strategy
Each type of automated bid strategy is designed to help you achieve a specific goal for your business.
+---------------+------------+-------------------------------------+
| Bidding type | Goal | Bid strat | Use Cases |
+---------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| Awareness | Visibility | TgtImpre.S | raise awareness |
| Consideration | Click | Max clicks | budget-constrained |
| Conversion | Conversion | Max conversion/ tCPA/ eCPC |
| Revenue | Revenue | Target ROAS| max rev w/ tgt ROAS |
+---------------+------------+-------------------------------------+Conversion-based bidding type
Maximize conversions: drive volume within your budget. Use case: advertisers want to max number of conversions and/or don’t have an explicit CPA/ROAS goal.
Target cost-per-acquisition (tCPA): automatically set bid to help you increase conversions while reaching your average CPA goal. Use case: lead generation
Enhanced cost-per-click (eCPC): automatically adjusts your manual bid up or down based on each click’s likelihood to result in a conversion. Use case: For Search, this is for advertisers who want to set the core bid manually or through a 3rd party bidding tool. For Display, this is for advertisers who don’t have conversion tracking, use a third-party bidding system or insist on setting bids manually with an added layer of real-time optimization. It’s also great for lead generation and to drive online sales.
7. Increase conversions with Performance Planner
3 main points
- Google Ads Performance Planner tool helps you forecast and determine your budgets while also improving your return on investment.
- It’s recommended to use it monthly.
- It’s best practice to separate campaigns with different marketing objectives into different Performance Planner plans, so that spend is not reallocated between two different marketing budgets or objectives.
So, that’s all for the summary. Hope that helps!
