Shopping Campaigns Can Help Grow Your Online Store

ecommerce-adwords-tipsIt isn’t unusual for businesses, no matter their size, to have online stores where their customers can browse and purchase goods. In fact, many businesses rely solely on the online model to propel their sales. You may be one of those select merchants. You may also be concerned about how to grow your sales in the online arena.

Your traditional AdWords text ads may already drive traffic to your website, but did you know that specialized AdWords shopping campaigns can help display your product catalog even better? What you get from text ads is exactly that: text. With shopping campaigns, though, you can display your product attributes in images, prices, and short descriptions to Google searchers before they even click on your campaign.

Building a Shopping Campaign

There are a few steps you need to take when setting up your new shopping campaign. Atria will cover the basics here, but for a detailed list of instructions, you can see the AdWords help page.

First, reach the Shopping selector after clicking “+Campaign” in the Campaigns tab of your AdWords dashboard. This will lead you to a series of prompts that define the details of your campaign. Among these prompts, you will add the country in which you sell products and the Merchant ID that will inform your new campaign. You will also be able to choose your bid strategy and in what countries you want your ads to appear. The Maximize Clicks strategy can work well here.

This all reflects the need for you to create a Google Merchant Center account, which acts as a repository for online listings of your products that also helps you track first-time and repeat buyers. AdWords shopping campaigns draw necessary information from your Merchant Center account such as the keywords relevant to your products. Therefore, if you maintain your online store then your ads will follow suit and be better primed to grab more customers.

Don’t Step on Your Own Feet

One of the most difficult parts of using any new online system is getting used to its intricacies. Although it would be impossible to cover every use case in this single blog post, we want to offer you an important chunk of advice: don’t get in your own way.

Just as the AdWords setup demands the creation of a Merchant Center account, the proper use of Merchant Center and shopping campaigns demands that you keep a watchful eye on your product descriptions.

You have probably used AdWords text ads before. You know that it would be unwise to use ineffective keywords and similar or repeating keywords – they simply won’t draw in buyers. Merchant Center uses your product group descriptions as your keywords, so it can be easy to overlap your work. Search Engine Journal remarks that two separate product groups that respectively contain a product type of “television” and brand of “LG” would have all your LG televisions competing against themselves in AdWords bids.

As much as possible, you will want to group your similar products into collective product groups. You want to reach customers, not step on your own feet.

There is no doubt that your website and AdWords account will need consistent attention. If all of this seems overwhelming, you’re not alone. Many business owners decide that their time is better spent focusing on other parts of their business. What is your time worth? How many hours have you already put into understanding Adwords?

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