Google Shopping Features and Benefits – Make It Work for You!

To the uninitiated, online shopping platforms may seem overly complicated and confusing, but as the platform continues to grow, e-commerce options are quickly becoming very user-friendly and easy to navigate for consumers. It’s now simpler than ever before to purchase something, pay for it securely and, receive it promptly. If it’s not what you thought, or you need to return it for whatever reason, many online retailers make this process as smooth as possible because they know and realise that it could be the key to that customer shopping with them again, or not.

When it comes to Google Shopping, it acts a little differently to some of the other big name e-commerce options out there. It’s not a ‘shop’ within itself, but what it does do is essentially the hard work for the customer – it searched the internet for what you want. As a consumer, you determine the key factors you desire, such as the item, the quality and, the price, etc. and Google Shopping sources products for you so that you may compare what is available and right for you. Given this, it’s absolutely imperative that, from a business owner’s point of view, you’re providing Google Shopping with the specific product details it needs to make the user-experience as seamless as it can be. Google Shopping works so well for SMEs compared to large online retailers because the focus is on the product and price.

The features and benefits are clear for the consumer. The features and benefits for business owners running their own Google Shopping ventures is a little more detailed and here we’re going to discuss them so that you have a clear guide to help you get the most out of it.

Google Merchant Centre

Goggle Shopping Campaigns can be easy to set up; however, there is a lot of work to get to this stage. Firstly, you need to provide the ‘Google Merchant Centre’ with all of the details you have on your business and the products you want to sell. This is fed through to Google Shopping so that it can list your products for consumers to browse. Getting a Data Feed in the Merchant Centre is the key to Google Shopping. A data feed is all the information on your products, in a way that Google understands. This information is then used to make your Google Shopping ads. The shopping campaign is set up in the settings, where you can determine things such as when you want to run your shopping campaign, your bids, etc. Click the clip below for a brief overview.

Google Merchant Center- data feed overview

Custom Labels

In the past, Custom Labels was only for business owners who liked to group their products specifically. Here at SponsoredLinX we’ve seen people wanting their big ticket items all in one group, or items that were only shipped inside the state due to their size. Now with the requirement for all Google Shopping Merchant Centres to have their shipping information present, Custom Labels has now hit the spot light and is an essential feature for your shopping campaigns. Custom Labels can be used to lump items together based on shipping rates, for example, therefore making the shipping information easier to handle.

Reporting Capabilities

Google Shopping reports is based around a retail centric management system, much like something which would be used in a brick-and-mortar store. If your Google Shopping is partnered with E-commerce tracking, you’re going to have access to some great reporting facilities. For example, you can be looking at your ROI for a specific product, and start bidding based on this behaviour. You can also track and report based on a product type, but it can go even further than that and you can drill right down into an individual product. If you have a product that needs to be individually monitored, you can do that. Once you really get an idea of money coming in versus money going out from your reports, you can make your online moves more strategic. When you use strategy correctly, it is only a matter of time before you start experiencing growth. For online shopping, you must have a plan and work your sales towards it.

Our Top Three Features

Google is always working on its products to enhance the user experience (you the business owner) and our top tree features within Google Shopping are as follows:

Promotions – Google Shopping allows businesses to advertise promotions. This gives consumers another incentive to look at their item. An example would be something like ‘free shipping inside Australia’.

Benchmarking – It is now easier than ever to see how your business is going in comparison to the competition. Business can see benchmark bids and Click-through-Rates (CTR).

Individual Bids – Since the change from Product Listing Ads (PLA) to Google Shopping, which occurred in August last year, businesses can now do very specific bids, not just from product group/s, but brand, custom label and even down to specific items.

Google Shopping brings all your products together in one easy to use platform so users can be exposed to products relevant to their search query. To learn more about how we here at SponsoredLinX can help you with your Google Shopping efforts, please don’t hesitate to call us on 1300 859 600, or visit our website here. Remember, we’re holding a super informative Optimise Webinar entirely focused on E-commerce and in particular Google Shopping. Don’t miss your chance to attend and register for FREE today!

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