This onboarding guide will walk you through the steps you need to take to get started with advertising your products on Google, from uploading your product data in Google Merchant Center to creating and monitoring Shopping ads in Google Ads.
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Before you begin
To set up your Shopping ads, you need to:- Add your products to Google Merchant Center so that they can appear organically across Google. When you're ready, you can promote your products to reach more customers and drive sales. Learn how to get started with Merchant Center.
- Create a campaign in Google Ads to advertise your added products. Learn more from Your guide to Google Ads.
By using Google Merchant Center and Google Ads together, you will be able to promote your products by providing customers detailed information about what you're selling before they even click your ad, reach a wider audience of potential customers and track the performance of your products over time by using retail-centric reporting tools.
Note:
- If you already use Google Merchant Center but are not yet familiar with Google Ads, it’s best to create your campaign in Merchant Center instead.
- In countries that participate in the Comparison Shopping Service (CSS) program, you can participate in Shopping ads through one or several CSSs of your choice. Some CSSs manage your product data and campaigns on your behalf, while others provide tools that allow you to manage your setup yourself. Learn more About advertising with Comparison Shopping Services.
Onboard to Google Merchant Center
- Sign up for Google Merchant Center, where you’ll add information about your business and products.
- Verify your online store. If you run into any issues, learn how to fix verification issues.
- Upload your product data either automatically from your online store or by manually uploading a file with all your product details, such as price, title, image, etc. Refer to the product specifications for more information. If you encounter any issues, refer to troubleshooting your data source.
- Your products will be reviewed for compliance with Google policies and regulations. If there are any issues detected, you can find them in the Needs attention tab.
- (Optional): You can enhance your product data by providing additional information such as promotions, shipping, estimated delivery dates. Learn more about annotations and badges in Shopping ads and organically showing products across Google.
Onboard to Google Ads
- Create a Google Ads account.
- After you've created a Google Ads account, enter your billing information.If you run into any problems, refer to billing & payments issues.
- Next, link your Google Ads account to your Google Merchant Center. This is how your campaigns will receive product information to generate Shopping ads.
- Set up conversion tracking for your website. If conversion tracking is not active, Google Ads may limit your campaign spend. If you run into issues, refer to this article for help.
Tip: If you are an advanced advertiser, consider setting up conversions with cart data, which is an extension to conversion tracking on your website. Using this you can provide the details of the products that are sold for each transaction. By providing this additional information, you can understand your ads’ performance and drive further optimizations.
- (Optional but highly recommended): Set up your data segments to re-engage with your customers by adding your website and app visitors. You can also use dynamic remarketing to show ads to your past site visitors and customize those ads based on the section of your site that people visited the most.
- Before you create your first campaign, make sure you meet the Shopping ads requirements. If you have any issues, refer to Policy Issues.
- Create your campaign. Shopping ads can be served by both Performance Max and Shopping campaigns. Performance Max campaigns are the best way to maximize your online sales as they reach a wider audience by serving your products to all Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. Learn more about the differences between Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns, and about how to create a Performance Max campaign and how to create a Standard Shopping campaign.
Note: After you’ve created your campaign, it takes 1 to 2 days for newly created campaigns to be reviewed to ensure that they meet all policy requirements.
Monitor Ad Performance
Note: Your campaign may require up to 2 weeks to learn. Campaign performance may fluctuate during this time due to the learning period, as your bid strategy is still learning. Learn more about Duration of the learning period for campaigns and what affects it.- If your campaign is not serving or has low traffic, review common reasons and learn how you can troubleshoot by referring to Google Ads Performance Max campaign not running or low traffic and Google Ads Standard Shopping campaign not running or low traffic.
- If all campaigns with a Merchant Center feed in your Google Ads account are not serving, check your Google Merchant Center Account for issues.
- If your campaign performance is fluctuating, review the different reasons why this may happen. Learn more about Performance Max campaign performance fluctuations and Standard Shopping campaign Performance fluctuations.
- To improve your ads performance, adopt best practices from optimize your Performance Max campaign and Monitor and optimize your Standard Shopping campaigns.
- Measuring the success of a campaign is essential to ensuring that your marketing efforts are effective and that you are getting a return on your investment. There are many ways to measure the result of your campaigns. If you have conversions with cart data set up, you can review reports to understand the revenue and profit generated by your campaigns. Alternatively, if you have conversion tracking, here are metrics to review success.
