Make your products stand out and maximize your reach across Google’s channels

Official guide to reaching more customers across their shopping journeys online and in-store.

 
 

Who is this guide for?

This guide is best for beginner and intermediate retail advertisers who have already set up their free product listings in Google Merchant Center and linked their account to Google Ads. If you still need to upload your products to Merchant Center, you can find more guidance here.

Amidst ongoing uncertainty and the constantly-evolving consumer journey, people’s needs and preferences have become a lot more unpredictable, making it increasingly complex to engage them.  

In this guide, you’ll learn how you can make your products stand out and combine your marketing expertise with Google AI-powered ads solutions to drive profitable growth and keep pace with consumers’ rapidly changing behaviors. Your knowledge of your customers and your business are key factors in guiding Google AI to success and differentiating your business from your competitors.

 

 

Illustration: Shoes on a box

1. Enhance your product feed to help your Shopping ads stand out

  • Use high-quality, product-first visuals.

Why: Close-up product shots with a white background make it easy for customers to see product details, helping you drive more engagement. 

Note

In the U.S., you can update your assets in Manufacturer Center to include 3D images if available. You can use this attribute for shoes and home goods. Based on internal data, people engage nearly 50 percent more with a 3D image versus a static image.1

  • Ensure your product data is accurate and up-to-date.

Why: Accurate data, like price and availability, is key to ensure your ads showcase the information your customers are looking for. Upload rich product descriptions and update product prices and availability if they change often.

Tip

Having at least 10 product offers will improve the overall performance of your Merchant Center and Ads campaigns.

Note: In Comparison Shopping Service (CSS) program countries, you participate in Shopping ads through one or several CSSs of your choice. Some CSSs manage your product data and your campaigns on your behalf, while others provide tools allowing you to manage your setup yourself. Learn more about advertising with Comparison Shopping Services.


Illustration: 9 people. 3 have checkmarks on their shirts.

2. Reach your customers wherever they are


Illustrations of an upward arrow, bar graph, pi chart, and cash

3. Optimize your campaigns to drive more performance

  • Optimize your budget with Performance Planner

Why: Performance Planner lets you create plans for your advertising spend and assess how changes to campaigns might affect key metrics and overall performance. 

  • Understand your performance and customers with the Insights page.

Why: Featuring just-in-time trends and forward-looking insights, the Insights page in Google Ads gives you visibility into what’s driving your performance, while surfacing relevant trends in your market. By checking the Insights page often, you’ll be able to better understand how your customer interests and preferences are shifting. 

  • Apply recommendations to improve your performance 

Why: Recommendations can help you improve performance by surfacing the most impactful optimization opportunities based on your account's performance history, your campaign settings, trends across Google and more. Review your recommendations regularly to continuously identify new opportunities and apply recommendations that support your business goals

  • Check your optimization score to evaluate recommendations

Why: Each recommendation shows how much your optimization score, an estimate of how well your Google Ads account is set to perform, will be impacted when you apply it. Use optimization score to prioritize the recommendations that will have the biggest impact on performance. The score and recommendations are dynamic and tailored to your business, so it will reflect new recommendations as they arise, based on shifting demand and changes in the market. 

  • Improve product performance with Product insights

Why: The Product Issues column in the Products tab in Google Ads helps you understand the performance of individual products in your campaign and resolve potential issues that may be impacting your reach. From there, you can access insights to easily spot underperforming offers, identify products with missing feed attributes, and see how competitive your products' bids are.

  • Evaluate your product strategy with Merchant Center reporting

Why: Make inventory decisions and prioritize which products to show in your advertising campaigns with the best sellers report. With this information, you can improve your pricing and bidding strategies on top products using insights from the price competitiveness report. Use the Reporting API to ingest and analyze the data from these and other Merchant Center reports at scale.

Note

Check out the 2023 Global Google Retail Guide to explore a collection of useful tools, product recommendations, and consumer insights that will help you achieve your business and marketing objectives.

To hear from product specialists on driving consistent online sales amid changing consumer behavior, tune in to Google Ads Academy: Grow Profitable Online Sales

 

 

1. Google Internal Data
2. Google-commissioned Ipsos Consumer Continuous study, AU, BR, CA, CN, FR, DE, IN, IT, JP, KR, MX, ES, ZA, U.K., U.S., ~n=500–1,000 online consumers 18+ per market, July 7, 2022–July 10, 2022
3. Google-commissioned Ipsos Consumer Continuous study, AU, BR, CA, CN, FR, DE, IN, IT, JP, KR, MX, ZA, ES, U.K., U.S., ~n=500–1,000 online consumers 18+ per market, Nov. 10, 2022–Nov. 13, 2022.
4. Google Data, Global, Ads, October 2022 - March 2023.
5. Google data, Global, November 2022
6. Google data, Global, November 2022

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