Shopping Ads for a Small Store

A photo and a price in the results

Search for maternity jeans and, above or beside the ordinary results, a row of product photos often appears, each with a price and a store name.

Those are Shopping ads. Nobody chose a keyword for them. They come from a feed of products the store sends to Google, and Google decides which searches each product matches.

For a small store they can be the most direct ad there is, because the shopper sees the product and the price before clicking. They can also be an expensive way to show a product to people comparing prices.

How they work

Your products live in a Merchant Center account, as a feed: a file or connection listing every item with its title, description, photo, price and availability.

An AdWords Shopping campaign uses that feed. Instead of keywords, you bid on groups of products, divided by category, brand or labels you choose, and pay when someone clicks.

Because the feed decides what a product appears for, the quality of the feed matters more than anything in the campaign settings.

What the feed needs

• A title naming the product plainly, in a shopper's words.
• A clean photo of the product, with no text across it.
• The price exactly as the product page shows it.
• Availability that changes when stock does.
• Barcode numbers for branded products, from the manufacturer's label.
• Variants, such as each size and colour, listed properly.

The first decides which searches a product can appear for. A style name means nothing to a searcher; the brand, the product type and its main feature match what people actually type.

Prices and stock that match the page

Google compares the feed with your product pages. When the price or availability in the feed differs from the page, products are disapproved, and repeated mismatches can put the whole account at risk.

Sale prices belong in their own field, with start and end dates, rather than replacing the regular price by hand.

The feed has to update as often as stock changes. For a store that sells out of popular sizes daily, a weekly upload is a promise the shelves cannot keep.

The store has to be ready too

Merchant Center checks the store as well as the products. The checkout needs to be secure, on HTTPS, and the site needs clear contact details and a returns policy.

Shipping costs set in Merchant Center must match what the checkout charges. A shopper who sees free shipping in the ad and a fee at checkout leaves, and the mismatch can get products disapproved.

Where small stores win and lose

Shopping ads put your price beside everyone else's. For an identical branded product that large retailers sell for less, you pay for clicks from people who are comparing prices and will buy elsewhere.

Small stores do better with products the large retailers do not carry: their own label, specialist items, brands with limited distribution, or products where local pickup matters.

Start with those. They are where the photo and the price work for you rather than against you.

A worked example

A maternity clothing boutique on a suburban high street also sells online: a few hundred items from several brands, plus a small own label of nursing tops.

Its first try at Shopping ads used a plugin's default feed and stalled within a week. Most products were disapproved.

The reasons were ordinary. Titles were style names, sizes were rolled into single items, branded pieces had no barcode numbers, and the feed updated weekly while popular sizes sold out daily.

So the feed promised sizes that had already gone, and Merchant Center flagged the difference between feed and page.

The fix started with titles rewritten as brand, product type and main feature. Each size and colour became its own item under one product, and branded pieces got their barcode numbers.

The own label was marked as having no barcode, and the feed now refreshes nightly from the store's stock.

The campaign restarted with the own label and the smaller brands, the products large retailers carry least. The first week's search terms included sewing patterns, which became negative keywords.

Starting small

Begin with one campaign, the products where you compete best, and a daily budget you would be comfortable spending for a month while you learn.

Target the provinces you actually ship to, with prices in Canadian dollars.

Once a week, read the search terms report, which lists the searches your products actually appeared for. Add the ones that will never buy as negative keywords, which stop the products showing for them.

A small store gets few clicks a day, so judge each change over weeks rather than days.

Reading the results

Track sales from the ads with AdWords conversion tracking on the order confirmation page. Without it, you can see clicks but not which of them bought.

Then look product by product. A product with many clicks and no sales may be priced above the market or shown with a weak photo. One that sells steadily deserves more of the spend.

Products that cost more in clicks than they earn can be excluded, which is a normal part of running these campaigns rather than a failure.

The counter-case

Some stores should wait. One with a handful of products, or one-of-a-kind pieces nobody searches for by name, may find too few matching searches to learn anything.

A store selling the same branded products as large retailers, at higher prices, pays for the comparison and rarely wins it.

And a store whose stock cannot be kept accurate, or whose checkout is not yet secure, should fix that first, since the feed will be rejected anyway.

For a store with the right products, a clean feed comes first and the campaign second.

Before the first campaign

1. Put the checkout on HTTPS.
2. Rewrite product titles in shoppers' words.
3. Add barcode numbers for branded products.
4. Set the feed to update whenever stock changes.
5. Match shipping settings to your checkout.
6. Start with one campaign and your best products.
7. Read the search terms every week.

Step four is where small stores most often come unstuck. A feed that lags behind the shelves turns ads into promises the store cannot keep, and Merchant Center notices.

Adjusting bids by device once the campaign runs follows the same logic as mobile bid adjustments for a business that takes calls.

Frequently asked questions

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