Google Ads (Adwords) Tools for Online Retailers

For online retailers looking to launch Google Adwords campaigns or improve their current performance and increase sales, this Pay Per Click platform provides many tools and features to make that possible.
In fact, online retailers have more tools to make use of in Adwords than other advertisers and many of these allow for precise targeting and lead to a better ROI than standard tools.
Here are some of the leading tools to add to your repertoire of paid search tools:

Product Listing Ads (PLA)

Product Listing Ads or shopping ads allow retailers to promote their products in Google shopping. These listings display the product title, an image, price, description and customer reviews and this helps searchers to find the products they need at the lowest prices.

PLAs work similarly to price comparison websites like Kelkoo, Nextag and Shopzilla that allow shoppers to compare products from various retailers on price, reviews, performance and other features.
To get started with shopping ads, you first need to create a Google Merchant Center account where you will upload a datafeed and optimise it to maximise your performance in shopping listings. A datafeed is a file that lists of all the products you want to advertise on Google Shopping and you create it as a CSV file and upload it to your Merchant Center account.
Next, you will link your adwords and Merchant Center accounts and then create your shopping campaigns in Adwords to promote your products. One difference between PLA campaigns and search campaigns is that you do not use keyword targeting, however you can use them as negative keywords to block certain searches that are not converting or relevant to your business.

Search Network

Search advertising is what many advertisers on Google Adwords are familiar with. It basically allows you to target people who are actively searching for your products, services, brands or company and you can write targeted ads for these searchers.
Search ads are limited in terms of creatives, compared to display campaigns and you can only promote your business using text ads.
For online retailers, text ads and keywords allow for precise targeting and they can create tightly themed ad groups that are focused on specific products. It also allows for enhancing ads with ad extensions to promote the retailers phone number with call extensions, other product pages and delivery details with sitelinks extensions, retailer reviews and business addresses with location extensions.

Google Display Network (GDN)

The Google Display Network provides online retailers with many segmentation and targeting features. It has many more targeting options than the search network and some of these include:
– Demographic targeting
– Topic
– Interests
– Placements and apps
– Keywords
GDN also differs from search in that people aren’t actively searching for products or brands, but are on third party websites browsing and viewing those sites and apps. So, advertisers place their banner and text ads on these sites which are contextually relevant and then visitors can click through to the advertiser’s website if they are interested.

Remarketing

Remarketing is available for a wide range of businesses in Adwords except those that are in the health sector. It’s a feature that allows retailers to target people who’ve visited their sites before and then use banners and text ads to bring them back to the site. The aim here is to get these visitors to purchase from the online retailer by reminding them of the products and the website itself.

There are two ways of setting up remarketing and one is in adwords and the other is in analytics. For the analytics option, both accounts should be linked and the audience lists will be created in analytics and then imported in adwords. The advantage of setting up remarketing in analytics is that you won’t have to upload new code to your website every time you create a new audience to target – you do it once in analytics.

Dynamic Remarketing

Dynamic remarketing is more advanced remarketing and allows retailers that have a datafeed in Google Merchant Center to promote products that their visitors have viewed previously on their websites. So, visitors and customers can be reminded of products that they’ve looked at on the website by showing them those same products as they browse websites that are part of the Google Display network.
Dynamic remarketing is more technical and requires that you make changes to the analytics code and then re-upload it to your website.