How To Setup A Google Shopping Campaign

A Google Shopping campaign is one of the primary campaign types in Google Ads. This campaign type allows you to target people searching for your products on Google and partner sites with product ads.

 

Unlike text ads which appear with a few lines of text, product ads show an image, price, description and title and attract people who are at the later stages of the buying funnel.

 

Where do Ads appear?

Your product ads appear in the Google search results when people use search queries related to your products. These appear above or to the right of the text ads and you can also see them on the Shopping page.

 

 

Set up Google Merchant Center

To promote your products with a Google shopping campaign, you will need to create a Merchant Center account. This is where you will upload your products and update them so they can appear in your campaign in Google Ads and then you can promote them.

 

Visit merchants.google.com to create a new account or login to an existing account. Follow the instructions there to provide your details and add and claim your website.

The Tools and Settings section in your account is where you can update your business details, submit your URL, provide shipping details, upload a logo, link accounts, add users and more.

 

Set up Google Ads

Next, you will need to create a Google Ads account where you will create a campaign to promote your products. Go to ads.google.com to create an account or login to an existing account

 

 

Add your billing details as soon as you create your account.

 

Link Google Ads and Merchant Center

Next, you will link your Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts.

 

Follow these steps:

 

1. Login to Google Merchant Center at merchants.google.com
2. Click the cogwheel in the top right section of your account
3. Click the ‘Linked accounts’ link
4. On the Google Ads page, which is the default landing page, you will see the ‘Link account’ link. Click that.
5. A dialog box opens where you can add the customer ID for the Google Ads account you created. This is a 10-digit number and you will find it in your Google Ads account
6. Click the ‘Send link request’ link
7. Login to your Google Ads account at google.com
8. Click the ‘Tools & Settings’ link in the top right corner
9. Next, click ‘Linked accounts’ under the SETUP section
10. You will see the Google Merchant Center section and clicking the ‘Details’ link takes you to a page where you will see the request that you sent and you can accept it there

 

Submit a Feed

Next , you will submit a feed with a list of all the products that you want to promote. There are a number of ways to do this. In your Merchant Center account, click the ‘Products’ link in the left menu and then click ‘Feeds’.

 

Follow the steps in there to submit your feed and the options available include uploading a spreadsheet, providing a feed through Google Sheets and others. The quickest way to get started is to use the Website Crawl option which scans your website for all products and adds them.

 

Your products will be reviewed by the Google team and this usually takes up to three working days. If the products are approved, then you are ready to move on to the next stage and set up your Google shopping campaign.

 

However, some products may be disapproved for a number of policy variations and you can follow the guidance to update them and get them approved.

 

Sometimes there could be a bigger problem maybe with your website, or product details, or missing values which can lead to all the products being disapproved. Again, just read the policy violation and follow the instructions to fix them.

 

 

Create a Google Shopping Campaign

 

Follow the steps below to create your campaign:

 

1. Login to your Google Ads account at ads.google.com
2. Click the ‘Campaigns’ link in the left page menu
3. Click the plus button, then click ‘New Campaign’
4. Choose the ‘Sales’ goal
5. Select the Shopping campaign type
6. Select the Merchant Center account you created
7. Choose the Standard Shopping campaign subtype
8. Name your campaign
9. Choose the bidding strategy. It’s best to start with an automated bid strategy like Maximise Clicks to get as many clicks as possible for your budget. You can set a maximum cost per click bid limit to control how much you will spend
10. Set a budget that you are comfortable with, but reasonable enough to get you enough traffic that you can quickly review
11. Choose the location you want to target. You can choose multiple countries but you are best starting with one and then rolling out to others as performance improves
12. Choose your ad group name
13. And click the ‘Create Campaign’ button

 

Go Live!

After creating your campaign your ads will start running if they are all approved and ready. On the product page in your campaign you can see which products are active and ready to serve.