What Are Google Product Ads?

Google product ads, also known as Shopping ads allow advertisers to promote their products on Google.com, its search partner sites and the Display network. As a retailer you can promote your online and local inventory with Shopping ads and boost traffic to your website or local store.

To get started, you will create and upload a product feed in Google Merchant Centre. And then you will link this to your Google Ads account and create a Shopping campaign.

Google Product Ads benefits

1. Cost-effective – running Google product ads can be very cost effective because you only pay for clicks. It’s a performance based platform like your Search campaigns and means you only pay for results, like visitors to your website. On average though, Shopping ads have lower cost per click rates than Search and Display campaigns and that’s because there is usually less competition. And so, many advertisers start with a small budget like £300 or $300 per month and then increase it as performance improves.
2. Better conversion rates – compared to other campaign types in Google Ads, Shopping ads on average have better conversion rates.
3. Powerful reporting – You can monitor how your products are performing at many levels of granularity. For example, you can see how many clicks a specific item got just by filtering your products view – no new product groups needed. And you can use benchmarking data to get insights into your competitive landscape.
4. Easier to manage – Instead of keywords, Shopping ads use product attributes (that you define in your Merchant Center data feed) to show your ads on relevant searches. You can browse your inventory directly in Google Ads and create product groups for the items you want to bid on.
5. Better engagement – With Shopping campaigns, customers can view and interact with attractive and engaging ads that give them a better sense of the product before they open the ad.
6. Better qualified leads – Increase the quality of your leads by featuring product information directly in your ads. Shoppers are more likely to purchase on your site if they’re better informed before opening the ad.
7. Broader presence – It’s possible that more than one of your Shopping ads will appear for a given search, and a Shopping ad and a text ad could both appear at the same time – doubling your reach!

What do they look like?

Google product ads include some key features that make them effective in driving sales. This includes an image, a title, a price, reviews and the Merchant name. And so they help to position your products to the right people, who are at the later stages of the buying stage and are likely to purchase.

This is how it appears on the Google search results page above or to the right of the text ad and organic results.

And when you move your mouse over the product ad, it expands and reveals more details like a return policy and the option to compare related products from 50+ shops.

Clicking the Shopping page on Google reveals even more details

You are able to see more details like shipping and delivery settings. And clicking one of the listings, expands it and reveals more images, the product description, product details and lot more. And this is before you even click through to the website.

To the left of the product listings, there are filtering options that allow you to update and see only products you are most interested in. You can filter by price, colour, type, department, delivery, size, merchant and a host of other options.

Where do they appear?

Google has a large network of websites and apps that display ads for their advertisers. This includes the Google Network Members list of over 3 million global websites and apps that display ads in text, display, image and video formats.

Google has also partnered with hundreds of search partner sites that includes its own properties like YouTube, Maps, Shopping, Play and more. So, your Google product ads will appear on Google.com and its properties listed above and hundreds of other search partner websites.

How do I create Google product ads?

You can follow the advice from Google on how to setup your shopping ads here.

First, you will need to create a Google Merchant Centre account at merchants.google.com. Next, you should provide a product feed of all the products that you would like to promote. Google has instructions on how to do that here.

Then you should create a Google Ads account at ads.google.com and link it to your Merchant Centre account. When your products have been approved and are ready, you can create a campaign in Google Ads to promote them. Follow the instructions in my blog post on setting up a Shopping campaign.