How To Optimize Your Google Ads Shopping Feed

So, we often, as you know, get people coming to us because they run shopping ads and they've got a product to sell. But here's a question that does come up, and this particular one was how do I select keywords for my shopping campaign? I just can't see how to set it up correctly. You can't? Okay, so shopping ads cannot use keywords.

Google will show you ads. So, the way the shopping ads work is through the Google Merchant Center, which is called the GMC. You set up your products, your feed in there, all your products in there. Google Merchant Center or Google will approve or disapprove those products, first of all. And you need to have all these things like your shipping terms, refund any offer like the sale price you are running.

All of this goes in Merchant Center and the ads. And then when you go to Google and search for, let's say, buy iPhone, you will have those four ads. The text ads with the text-only come up but above it, and sometimes on the right-hand side as well on the desktop or laptop. But nowadays it comes up on the top.

You will see the ads with the photo of the product, the name of the product, the price and the company name. So that is a very highly visual product ad. So, you can see the product, the colour of the product, whether it's blue, black, green or whatever. And then the price over there as well. And if it's a sale going on, then it will have a crossed-out price and then the sale price as well.

So that's what shopping ads are all about. And you want them to pop up on Google. Those are the only ads which come up, which are not text ads on the Google page. So, we have video ads. They don't show up on the Google page or the search page and the display banner ads, which we call them.

They don't show up, only shopping ads. So, it's a very powerful way of bringing that product in front of your right audience because the intent is there. People are searching. And the way Google search shows these ads is brilliant. And the algorithm is getting better and better. If somebody's searching for an iPhone. You will see all the pictures of iPhones at the top and not Samsung because again, it's apples for apples.

What you are looking for. So, you cannot control shopping with search ads, but what you can do is control them with negative keywords. So, if you don't want your ads, shopping ads to be shown for a particular product or a search term, you keep stuffing them in your account and then Google is going to just narrow it down to those search terms or keywords where you want your ads to show up.

Yeah, that's really brilliant. And we work in this world, but you know, you think of our own behaviour, you just cannot avoid being drawn to those shopping ads. Your eye just goes to that highly visual place and you would automatically stay there and quickly shift through those images, don't you? To say, yeah, that's the one I was thinking of.

You can't be bothered to even look down and read. So really powerful, isn't it? So, the best tip I can give you about shopping ads is to make sure that your Google Merchant Center feed is clean. By clean, what I mean is don't have too many disapproved products in there because Google is going to penalize you that you're not paying attention to what I'm saying.

And you need to follow what Google is asking you to do to the dot and optimize it so that Google knows that this is an iPhone, this is a Samsung phone, this is a Google Pixel phone and so on. Perfect. Thanks for that.