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Run a Shopping campaign to advertise your store inventory
A Shopping campaign allows you to organize and custom-promote your entire inventory through Google Ads. This can help retail businesses generate more sales and save time organizing their inventory.
With Shopping campaigns, instead of choosing keywords, you set up a product feed in Google Merchant Center. Google will use that feed to show ads (called Shopping ads) with a picture of your item, its price, and your store name. Here are some benefits of using Shopping campaigns:
- More traffic and leads: Many businesses experience significantly higher clickthrough rates (CTR) with Shopping ads compared to text ads shown in the same location for shopping searches on Google.
- Better qualified leads: Increase the quality of your leads by featuring product information directly in your ads to help shoppers make informed purchase decisions. This makes shoppers more likely to complete a purchase on your site.
- Automated targeting: Instead of keywords, Shopping ads use the product attributes you defined in your data feed to show your ads on relevant searches.
- Broader reach: More than one of your Shopping ads can appear for a given customer search and, if relevant, a Shopping ad and a text ad can also appear at the same time. This means your reach with shoppers for a single search could double.
To run a Shopping campaign, you’ll need to have a Google Merchant Center account linked to your Google Ads account.
Learn how to set up your Shopping campaign.
Use remarketing lists to reach returning visitors
Remarketing lets you show ads to people who've previously visited your website. This is a great way for businesses to get higher returns because returning visitors might be more receptive to their ads and special offers. By tailoring your message to appeal to returning customers, you can bring them back to your site and drive more sales.
To set up remarketing, you'll need to insert a piece of code (called a remarketing tag) to all the pages of your website. When shoppers come to your site, they'll be added to your remarketing list. You can then build a remarketing campaign with a specific message to show only to people on that list.
There are several ways to define who to add to your remarketing list. You can set up lists for people who visited a certain page, or you can create more advanced lists using templates and rules. Here are some common types of remarketing lists:
- General site visitors: The most basic way to remarket is to reach all the visitors to your website. This means that anyone who visits your website can see your remarketing ads. This is the simplest starting point for remarketing lists—people who’ve indicated any kind of interest in your brand by visiting your site.
- Product categories: To showcase ads for different products, you can create a remarketing list for your most popular product categories. This way, if users have checked out that section of your site, you can create tailored ads for them.
- Shopping cart abandoners: With remarketing, you can show ads targeted to people who've added items to their shopping carts without completing their purchase. Since these customers are often very close to making a purchasing decision, it can be a valuable opportunity to reach out to them and help them make the sale.
Learn how to create a remarketing list.
Use Ecommerce tracking to see what visitors buy through your site
If you're using Analytics, Ecommerce tracking can help you find out what visitors buy through your site, including:
- Products: Which products they buy, in what quantity, and the revenue generated by those products. This helps you understand which of your products sell well, and by inference, which of your products are best suited for your customer base and which ones are supported by your best marketing efforts. A poorly selling product may not necessarily be the wrong product, but may have the wrong marketing behind it.
- Transactions: The revenue per transaction, and the number of products per transaction. For example, if the number of products per transaction is lower than you'd like, you might benefit from offering better quantity discounts, or eliminating shipping costs if customers meet a minimum dollar amount.
- Time to purchase: The number of days and number of visits it takes to purchase, starting from the most recent campaign through the completed transaction. For example, if your sales cycles are stable, or fluctuate predictably based on product or season, then you can use that information (in conjunction with overall sales forecasts) to make reliable predictions about revenue. If customers routinely make numerous visits before they purchase, you might think about a site design that leads more easily to your purchase pages, or options that let users compare your products and prices to your competitors'.
Learn how to set up Ecommerce tracking.
