Google (News - Alert) Shopping is a service which allows business owners to list their products within Google’s SERPs. It is available to users from both mobile and web apps.

These adverts stand out from standard Google Ads because they include images and a price in the result.

This format of ads is very popular among ecommerce businesses and the advertisers they employ to help sell their clients’ inventory.

If you are a marketing agency, freelancer or a business owner running your own ads, here are five tips to help you maximise your Google Shopping performance:

1. Prioritise Your Budget to the Best Sellers

When you’re starting out you may decide to throw all of your products into one campaign and see what works. This has its positives and negatives. The positives being that it’s the quickest way to get your products listed.

The big negative doing this is that your budget could be spent on products that aren’t converting and/or are providing a negative return on interest. Your best sellers or potential best sellers may be receiving very few impressions. If you can separate your best sellers into their own campaign(s) and dedicate a specific budget to them it allows for a greater ROI.

2. Build Negative Keyword Lists

One sure-fire way to spend your budget on irrelevant search results is to leave your campaigns running without adding any negatives. Ideally, you will have time to carry out keyword research before you start your campaign so that you can find irrelevant search queries to prevent your ads from appearing for.

Common keywords that appear in the ecommerce world include:

• Sell
• Ebay
• Amazon
• Free
• Second hand

Provided you are running a Standard Shopping campaign, as opposed to a Smart Shopping campaign, you are able to see a list keyword phrases your ads have appeared for. This will allow you to identify irrelevant terms that you can add as negatives.

If either of the steps so far or later in this post are too time consuming or difficult, our advice would be to hire a top freelance ppc consultant to optimise and manage your account, such as Barrie Smith. Based in the United Kingdom, he has a wealth of experience in managing ecommerce stores with a track record of success.

3. Audit and Optimise Your Product Feed

One thing that a top freelance PPC consultant or agency will do is audit and optimise your product feed based on the performance.

Your Google Product data feed is essential when it comes to succeeding with Google Shopping. This is the information you provide to Google to serve as your ads, which ultimately is what you want users to click on and then purchase from your site.

The feed contains all of the product information that is being served. Making sure your product titles are relevant will enhance their visibility and help to boost your click-through rate (CTR).

If you have products with low CTRs then auditing the feed until they improve to a satisfactory level is essential. This could be putting key details at the front of your product title or testing different product images.

4. Adjust your demographic targeting

Whilst not being as sophisticated as Facebook (News - Alert) Ads’ demographic targeting, it’s still essential that you make adjustments within Google too.

If a certain age category is performing significantly worse than the overall average and not returning a positive ROI then you may want to consider switching it off. The same could be said of genders too.

Likewise, if you are using Audiences then it’s worth keeping a track on how they are performing as others may be costing you money rather than making you profit.

5. Bid Optimisation

Whilst Google is pushing hard on their automated bidding, nearly all freelance PPC experts we have spoken to over the past 6 months have recommended a Manual CPC (News - Alert) strategy. They say this allows you to keep on top of your spending and get optimal results without overspending.

You can set a maximum cost per click for each product and it’s recommended you do so on how each is performing. Ultimately, you will want to prioritise your adjustments on those products that are giving you the best return on ad spend, and those that aren’t giving you any.