The Shopify Merchant community is one of the fastest-growing online marketplaces observed in the last decade. More than 1.75 million merchants are selling their products on Shopify—a crazy number when you think about it!
Shopify has provided a platform for merchants to showcase their products in a tailored fashion. While Shopify in itself has proven to be sufficient—merchants still feel the need to broaden their horizons and reach a wider audience through multichannel marketing.
Enter–Google Shopping Ads.
Google Shopping Ads are picture and text-based ads you see each time you search for a product-related query (but you probably already knew that).
Several merchants have connected their Shopify stores to Google Merchant Center—acting as an intermediary for Google Shopping Ads for your Shopify Store.
Google Shopping Ads for your Shopify store are the greatest benefaction to generating qualifying leads.
Not only do Shopping Ads generate leads, but they also offer you a higher Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and are responsible for creating retail-centric campaigns that can help you increase your sales over time (if used correctly).
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Why Aren’t You Getting Traffic From Google Shopping Ads For Your Shopify Store?
- One of the biggest reasons why you aren’t getting enough traffic from Google Shopping Ads is that your Google Merchant Account has issues such as disapprovals, errors, and warnings. In 2022, it was found that around 7% of product Listings were rejected because they violated the Shopping ads policy due to product identification issues, excessive capitalization, generic image, including promotional overlay on the image, image is too small, or invalid value.
- Another reason might be that your products are not showing up due to low-quality listings or low bids. (You can learn more about how to use Google Shopping Bidding Strategies here)
- The Google Channel App on Shopify may have a slower frequency of updating your product information onto Google Merchant Centre or uploading incorrect data. Uploading your product Data feed with accurate synchronization is highly recommended. You can combat this flaw by using Adnabu’s Data Feed App.
These are just a few reasons why your Shopping Ads might not be performing at their optimum levels. There can be a multitude of other factors that can influence the traffic that Google Shopping Ads can generate on your store.
There are several ways that you can use to increase your Return on Ads Spend (ROAS). Keep scrolling to discover ways that can help you yield high results and turn your Google Shopping Ads for your Shopify Store profitable.
How to Boost Google Shopping Ads Performance On Your Shopify Store?
When setting up Google Shopping Ads for Shopify, it is extremely important to take note of the fact that Shopping ads don’t only appear in Google’s standard search results anymore.
They are also visible on the Shopping tab, on search partner websites, in the price comparison Shopping service and apps (iOS and Android), and even on YouTube and the Google Display Network.
Because Shopping ads are so useful for shoppers and popular with advertisers, Google has steadily expanded Shopping’s reach, and that means more opportunities to reach shoppers.
Your product feed data is stored and updated by the Google Merchant Center every single day. Each time you add a new product to your store or a new variant, the data of the product must be fed into the Merchant Center to ensure optimal working.
It can be a hassle to gather and jot down data every single day into an XML file and upload that file to Google Merchant Center. Using product feed management apps makes a lot of your work easier and faster.
Here are five tips that will help you boost your Google Shopping Ads performance for your Shopify Store.
Google Shopping Tip #1 – Fixing Google Merchant Center Errors
Retailers often face a problem with fixing errors that have been displayed in Google Merchant Center. These may act as contributors to the poor performance of Google Shopping Ads.
Since Google Merchant Center (Google Merchant Center) plays a key role in displaying your ads in response to relevant queries, it is quite important to ensure that your Google Merchant Center is error-free and doesn’t hamper the performance of your Google Shopping Ads.
Listed below are some of the common errors that can be attributed to the decline in your Shopping Ads performance. These may be ways that can improve your ad performance, or they may be highly severe, which may be disastrous for your business.
In order to make it easy for you to understand them, google has segregated issues into three types:
- Errors that require immediate and priority attention, which may result in account suspension (not always),
- Warnings that may become potentially harmful and decrease your performance and finally,
- Notifications that can be treated as suggestions to improve your performance.
- Availability Errors
Availability of a product is a predefined field that can only contain either of the three values:
- In Stock
- Out of Stock
- Preorder
Any Input other than this is going to get the product disapproved.
There can be three types of Availability errors on Google Merchant Center.
Invalid Value or Missing Value
There can be a possibility that the product data feed that was submitted may contain a value that is unreadable by the Google Merchant Center, or the submission of the value has been skipped altogether. For eg, using words such as ‘True’ or ‘False’ within the ‘is_available’ field will result in the creation of an error.
Keep in mind that this error can be rectified by the use of the correct value, and failure to do so will ultimately affect not only the performance of your Shopping Ads but will also ultimately end with an account suspension.
Unclear Value On Your Shopify Store
When a user clicks on a Google Shopping Ad, ideally, they would be directed to the landing page, i.e., the product page. However, in case of a lack of availability on your landing page, Google Merchant Center will report it as an error to you.
This prevents customers from having a bad experience that may deter them away from visiting your store ever again. To prevent this, you can verify the availability of the product on your landing page and ensure that the data present is included in your structure data markup. You can visit Google’s Structured Data Testing Page to rectify this.
Automatic Item Updates Are Set To Active
When Google updates your data due to a discrepancy between the data available on your store and the data in the feed uploaded to Google. This occurs when your updates are set to ‘Enable Automatic Item Updates’
This is not a problem if it occurs once in a while; however, if the error starts appearing frequently, your item may get disapproved and your account suspended.
PRO TIP: In certain cases, “Automatic item updates active [availability]” warning may show up due to incorrect availability in microdata.
In simpler terms, it means that your data feed contains the correct values, but your structured data markup does not.
This results in Google overwriting availability with incorrect data.
Fixing your Microdata can help overcome this issue. 2. Shipping & Tax Errors
Uploading your Shipping and Tax-related data is essential when uploading the rest of your data. Commonly, this error shows up when there is a lack of data available from the feed.
This lack of sufficient data can be easily overruled by setting up data directly in Google Merchant Center. These configurations can then be applied sitewide.
3. Unique Product Identifier Errors (GTIN/MPN/Brand)
Google uses UPIs (Unique Product Identifiers) to categorize products properly.
Verified products will ensure that Shopping Ads show more relevant searches, which basically equals Higher Conversion Rates; further, they will also generate visibility through unpaid product listings and will give your store a higher quality.
Your product GTIN may be lacking crucial information, such as a missing GTIN value, or may have an incorrect GTIN. Google will thoroughly investigate and verify all values in the feed.
You can read more about GTIN Errors and how to fix them here.
4. Description Related Errors
For every product, Google has decided to add a ‘description’ field to their Shopping Ads following September 2020, and while the update may not be the latest, it is fairly recent. Products that are without a ‘description’ field will be shown in ads; however, they will be given a lower priority and will not perform adequately.
5. Image Related Errors
The images you submit to Google Merchant Center are of monumental importance as they are the visual cues for the customers who might end up on your page. An image is processed 60,000 times faster by the human brain as compared to text. For every blurry, promotion-filled, or stock image you put up as the feature image for your product, you drive away potential customers as the image appears unappealing or boring to them.
6. Item Disapproved Due To Policy Violations
While you may already be familiar with this, Google has a list of Policy Violations that the algorithm may have found in your product data.
To fix this error there are no fixed steps that you can take. Rather, the solution will be provided by Google itself. There are numerous ways that your data can violate Google’s Policy.
If you have already made changes to your product data and ad copies and are still seeing the error, it may be possible that your product has been blacklisted.
Google Shopping Tip #2 – Adding Attributes
Your Data Feed is the most important part of your Ad Campaign. Optimizing your data allows Google to show your ads to potential customers for your store accurately. In order to get the best out of your Google Shopping Ads, ensure these attributes are up to date.
Upgrading your Product Attributes to the best of your ability will enhance the product performance and ultimately increase your conversion rate as well. Product details such as Images, Product Titles, Sales, and Pricing are the required attributes that should be included in your data feed.
- Images: Images, as mentioned above, are the first things that a customer sees when viewing your Ad. Ensure that you use the correct image for the correct product. Furthermore, ensure that if a product has multiple variants, your images are correctly linked to the variant type to avoid any errors and confusion.
- Product Title: The title of your product is what holds the customer’s attention after an image has piqued their interest. Having a product title that is unique, informative, and includes keywords can help generate sales for your product. To delve deeper into how to create better product titles, read this.
- Other Optional Attributes: Essential attributes can only give you an average performance; if you really wish to turn your Shopping Ads profitable, you can take a few extra steps.
Include a colour_attribute to your product data; not only does it help in targeting users that are looking for a specific color, but also helps in defining variants.
If not the color, you can also choose to add the specific size of your product to your product data feed.
If your product doesn’t contain a color or size attribute, you can also manually add a particular product detail, using the attribute product_detail.
Lastly, you can add your shipping price and policy to provide more information to Google as well as your customers. Google displays it in your Shopping Ads. This is a super important tip if you’re a seller with customers in multiple countries across the world. We talk about this later in the article too.
These attributes are the components of your products that make up your Shopping Ad verification. They can be very useful in providing vital information to customers.
Google Shopping Tip #3 – Make Use of SEO Practices
Keywords are the building blocks of the bridge that connects you and your potential customers. Using relevant keywords that have high search volumes can generate more clicks on your Shopping Ad and help Google Shopping Ads increase your reach and click-through rate.
Using Long Tail Keywords can potentially improve your visibility and ranking in the Google search engine page (SERP) because they are specific- it can mean that they may not rank the highest in keyword searches, but they ensure that you receive maximum conversions due to their specificity.
Not only is this tip useful for Google Shopping Ads but is also for other search engines. This also gives you a competitive edge over other stores selling similar products.
Keyword optimization is the best possible tool you can possess. Adding apps on Shopify such as Google Shopping Feed can easily help you by automatically suggesting the top keywords for your products.
Google Shopping Tip #4 – Create Multi-Language Feeds
A Multi-language Feed is another beneficial way of creating a more globalized store. It is particularly beneficial for store owners that are looking to expand their stores beyond physical boundaries.
By allowing customers across the world to reach your store, you can increase conversions as a wider range of audience will also bring in higher conversions and click-through rates.
However, creating a Multi-language feed is no easy task. The Google Channel app lacks this feature and thus creates problems for Shopify Merchants. By integrating a multilingual approach, you will notice an increase in conversions, while the bounce rate will drop.
This is mainly because your store will be able to provide customers from different regions with a better understanding of your products in their native language. This results in an increase in engagements too.
In fact, in order to increase visibility among international customers, you must also be recognizable in international SEO too.
The native Google Channel App available for free on Shopify is limiting in nature because it does not allow users to create multi-language feeds. These limitations are often frustrating and can act as an obstacle to your reach and conversions.
If you are interested in creating multi-language feeds (trust me, this can really take your reach global), I personally recommend using AdNabu’s Google Shopping Feed app.
The app seamlessly ‘fact-checks’ your product data (translated data, too) and pushes it to Google Merchant Center for easy approval. Ultimately, you spend less time creating and managing multilingual feeds but have expanded your ad campaigns to global heights.
Google Shopping Tip #5 – Add Product Reviews
How often have you bought a product for yourself after checking the reviews from its previous users? Many times we judge a product based on the rating that is visible in Google Shopping Ads.
Over 95% of users choose to read reviews before they purchase a product. Over half of the even agreed to pay more for a product with verified reviews.
It is not hard to see why, as adding Product Reviews to your Shopping Ad is incredibly favorable as it will exponentially increase credibility and build trust among your clientele. It acts as the social proof for your product and stands as a backing for your product.
In fact, you can even promote your product based on the genuine reviews you have received from your past customers. Providing reviews along with your product can thus influence purchase decisions and might just be the thing to get you the conversion rate you desire.
You can integrate product reviews from your Shopify store into your Google Merchant Center in two ways – you can install an app on your Shopify store to add product reviews.
The second way (highly recommended) is to add a product feed management app that can integrate product reviews and directly send them to Google Merchant Center. I recommend using product management apps to integrate product reviews into your feed (it’s easier to manage).
Using this method is far more efficient as not only does the app integrate product reviews, but it also uses a bunch of other features that can help optimize your product data and manage it more effectively.
BONUS TIP: Track The Changes You Made
Here’s an additional tip for you, Track The Changes You Make.
Once you have made all these changes, you need to analyze them frequently on Google Ads. Keeping track of all the metrics from different channels will help you collect data for future campaigns.
You can do this in many different ways:
- Campaign Analytics on Google Ads – You can access your Campaign Analytics by visiting your campaign page. It is available in the Ads and Extensions tab.
You can simply hover over the tab to view performance metrics such as impressions, clicks, click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, Cost per Click (CPC), etc.
You can also click on the Reports tab at the top of the page to generate a detailed report of the same.
- Shopify Analytics – You can also make use of the Shopify Analytics page to stay updated with the status of your store’s performance.
You can view the recent activities, get an insight into visitor activities and keep a tab on the speed of your store. It also helps you analyze the transactions that occur in your store.
- Using Apps to Manage Data – There are apps that can help you modify, manage, store, and optimize your Data.
By constantly evolving with the market trends, it is also important to keep track of all the changes that aid you.
Pro Tip: To create high-yielding shopping ads and to give your store a boost, you can try A/B testing with different ad copies and descriptions to see which works best for you. You can try out different headlines with multiple descriptions and analyze their performance. You can optimize your ads to match customer queries by testing and experimenting with your campaign. Doing these will not only aid machine learning for Google to understand your audience better but also give you a better understanding of how your audience responds to different types of ads.
Conclusion
Given above are a few ways to help you Optimize your Google Shopping Ads for your Shopify Store and achieve profitable results.
Keep in mind that Google is constantly evolving and updating its policies, and keeping up with it is remarkably important. These suggestions will surely help you accomplish your goals and generate leads.
Ensure that you stay up to date with the policies and frequently visit Google’s official FAQ section to clear out any doubts.
