Used correctly, Google Shopping can be an effective PPC channel for your ecommerce business. It’s a great platform for getting your products in front of potential shoppers and competing with similar retailers.
Find out more about PPC campaigns here.
It does come with some difficulties, however, which can be separated into 3 major categories.
Growth
If you’re not bidding uniquely for each individual SKU for your products, it can be hard to grow your Google Shopping channel.
A lack of access to data, such as using Google Smart Shopping’s ‘black box’ approach, can make it difficult to optimise your Shopping channel. If you don’t have the data available, you can’t make educated decisions on how to grow your Shopping channel. Access to more data means you can react faster to outperform your competitors and respond appropriately to fluctuations in the market.
Google has retired Smart Shopping campaigns and has replaced them with Performance Max campaigns. Get up-to-date information on Performance Max here.
Read our case study on SHRINE to find out how we helped them improve growth through Google Shopping.
Profitability
If you don’t have access to granular data it’ll be harder to place bids based on profitability for each of your product SKUs.
Not all search queries have the same level of buying intent. You can often end up prioritising low intent search terms, meaning you’ll be sacrificing profitability.
Machine learning can identify the buying intent of potential customers and target their high intent searches, increasing your probable conversions and the profitability of your Shopping channel.
Our case study on Lounge highlights how we helped improve their profitability.
Time
Time is potentially the biggest barrier to managing a Shopping channel successfully. Manual bidding is very time-consuming and can often lead to you not getting the most out of your Shopping channel.
For retailers dealing with thousands of SKUs, it’s near impossible to bid manually on a granular level, meaning you’ll end up missing out on conversions. If you’re not managing to keep on top of your bids and react to spikes in the market, you’ll struggle to unlock the full potential of Google Shopping.
Placing SKUs in groups could lead to certain products showing up for irrelevant search queries, or for low intent searches with less probability of converting. To truly succeed with your Shopping channel, you need to be bidding on an individual level for each SKU.
We helped The Union Project take back their time spent on Google Shopping, which you can read about here.
What can you do to get past these barriers?
A great solution to Google Shopping success is to use an automated platform. A technology platform like Bidnamic can be used to get past the three major barriers to Google Shopping success. In-house bidding comes with a huge time commitment, and having a managed service is more efficient. For information related to Google Shopping management, we have an article available here.
Here at Bidnamic, we use machine learning with a human touch. Our technology platform sets bids based on market fluctuations for every single SKU in a product catalogue on a granular level. We make an average of 500,000 Google Shopping bid adjustments for our clients each week, and bid prices are altered in real-time and run 24/7.
We combine this machine learning approach with an integral human touch. Our Customer Success team are available to support our clients whenever needed, and schedule weekly conversations to get to know businesses in-depth. We find that with the knowledge we gain from having close working relationships with our clients we are able to fully maximise their Google Shopping potential.
If you’re looking into Google Shopping and wondering how it can be a profitable channel for you, take a look at our 2021 Google Shopping Playbook.
For a more in-depth chat about how Google Shopping can be a great platform for your business, book a call with one of our specialists today.
