Google Shopping experts that know ecommerce

Google Shopping is a comparison shopping service offered by Google. As a consumer, this looks like a carousel of products which appear at the top of the Google Search results when you search for a product or when you visit the Shopping tab.

However, for businesses, this product by Google offers a huge opportunity to capture new and existing customers. Using Google Ads, businesses can pay to have their products show up in the Google Shopping carousel.

Google Merchant Center houses your product feed and is an essential tool if you wish to run Google Shopping. You can also make changes to your feed here before it goes through to Google Ads.

Google Search means you are bidding on keywords and serving text ads to people when they search for these keywords.

Google Shopping means you are bidding on product clicks and you are serving product listing ads to people when they search for keywords that Google consider relevant to your products.

Both Google Search and Google Shopping can be relevant for ecommerce businesses, but most find Google Shopping to be the more lucrative option.

Absolutely. If you are an ecommerce store in NZ, you should almost certainly be running Google Shopping campaigns. Most likely, Performance Max is your best pick but for some businesses a standard shopping structure can be optimal.

If you're not running Google Shopping, chances are you are leaving money on the table and are not ensuring your products are showing up for potential customers when they're looking for what you're offering.

Google Shopping is powered by a product feed. This comes in various fomats (XML, Google Sheets and API being the most common) and is essentially a list of all your products and the corresponding product data.

The most important attributes to include are your Title, URL, Price and Availability, however, including as much high quality product data as possible will help you to achieve better results.

This feed needs to be generated and sent to Google. In most cases this can be achieved with a handy plugin (such as on Shopify), otherwise in some cases you may require developer support.

It depends on your business! We highly recommend ensuring you're profitable (it sounds obvious but some agencies seem to miss this point) unless you are a start-up with good funding.

If you have never run Google Shopping before we can help to recommend a starting budget, but ultimately, once you've found the return on ad spend (ROAS) which makes you profitable we recommend keeping the budget open.

For example, if your average profit margin is 50% and you want a ROAS of 4 why not spend as much as you can? If you spend $1 million dollars you'll walk away with $1 million in profit at the end.

Performance Max is Google's favourite black-box campaign type! By using it, you get to use Google's AI to serve your ads to the right people at the right time.

The main difference between PMax and Google Shopping is the placements where you are eligible to show. For Google Shopping campaigns you will only appear in the Google Shopping carousel and tab, whilst PMax will serve your ads across all of Google's websites and platforms, including YouTube, Google Search, Google Shopping and the Google Display Network.

This comes with some pretty significant advantages and can be extremely powerful for scaling up ecommerce stores. The main catch is that Performance Max has limited reporting and control capabilities. This is less of an issue these days, but we are still limited in what we can do.

Unfortunately, Google rarely corresponds directly with businesses. In the first instance, you can try using their Live Chat feature, however, we've found that you often get connected with someone less-than-capable.

For this reason we generally recommend not talking to Google at all unless you really must.

If you need help with something related to managing your Google Ads account, your best bet is to talk to a Google Ads agency such as us.