AdWords Shopping Campaigns is the successor to Google’s Product Listing Ads program, a tested and trusted means of connecting with customers and promoting your products on the Google Shopping platform. Consumers can browse among a variety of offerings in a chosen product category, complete with high-quality graphics as well as product and pricing information. The Shopping Campaign program allows merchants to better position their products to get increased exposure while streamlining the product management and bidding process.

Adding a Google Shopping Campaign to your e-commerce marketing arsenal can help boost your overall return-on-investment (ROI) by:

• Increasing the number of quality leads. The Shopping Campaign format was designed to help you connect with potential customers who are looking for the exact products you have to offer.
• Driving more visitor traffic to your e-commerce site.
• Improving your click-through rate (CTR) across all featured product offerings.
• Lowering your per-click costs through a refined data reporting process that allows you to quickly refine your bidding strategy to match updated sales results.

How the Shopping Campaign Process Works
Once you set up Google AdWords and Merchant Center accounts for your business, you’ll be able to create specific product ads that display whenever users search for closely related products or product categories. Online ads typically feature a high-quality image of the product along with a title, price, and the name of your business.

You determine your Shopping Campaign costs by adjusting the per-click rate that you wish to pay. Based on your overall budget and the frequency at which you want your ads to appear, you can set your ad spend at whatever amount makes sense for your particular situation. Shopping Campaigns provide you with a retail-focused method of managing and promoting your products. This means that you can analyze your product inventory to determine the most appropriate product groupings that will give you the strongest presence for online shoppers. Timely detailed reporting data enables you to tweak your Shopping Campaign as needed to maximize results.

How to Run More Profitable Google Shopping Campaigns
1. Follow the 80/20 rule in optimizing your products. Analyze your data carefully to identify the 20 percent of your product offerings that are generating 80 percent of your revenue. This where 80 percent of your optimization efforts should be directed. Don’t neglect the remaining 80 percent of your products that contribute less revenue – just don’t obsess over them.

2. Remember that each of the products in your Merchant Feed will be targeted by default. You can customize your bid based on performance if you organize your products into smaller and more manageable groups. Excluding those products that are not generating profitable traffic will spare you the expense of unprofitable clicks and improve your overall ROI.

3. Don’t compete against yourself. Take care to place products in only one Product Group, with their corresponding keywords appearing only in one Ad Group. Think of your e-commerce site as a “brick and mortar” store, and place each of your products on the most appropriate “shelf.”

4. Maintain the quality of your Merchant Feed. Maximize your traffic potential by using descriptive keywords in your product titles and descriptions.

5. Break your Shopping Campaign into smaller campaigns based on Ad Groups. This will allow you to allocate your budget and designate negative keywords and bid modifiers for each specific product grouping.