The best Google Ads campaign types for online stores
There are many types of Google Ads campaigns to promote our product or service. There are types of campaigns that serve either B2B or e-commerce purposes, but there are also types that are best used specifically for a webshop. These Google Ads campaign types have a different (more extensive) set of tools than a standard search or display ad. In this article we’ll show you the types of Google advertisement types that are definitely worth using and trying for webshops to increase our business results.
Prerequisites
Above all, there are some prerequisites for our e-commerce advertising that we need to provide for our campaigns to work. Before launching the campaign itself, it’s a good idea to take the following preparatory steps:
Setting up Google Merchant Center
The Google Merchant Center is a free tool for managing your business information, various tax and shipping settings, and our webshop products in one place. It is also a prerequisite for setting up Google Shopping campaigns and Performance Max campaigns, which will be discussed later. These campaigns use the Merchant Center as a datasource to get the necessary input they need to run their ads.
What should I look out for when setting up Google Merchant Center?
- Set up your business information, shipping and refund terms, enter your tax information, and don’t forget to link your Google Ads and Merchant Center accounts.
- Upload a product feed, which is a special tabular file containing data about our products. The product feed is the heart of the shopping campaign, so always pay close attention to compiling it! Google Help helps you choose the right format and explains what’s required in your feed.
Setting up e-commerce measurements (Google Analytics)
- Ecommerce measurement is more than a simple conversion measurement. Not only do we see that someone has purchased a webshop product, but we can also get more information about the characteristics of the purchases (e.g. Cart Value, Abandoned Transactions, Product Page Views) and customer behavior. Setting up e-commerce measurements is a developer task, so entrust it to a programmer or web developer who is familiar with the subject.
- Make sure e-commerce measurement is set up in both Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4, as the earlier version of Analytics will be phased out in 2023, however GA4 is not yet fully operational for all measurement tasks at the moment.
Setting up dynamic remarketing tags
Dynamic remarketing tags help us to show exactly the product (or related products or services) in our ads later if an interested person has already viewed a product in our webshop but has not purchased it. You can set your own Google Ads remarketing tag in the Audience Manager menu by specifying the “retail” business type for your e-commerce campaign.
E-commerce (and supporting) Google advertising solutions in a nutshell
Once we have made the above measurements and settings, we need to think about which type of e-commerce campaign we choose that best suits our goals. While each will support our webshop sales, this is achieved in different ways.
Once we have made the above measurements and settings, we need to think about which type of e-commerce campaign we choose that best suits our goals. While each will support our webshop sales, this is achieved in different ways.
Google Shopping campaign, the uncrowned king of webshop ads
This type of campaign has been available in Hungary since the summer of 2019. We distinguish two types within this category, these are normal and smart shopping campaigns.
Let’s see what the difference is between normal and smart shopping campaigns.
- The standard shopping type is more transparent, gives you more control in optimizing your campaign, and gives you more information about your campaign (such as search terms).
- Smart shopping is based on artificial intelligence, less optimizable, shows less data, but thanks to Google’s smart algorithm based on artificial intelligence and multi-level ad serving (search bar, Youtube, Gmail, millions of websites), the system knows where to display an advertisement for the user to have a high chance of buying from the advertised product.
A special feature of shopping campaigns is that they do not operate on keywords like search campaigns. The system obtains information from the Merchant Center product feed to display ads that appear in the bar above the search ads in the search results, making them more prominent and more effective than a simple text search ad.
Pros:
- In our experience, cost-per-clicks (CPCs) are much lower than those of your search campaigns, so you can achieve higher ROI
- creating campaigns is a quick and easy process – once the necessary preparations have been made
- both smart and normal shopping campaigns can appear on other interfaces of the Google Display Network in addition to search results, so we can reach users at multiple stages of the shopping process.
- The buyer is not taken to a general landing page, but directly to the page of the advertised product in the webshop, so you can buy the product immediately without having to search for it on the website.
Dynamic display remarketing campaign, the best companion
Dynamic remarketing is a specific version of display campaigns that displays product ads on the display network (websites, Youtube, Gmail). This type of campaign either derives information from a custom product feed or uses ads uploaded to the Merchant Center to show ads to the remarketing audience we’re targeting. These are users who have already visited our website and viewed a specific product there.
Pros:
- we can target well-defined users (e.g. people who put a product in the cart in the last 7 days but didn’t buy it)
- dynamic remarketing labeling allows us to show these users in the ad the product they have viewed / added to cart
- smart shopping campaigns also use the above feature, but since smart shopping campaigns are targeted automatically and not controlled by us, a dynamic remarketing display campaign can be a great addition to your shopping campaigns.
Search campaign, the old biker
This is one of the oldest campaign types, but it still holds its place today. Cost-per-clicks (CPCs) are much higher than in shopping campaigns, but it’s a good idea to include a search campaign in our entire Google advertising portfolio. This is especially true when advertising for a focus product / product category. One of the subtypes of a search campaign is called dynamic search campaign (DSA).
Pros:
DSA – also known as dynamic search advertising – is a very good choice for webshops because this type of search campaign does not use keywords to display ads, but the wording of the website, so it is easier to advertise a well-worded and structured page in the search engine without spending hours and days creating a manual search campaign for each product / category one at a time. This would be almost impossible with a large number of advertised products. In addition to displaying the ad, the headline of the ad is automatically generated from the content of the website, so our ad always includes the name of the product the user searched for.
Performance Max campaign type, new entrant
Performance Max is the latest type of Google ad campaign which can now show ads in all placements on the Google Display Network, so we can now show our ads in one campaign on search results, shopping results, millions of websites, Youtube, Gmail and in the Discovery feed.
This type of campaign can work in the same way as a Shopping campaign, so much so that in the summer of 2022, Smart Shopping campaigns are expected to expire and be integrated into the Performance Max campaign type. It’s a good idea to have a Google Ads tagged purchase transaction event, because that’s all we’ll be able to use for Performance Max campaigns (results data returned from Google Analytics will no longer be suitable).
Pros:
- Performance Max uses a higher level of artificial intelligence and attracts the potential buyer in the right moment. It appears on all Google Networks, whether it’s a video ad, an image ad, or a specific product ad.
- Although limited, we can see statistics for the campaign, such as what keyword topics the ads have appeared on. Improvements to the campaign are expected in the future, but it’s a good idea to experiment with the data analytics options provided by this campaign type.
Summary
We can see that there is a varied and constantly evolving toolbox for Google Ads campaign types for our webshop. With e-commerce campaigns, we can now cover all areas of the Google advertising network, but we can add well-known, proven campaign types to our liking. To get the most out of our webshop ads, we also need to take care of the preparation steps (Merchant Center and e-commerce metrics, dynamic remarketing) so that the campaigns that work with artificial intelligence get the best results for us.