If you’re a retailer with an online presence, chances are you’re constantly looking for ways to increase your brand awareness, build your customer base, and sell more through the myriad channels available in today’s marketplace.

Whether it’s via your website, a distributor, or social media, there’ve never been more opportunities to get your products in front of potential customers — but how do you ensure you’re taking advantage of the right channels? The answer: invest in Google Shopping.

What is Google Shopping, and how does it work?

Those products that appear at the top or along the side of the page when you search for something like ‘black Nike hoodie’? That’s Google Shopping.

Google Shopping ads account for a whopping 76.4% of all retail search ad spend, and they generate higher click-through and conversion rates than any other pay-per-click advertising method. A cost-effective way for you to market your products, Google Shopping uses Google Ads (where you build your shopping campaigns and set your bids) and Google Merchant Centre (where you build your product feed) to create ads that then show up when someone searches for your specified keywords.

How can you win at Google Shopping?

If you do Google Shopping right, you can minimise your spend, maximise your profit, earn valuable repeat customers, and take your brand awareness to a new level. So what’s involved with doing it right?

First: as far as Google is concerned, your product feed (which you manage in Google Merchant Centre) is the most important aspect of Google Shopping. That’s because, to generate your Google Shopping ads, the search engine needs to be able to pull from a clearly defined, precisely detailed product feed.

You’ve got two options when it comes to building your feed: do it manually, or offload the work to an extension. The former likely makes the most sense if you’ve got a smaller product offering — but either way, you need to ensure that your product title is accurate and optimised for search queries and that your product descriptions are captivating and thorough.

This leads us to tip #2: put yourself in the buyer’s shoes when it comes to those search queries. Say, for example, that you’re a housewares retailer offering a variety of goods such as bath products, kitchen appliances, and home furnishings. You’re writing the title and description for one of your bestselling SKUs — let’s call it a bath mat — and wondering how best to describe it to achieve a high ranking on Google Shopping.

So imagine you’re a potential customer. What would you search for in order to land on that product? ‘Decorative blue bath mat’? ‘Plush floral bath mat’? ‘Shag runner bath mat’? Whatever the case, project yourself into the customer’s mindset and tailor your keywords and descriptions to that mindset.

And speaking of those bestselling SKUs: tip #3 involves being purposeful about what you choose to sell on Google Shopping. Depending on your budget, it may not pay to advertise your entire catalogue; instead, focus your efforts on products people are likely to repurchase or goods with the highest margins.

Now that you’ve decided which products to sell, it’s time for tip #4: be strategic with your bids. Rather than setting the same bid for all of your goods, go a little higher on the products that sell faster — and then monitor your feed to see what’s working and what’s not, and adjust your bids if your products aren’t generating the number of clicks you’d like.

The bottom line on Google Shopping

Google Shopping provides you with an easy-to-use, intuitive sales channel that gets your products in front of potential customers as soon as they hit the ‘Search’ button. Fine-tuning your strategy and learning how to adjust keywords and bids may take a bit of work — but when you remember that Google Shopping dominates retail search ad spend (with nearly 80%), it’s easy to see why the time and financial commitments are worth it!