Podcast Episode9: Google Shopping
===
[00:00:00] Hi everyone. I'm Pip from Seymour Digital Media. You're listening to Know How Marketing Lab podcast. This podcast brings together different experts in marketing from our Facebook group, Cyber Punk Geeks, marketing mixer. Each week we get on here and we talk about something search marketing like Google.
[00:00:18] Or seo, Social media marketing. From Facebook to TikTok or website marketing. If you're a marketer or aspiring marketer, a business owner or entrepreneur, this podcast for you, we're gonna share the best seo, search, social and website strategies. We share tips and hacks, Google ad strategies, what's going on in the current market.
[00:00:41] Each week we discuss something exciting and awesome in marketing. I'm for geek speak, and today we are gonna be talking about Google Shopping. What is it? Why you should be using it, even if you're not doing ads, and also how is it gonna all integrate for the future of [00:01:00] e-commerce? And of course, I am fall.
[00:01:05] And I'm Greg. Yeah. And so for today, we wanted to talk about Google shopping, especially as we are coming into the holiday season and people are looking at gifts and Black Friday, all that good stuff. And so I guess first starting off what is Google shopping, but I guess more over, now that I think about it, that's a misnomer.
[00:01:25] It's more. What is Google Merchant Center? Cuz that's the core at the heart of it, and it's it's a node that you set up, how you set up your analytics, your ads, your YouTube channel, all that stuff. It's like that where it's a connecting hub where you verify your products and then you could start to do things like the ads.
[00:01:44] And yeah, and so I, it boils down that it has two main types, of course, the ads that I just mentioned. So you can do a whole paid component, but it also has an awesome organic integration. Yeah. So start off with the, maybe the [00:02:00] basics of, you have an e-commerce store, you want to get your products listed.
[00:02:05] The Google shopping feeds, there's a free tier obviously, and there's the paid tier, but just in general going about setting up so that you can get some of your products that you have into the Google shopping, what are people doing for that? Yeah, so it's generally you're gonna have to have an integration.
[00:02:25] There's definitely one for who? Commerce. Shopify is a big one. I think Big Commerce is another one. I just, I don. Pretty much either WooCommerce or Shopify. So I'm sure there's a couple other platforms. But this integration, basically it connects your store to your merchant center account, and then it says, Here are the products I would like to have there.
[00:02:43] And so when you do that, it's gonna give you a bunch of Oh We need these things on your products, like a name, a price, what's the shipping rate like? They're gonna give you a bunch of characteristics that they need and then your job is to just fill out those parts. I will say that it is [00:03:00] probably the most annoying part is just setting it up, cuz there's a lot of, Oh, you need to fill out this part.
[00:03:04] Oh, you need to fill that part. There's all, it's a little steep to get it set up, but once it's set up like you're golden, you're off to the races and the Google Merchant Center is something separate. Google Analytics or Google Ads or your search console. It's its own Google Merchant Center specific for being able to list.
[00:03:26] Start to list your products from your store in Google shopping and somehow they also connect to the others for additional things. Yeah, it's its own little separate hub that once you've got it connected and you verified your products with it, like a whole bunch of new options are open to you. That kind of can connect to, like you said, like you can connect your analytics cuz it has its own little.
[00:03:52] Someone clicked on it and then they went from there. And so having that connection where they can track that stuff for you, they do have that connection built in when I was [00:04:00] just recently they've added that part. The other cool part is like you can connect it to your ads platform, so you can run ads.
[00:04:06] You can also have it that once you verified for the organic, there's gonna be, in your Google search, you'll see a tab like at the very top. It's got like search news and then it's got shopping. And that shopping tab, there's gonna be obviously a set of ads at the very top. We're how we're all used to with search.
[00:04:23] And then everything underneath of that, for the most part will be organic. And so say you're looking up like baby's clothes, and then it's going to show up like a couple of ads and then you know, all the baby clothes. And then you could be advertising yours on there as well, if it's relevant to the person's search, et.
[00:04:40] Yeah, so having your products in Google Merchant Center then allows those products to then be pulled up in the search, which was what you were just referring to, right? So if someone searches on Google for specific products, and you've got yours products listed in Google Merchant [00:05:00] Center and all Integr.
[00:05:02] Then there's the possibility of your products then being pulled up as a product in that section in the organic results. That's, Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's gonna be, you're gonna be SEOing the products, so your title and your description will matter For Google, they really will concern a lot with that part of it when it's coming to, how do they identify it as like a, this type of product and it relates to those people.
[00:05:29] When you're doing, when you're doing ads, you don't get what I describe as like positive targeting. Meaning like when someone searches for this, I wanna show up. It's more like when someone searches for this, I don't wanna show up. It's more of, I consider it more casting. The net. Google shopping is something that I needed to explore a lot more because I do have clients that do e-commerce, that I can definitely suggest these things.
[00:05:52] But one of the things that, because I haven't become fully aware of what everything you can [00:06:00] do when you have your products listed in there and they come up in a search. If someone were to click on that, does it bring them to your own site, to that product page? Or are they in a Google merchant like, or a Google shopping sort of area?
[00:06:18] That's actually really good. Que question. That's the part that's weird about the merchant center and especially the shopping tab. It does have a bit of a two step. So what happens is like you'll see like a carousel of all these bikes. I'm just gonna use as an example. So you'll see like a whole like grade of bikes, and so it'll have their image, they're priced in the name of the product, and then you click on it and what it does is it opens up and then it.
[00:06:42] Details about the shipping. It'll have the description so it gives you more information about that product. Then you click on it and it will go directly to that product page. Okay. So right there where you can add to cart, complete the transaction. And so that's one where, Yeah, it's got a bit of, Yeah is a weird two step.
[00:06:59] I [00:07:00] get why they did it that way, but it's still I feel like they could have just gone directly to the product page, but I don't think I mind the two step for the fact of, because for the most part, you're giving someone that shopping feeling within the Google search result. That person might not necessarily want to click.
[00:07:23] To go to that specific product on the site, yet they might want a little bit more information and then close that and then check another one before actually ending up going to. So I think the usability case is probably right for how they're doing it. Yeah. I just didn't know if that was the case before because I know, I think there's an option in Google where you there where there is Google shopping.
[00:07:48] Like you could have products. On Google and actually have products bought through Google, I believe. Oh, I don't I'm wasn't sure. Don't exactly [00:08:00] if that was the case or not. Yeah, I think that they had tested it out and then they moved over. I don't think they have a complete checkout system in Google anymore because they outsourced it entirely to like going to the product page.
[00:08:12] And I think that's entirely, I know Facebook does have its own checkout integration. I haven't used it as much and I know that it's like a fully contained system within Facebook and like Messenger and you could do it like that. But I think that Google's been moving away and closer to the.
[00:08:29] Traditional e-commerce setup where it's like they expect you to go to their person's website, though you did give me in talking about this, it made me, because we were talking a lot about this. So one other thing that's super cool about the setting up the shopping and getting it all set up is that we can do the dynamic retargeting.
[00:08:47] And it also made me think of as it's just a jumping off point. Like you said, like maybe someone checks, checks out that page. I wonder if you can set up a retargeting audience based on. The, not even having left, like the Google [00:09:00] platform per se, and they could get set up on your, as a retargeting audience for you because they did show some interest maybe, and you think that would make sense because they are in, at that point you're in Google, Google knows that person checked out the details.
[00:09:17] In the Google shopping about that product, so I'm sure they do have analytic, the person did. So you would be able to track that and use that information in your Google ads in the future. I think when we were discussing the topic earlier, I think both of us were thinking more along the lines of the fact that the analytics and tracking were available if they actually came to your site and looked at a product and then you could retarget that for sure.
[00:09:47] Yeah, but I would be shocked. If it wasn't the case that you could also target based on them just viewing it within Google. The Google Shopping only. Yeah. Cuz I know that you can [00:10:00] connect your merchant center account with your Google Analytics. So like to me that would be the use case. There would be not only to see what's the click through rate on individual products.
[00:10:09] So this one gets a lot of clicks et cetera. But also to see which one, like making retargeting audiences based off that. Like it seems to me like Google would not. An opportunity like that to give people some sort of new advertising opportunities there. And that kinda makes sense for Google before we move on to the advertising portion of it.
[00:10:29] Yeah. Cause that's gonna be, I think what we move on next is, I want to say that everything that we've discussed up until this point, just having your product in there and searchable. And viewable, this is all free. Yeah. None of this part is paid, so definitely. Worthwhile to do this because it's another way to get your products out there and the potential for people to find them and purchase them from you.[00:11:00]
[00:11:00] Yeah. So now with, as we've talked about, the analytics portion, Obviously it's a huge deal for getting into the paid and retargeting. So let's, I was just gonna add one extra thing about the organic. There's two little parts that I wanted to say, and this is the other reason why it's important to get this set up is that new connections are always being made inside of Google Merchant Center.
[00:11:23] So new one that's come out is YouTube. So you can do YouTube shorts and that'll connect to the product page. And so it's like a nice seamless integration there. Which is really cool. I've seen a couple of people use it where they're like showing you a little short of how to use their product and then it's got the little view product thing in the bottom corner.
[00:11:41] You click on it the way you go. So that's really cool as people start to make more content around it and makes a funnel right, Where you go from people didn't even know they wanted this to seeing it visually being used to them, being able to purchase it, I think is, and those additional connections as well are part of free.
[00:11:57] Like you can just connect and have them listed [00:12:00] there. Not be paying extra. That's what I saw. Like when I was setting it up, I didn't really have a good use case, so I haven't been able to set it up, but like it looked entirely organic the whole way through. I'm sure that there's also paid like YouTube ads and stuff like that, and I'm sure that they'll be coming up with something like that in the future.
[00:12:18] Yeah, but my understanding is like they're going at from the organic angle for the start, and I know that's a big one for streamers. You can even do it, apparently the checkout, say you're doing a product launch stream, you can have the check. That one actually is contained fully in YouTube cuz the video doesn't end.
[00:12:34] So you go in and like all of a sudden it'll be like, there'll be picture and then from the picture and picture they'll, you'll still have the checkout. So the person's still talking about Hey, this is awesome. It does blah, blah, blah, features, and if you get it within the next minute, you can use discount, go blah, blah, blah.
[00:12:50] And so you could still be having the video going while they're doing the checkout and they don't miss a minute of the live. So that was pretty cool to see that part. [00:13:00] And again, like it's just building new connections. One other one that you and I were talked a bit about is pointy. It connects to your, It's a really weird connection.
[00:13:09] We were trying to wrap our heads around so it connects to da and so it connects to your integrated pos. So the use case that they always say is that, say someone buys a bike and you can find this if you look up Comox bike shop. There's one that's in Comox here on the island that is having it so you can see it, a live action, what it looks like.
[00:13:30] And they've got all their products and it says Low inventory, no inventory, tons of inventory. And what happens is say someone buys bike, they'll go out the window or go out the door. , and then pointy will get a signal that's Oh, this person bought this bike. And then that sends a signal to Google Merchant Center to then update Google Business Profile or Google.
[00:13:51] Google my business, and then I'll update everything in real time. And so that's just a way that people know, Oh, I, okay, I was gonna buy that, but they don't have it now. I'll just come back later. [00:14:00] And so that's just a interesting way to have those connections as well. And again, I think pointy is.
[00:14:06] Three, They were very cagey about pricing on their website. It might be, I don't recall seeing any pricing related to it, but I haven't. Really done a deep dive into it. Yeah. But I've noticed a ton of push towards pointy. I've just got a whole new round of YouTube ads telling me about how awesome pointy is and how I should be using it.
[00:14:31] And you do have to also check because there's certain pos. Point of sale systems that do connect with it. And certain ones that don't, like Shopify, notably doesn't. But Ven, which has a really deep integration with Shopify does. So you have to look at what your system is. These are just different ways of connecting these parts that all fit into that ecosystem.
[00:14:52] But I just wanna note that one. But yeah, unless like you wanna move on to the ads Orco? Yeah. Might. As might as well go to the [00:15:00] paid portion of the program. Yeah, for sure. Want to know more about seo? We've got a class for that. Our mission is to educate students about the right tools, techniques, and strategies to grow their businesses using the most up to date search engine marketing optimization techniques and tools.
[00:15:20] Find out more@knowhowmarketinglab.com. So I think we already touched on it a little bit as a kind of a good jumping, we've touched on two major ad components that you'll be seeing. So there's the classic you're doing a shopping ad and that's, you go to the shopping tab and it's got ads there.
[00:15:41] Or also on the search page you'll see on that classic sidebar and it's got like a carousel of images. Or at the very top you'll see, say you look, you type in. laptops under 300 bucks, and then it'll be like a bunch of laptops that'll show up as a carousel along the top of your Google search. So you don't, you're not even [00:16:00] going to the a shopping tab that's paid.
[00:16:02] So before we continue with this, can we somewhat tell people, and I'm not even sure because like I said I'm not massive on Google shopping yet. With the organic listings versus the paid listings where you just described, they're in a carousel at the top. Where do we find those in the search results page and are they both there?
[00:16:31] So the organic, from my understanding, will only show up on the shopping tab. So it won't show up on the regular search page. You have to go over to the shopping page, like you have to go. How you can go to like only view images or only view Like news or, Yeah, or view the shopping. Yeah. Okay. So the free stuff is only in that shopping tab, so people would have to go to that to browse through any of the [00:17:00] products available?
[00:17:00] Yeah. Okay. And then on the general organic page, as you do a search, if you search for a product and Google Deems, its like a specific product that you're searching for, you'll get on the organics page, that product lists carousel, and those are all. Yeah, just for it. So if you see anything on your regular search, like you just type it into Google, find me laptop under a thousand bucks.
[00:17:28] Then any product on there that has like an image and a price that's shopping ads, like those are the ads themselves. Yeah. So it's basically, yeah, it's pretty much anything that isn't showing up on that shopping tab. Probably gonna be paid naturally because they're showing you in more obvious places that they're trying to get you to induce you there with the payment or the ad.
[00:17:54] Gotcha. Yeah. One thing to also keep in mind is that it does [00:18:00] have a fairly low click through rate, so don't be discouraged if you're getting 1% click through rate, like that's actually fairly good. Point seven five is the expected click through rate, so don't feel bad if you run an ads campaign and you're only getting 0.75.
[00:18:12] That's actually. Exactly what you should be expecting. Yeah. The other thing is, so one thing to watch out for that I'm going to, this is my professional opinion here, Don't run a Performance Max campaign that's replace the smart shopping. They don't give you any control. You don't know where you're being shown.
[00:18:31] You don't know which format because there's all these different formats that they say, Oh, you're gonna be in a YouTube, a, you're gonna be in a Gmail ad, and you don't know how much your budget's being wasted on. They're ad types that aren't converting and they're just like, Oh, we're gonna maximize it.
[00:18:47] And they just want you to hand for their credit card, a list of products, and then just say, Yeah, we're gonna get you more sales. And you, it's just a black box. So generally I would avoid it if [00:19:00] possible. Yeah you have so many tools to specifically put your product in front of people who either have already shown interest in, in your site or looked at product.
[00:19:10] That doing that is really a waste. You might as well just get super targeted and have your product placed in front of people who you already know have the potential of. Yeah, exactly. And like I said, most of a regular shopping ad isn't the is way simpler to set up than a search ad. Again, the hardest part is just getting your products ready and available to be an ad that's gonna be the biggest hurdle you're gonna have to climb over.
[00:19:38] Yeah. But generally, yeah, just. Kind of avoiding the smart campaigns. I haven't seen a lot of data to suggest they actually are better. Sometimes people do regular smart ads for search, and there's some cases where it does work better, but generally for this shopping, I would avoid it if you can, is that it's not gonna be any more technically complicated to just set it up yourself and just run it right.
[00:19:59] And [00:20:00] so you mentioned then that these products in your Google Shopping or Google Merchant Center, you can do paid advertising to get them onto the organics page where you have the carousel, which is a paid option. But there are a lot more paid options to display your product. I gave you the example because I was just completely floored.
[00:20:24] I knew this was possible, but it just, Yeah, it's one of those things when you talk and all of a sudden you're seeing ads for things, right? I was on a site, had some things in my cart, was gonna didn't check out because I was gonna ask my wife if you wanted anything before I completed the check. And like the next time I was, I think I was probably in a, in my phone and the app I was using had paid advertising in it.
[00:20:50] Literally, the things I had put into my cart from this shopping experience were in the ad that was being shown to me. So that's how targeted [00:21:00] you can get. Yeah. Down to the actual product that someone has put in their cart or looked at on your. Can be shown back to the person to pull them back. So let's talk about the additional things that you can do like that, other than having it in the carousel, how many other things can we do?
[00:21:21] Yeah, that's a really good. Point, and it's definitely, we've already alluded to it at the start when we were talking about connecting analytics and doing the retargeting there. So I'll just run through a couple of the different placement types that you can have, so different places that can show up.
[00:21:34] And then I wanna end it with the, what we were talking about, the display. Because dynamic retargeting display ads, which is what you saw definitely is, I'd say the easily the most powerful one. But you definitely have, So I mentioned Gmail ads. As far as I know, they have absolutely terrible click rate and very terrible conversion rate cuz no one's going into their folder to be like, Oh like I should do some shopping directly in my Gmail.
[00:21:58] It's a weird, [00:22:00] same thing for YouTube ads. So there'll be the bumper ad that maybe someone will have and then there'll be a carousel. Products underneath. I don't know how well those work. I'm getting, guess not as well, Just call it a hunch. And that one I haven't explored. YouTube the YouTube ads themselves, how to set those up and what are options there because YouTube does have a lot of options within it.
[00:22:23] Those are the, Oh, Discovery. That was the third one. I knew there was another one. So if you have a pixel phone, you'll have the discovery feed, that's your left most panel and you can have shopping ads in there as well. Again. I don't think that those do really well because that's not what you're expecting from your discovery feed.
[00:22:40] You're expecting it to be like products probably not, but other advertising in there might. Be effective. I have phone, so I do swipe and look at my Google feed for latest news. It's pretty accurate with day to day. Yeah. I like it [00:23:00] and I think it's a really untapped, personally, I think it's a really untapped ad.
[00:23:04] Area because everything I've seen so far in the discovery feed has been fairly clumsy. And you can tell it was part of a smart campaign where it is just an option that was available and then they just slotted it in. But I definitely think this is one, I want to put a pin in this cuz I'd like to do this as a topic.
[00:23:20] It's been something brewing in my mind is doing. Different advertising event sign up that I think would be really useful. One, same for Gmail ads, I think would be really useful there. Thinking of it more what do you expect to see in your inbox or on your feed? And then it's all you're doing is you're targeting people based on their interests that they would actually like that part.
[00:23:41] And so you could. Do giveaways, email signups, like things like that would just, it's a low cost, cuz I'm guessing that they're like 10 cents, 20 cents a click. And if you're getting tons of people on your email list, you're building an email list and you're making tons more money off that, then that's well worth it for the five [00:24:00] bucks, 10 bucks that you spent to build it.
[00:24:01] Again, that's a rabbit hole that I would like, I need to do a bit more research, but it's definitely something I think is interesting. Since we are coming up on time, I do want to end with the dynamic retargeting. So one of the stupid parts that we are talking about is you have to get different levels of acceptance.
[00:24:19] You have to get approved for the dynamic retargeting ads as well as the organic. For some reason, they can't just do it all in one. To me would've been the most obvious thing is You're either approved or you're not. And for some reason they, they've decided that they were gonna split it out.
[00:24:32] You need to get approved for both. Yeah. And so it's definitely, once you've been approved for the dynamic retargeting ads, what you do is you'll have a, it's gonna be an option in your display ads that it's like, Oh, use my product feed because you've connected the two and then it's using that. And then what it does is using your example that you said is that you would do an ad and you can make it an audience that is like they've made it to any page that has the word product in it.
[00:24:57] So it's slash product slash whatever it is. [00:25:00] If they've made it to product, but not to slash thank you, then that's a retargeting audience. And then any of them that have seen any products that are on that list, I would like you to show them that product again. And so that's just a way for you, It's a pretty simple if they've made it to this page, but not to this page.
[00:25:18] Show them the product that they had fairly it sounds complicated, but once you've done it once or twice, it's honestly pretty straightforward. It's just knowing where to look, how to set it up. That part's a little more complicated, but. But so powerful though. Yeah, because I had totally planned to buy these, go back and buy them and just wait, ask my wife if there was anything she wanted while we were gonna place this order instead of placing two orders if she needed something.
[00:25:45] And immediately I had, I was seeing ads that were being retargeted to me with the actual images of the product in the ad that I had in my cart. Yeah. That, and [00:26:00] it's really powerful as well to just be, also it gives you opportunities to do up sales cuz you can also do discount codes, right?
[00:26:08] You can be like, Hey, for first time purchasers use the discount code, blah, blah, blah. It gives you options and it costs you if you're, if you really got your numbers figured out, like the 10 20 cents it costs for the click is gonna be well worth it to get that if you're making the sale, the advertising, Yeah.
[00:26:23] It's just, it's a super powerful tool. I think it. Really underused. And again, because everyone's been using smart campaigns, I think hasn't been executed as well as it could be. And I think that there's a lot of opportunities for really smart people to do the retargeting and to get the messaging down to be a little bit better and a little more streamlined to what people get, getting, capturing people and getting them back into the.
[00:26:49] Awesome. We are coming up at time here, but I did want to make mention that anybody who does have a site where you're selling product, definitely look [00:27:00] into Google Merchant Center and set this up cause just for free stuff. Alone is gonna be amazing. And for Google to know about your product and stuff.
[00:27:09] If you're running WooCommerce on WordPress, there's a couple of plugins that should allow you to easily get your products from your store into the Google Shopping Merchant Center. And as well, I believe Shopify has the same types. Connections that will allow you to easily bring your stuff over there.
[00:27:30] So it shouldn't be too much of a manual process if you have bigger catalog of product, but definitely look into it. Yeah. And any final notes you wanna leave with? The big one, I think you kinda said it was like, this is a really good opportunity for any e-commerce. Business to get this set up because it's just, once you've got it set up and you've been approved, you're just gonna thank yourself later.
[00:27:51] Because whether you're doing ads now or you want to do them later on just gives you so many new opportunities. And Google is going [00:28:00] to be investing a lot. They're gonna still be investing more because they're trying to compete with Amazon and this is their way to do it. And so we should definitely take advantage.
[00:28:10] Awesome. No, I really liked this topic because like I told you, I really wanted to dive deeper into it because I do have e-commerce, so it's, you've given me the motivation to, to go look into it a lot more and actually set it up for a couple people. Yeah, No, for sure. And it's, yeah, it's definitely one that like spurred once you realize Oh, I could do all of that with this And you realize like what's available to you that Yeah, it's definitely one that I think is super important.
[00:28:36] Do we know what's coming up next week? Next week is gonna be Arena and Pip, talking about the Google Ads editor. Why you need to be using it to save yourself time. Awesome. Sounds fun. Yeah, and I guess all it leaves to me to say is, My name is Fay. And I'm Greg. Thanks for joining us today. Yeah, and see you next [00:29:00] time.
[00:29:00] Bye everyone.
[00:29:01] The conversation never stops in our Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks. Join us at facebook.com/groups/geeks to ask your questions, meet new friends, and learn even more about search, social and websites.
