Running Google Ads for E-Commerce: The Essential Playbook / by Andrew Steven

To successfully run Google Ads for e-commerce, you need a strategy that combines continuous testing, optimized feeds, distinct campaigns, and effective conversion tracking. Google Ads can offer businesses a unique blend of broad reach in multiple forms and precise control over budgets and targeting.

However, complexity and specificity have a push and pull with power. To get the most out of your investment, you have to know what you’re doing.

In this article, we’ll look at a practical approach to getting the results you want and how you can accomplish them on your own, as well as ways e-commerce Google Ads management services can take that work off your plate and maximize your investments.

Understanding Google Ads

The first step to making the right investments with Google Ads is understanding the various forms they can take.

  • Shopping ads: These appear as visual product listings in search results and are driven by the data or product feed created by the seller, not by keywords.

  • Search ads: These are text ads that appear in search results.

  • YouTube ads: These video ads have their own levers of control in that they can be skippable or not and can be displayed before, during or after YouTube videos.

  • Discovery ads: These ads are generated using images, logos, and text submitted by the business, and appear on the YouTube homepage and in the Google Discover feed.

  • Display ads: These are the ads most consumers are most familiar with, appearing as visual ads on webpages.

All these options require finesse if you want to maximize their value. Google Shopping ads optimization, for example, can be complex, but completely worth it once you figure out who to target with which product.

A High-Quality Feed

At the start of your e-commerce ad journey, you need a strong foundation, which is your feed. This is the collection of product information that details your product and allows you to group items into categories, which, in turn, allows you more precise control over your campaigns.

Google Shopping uses this feed instead of keywords. Here are some ways to optimize your feed:

  • Complete every available field; the more information, the better.

  • Use clear, keyword-rich product titles.

  • Use high-quality photos that center your product.

  • Include cost, shipping, and availability.

To start, clarity is key. You want would-be customers to take one look at your ad and know what you’re selling and if it fits their needs.

Campaign Structure

One of the important aspects of Google Ads is that you can categorize your products, allowing you to craft specific campaigns with parameters most effective for your goals. The way you categorize and break out products has a high ceiling for complexity, but here are some considerations to start:

  • You can group products based on margins and performance, such as creating a category for your bestsellers.

  • You can group products based on type (if you sell clothes, you can create a category just for running shoes)

  • You can group products based on promotion and seasonality.

You don’t want to market your bestsellers the same way you do your items on clearance, and you can shape those decisions by paying attention to your feed. These decisions should be made using data.

Tracking Conversions

Google Ads is powerful in part because it can both use and provide data. Tracking conversions is one of the key parts to understanding how your business is functioning and how your customers see it. Here are a few conversion events that can be helpful:

  • Purchase: This will communicate direct return on investment (ROI), telling you how well a product sells.

  • Add to cart: This indicates buyer intent and can provide future targets for remarketing.

  • Begin checkout: If you’re seeing interaction that doesn’t end in purchases, you can track this to see where the funnel drop-off point is occurring.

There are other conversion events that you can track, though it’s easy to get inundated with data that you ultimately don’t use. Tracking this information can be helpful, however, and give you a three-dimensional picture of where your business stands and where it needs to go.

Test, Test, Test

Once you have your product feed, your categories, and your conversion tracking in place, you should be able to craft unique and functional campaigns. The work is never done, however, because you should always be testing and adapting.

Experts in the industry, like those at BERK Labs, can help you implement full strategies that are informed by data, and we can help you use that data to change and respond to customer behavior.