How to Optimize Your Businesses’ Google Shopping Feed For Maximized Success!.

In the US, the Digital Marketing Industry for product sales has seen a massive paradigm shift in recent years with the success of services like Amazon. Indeed, they recently overtook even the mighty Google in recent years with around 47% of Americans surveyed admitting to starting their product searches there. However, with Amazon only starting to deliver to Thailand within the past year and prices being of a western level, Google Shopping remains the most cost-effective method of selling products in Thailand online.

After all, over 35% of Google product searches convert into a sale within 5 days, whereas Amazon is only at around 20%. Google Shopping campaigns have a proven record of being a success and they are instant when creating, however, just like Google Adwords, they require time, effort, know-how, and some optimization to make the campaign successful. If you want a high conversion rate then you will need to ensure your Google Shopping feed is as well optimized as possible. Let’s go over some top tips to help you optimize your Google Shopping Campaign for Thailand.

What is a Google Shopping Feed?

First, it is important to understand what your Google Shopping feed is and why it is important. Unlike search campaigns, shopping advertisers cannot directly control which keywords will trigger their specific advertisement. Google actually crawls Shopping advertisers websites and feeds in order to categorize and sort them for individual searches. It will place you in accordance with how strong the information it finds is. Depending on the scale of your operation, you may be able to do this manually for a company that sells a few different products. Or for those who have hundreds, or even thousands of products, you will need to find an app or service to assist you with formatting your feed in a Google-focused manner.

Optimization

So this is where we will go over exactly how to optimize your Google Shopping feed for maximum exposure. Now when you initially create your feed, the more information that you provide, the better, as this will give the algorithm more to go on when categorizing you. And on the other side of this coin, not providing enough could affect how you are categorized and ranked for particular keywords. In this regard, Google Shopping Optimization is very much like SEO, you have to populate your feed with correct and relevant information in order for the algorithm to understand exactly what your product is and the specifics of said product.

Product Titles

When titling your products, you want to ensure that the keyword that you want to target (e.g coffee cups) should be as close to the front of the title as possible. It can be compared to a website page title, it gives both the reader and the algorithm a clear idea of what your product is and what kind of keywords it would need to trigger in order for the information to be relevant to the searcher. However, be careful of trying to stuff your titles with keywords it needs to be done in a way that makes it clear what your product is without hammering the point.

Pictures

Now, this part is more about appealing to your potential customers than appeasing the autonomous servants of Google. The more eye-catching, professional and high quality your product photographs are, the more likely you are to appeal to a customer who is looking for your product. Think of your photograph like your products introduction, you want it to be as good as possible right? However, there are some stipulations from Google’s end. Such as the photo being free of any text, watermarks or logos.

Product Category

Now, this is not something your customers will actually see over, this is more of a backend factor that is taken into consideration by Google in order to populate the search results. When setting up your campaign, you are required to select from Google’s “Product Taxonomy List” also known as a GPT, which has over 6,000 categories. Product category is so important when speaking in terms of relevance, after all the more you target your product into the correct subcategories, the more relevant your product will end up being.

Product Type

This is a very similar sounding thing to “Product category” but for those who sell niche products, this is something you should get to grips with. In layman’s terms, the product type gives you another Google facing factor to consider when ranking your products for relevance in search terms. Sometimes the GPT will allow you to find exactly the correct category and other times … it won’t. With this in mind companies that sell very specific or nice products need to be aware of how to use product type.

Product Description

When writing your product description, some have the idea that writing a longwinded essay about all the frivolous details of their products is the key to success, quite frankly, it’s not. The algorithm is designed to crawl the text for relevant keywords, this is where you should be clearly and concisely targeting secondary keywords for your products. Remember to be direct, but not spammy with how you insert these keywords.

Custom Labels

Custom labels are essentially groups of products of a type that are all put into one barrel and targeted to the most relevant demographics. Working in a similar way to “Ad Groups” on search advertising, you then assign bids to the individual barrels of products. This allows you to differentiate between individual products in individual groups and target those products with higher bids.

Other Factors

Be sure to look at the price of your products and how others are pricing them in order to be competitive in the marketplace. If your products are branded it is essential that you also include this in your feed in order to target related searches. For apparel sellers, there is a whole host of other information like gender, color and size that also needs to be included in your product descriptions.

So hope that gives you some indication into how a Shopping Feed works, and what you can do to get the most from your Shopping campaigns. If you’re still looking for some help then speak to one of the team at Phoenix Media today on 02 038 5400 or email info@phoenixmedia.co.th

About the author

As the managing partner for Phoenix Media, Rob brings over 10 years’ experience in digital marketing and running successful agencies in the UK, Australia and Thailand. Starting in a sales role he has covered all aspects of the agency from sales and service to technical ad operations. Reach him directly on rob@phoenixmedia.co.th