Google Shopping for BigCommerce Stores: Discover the Advantages!

If you have a BigCommerce store and are thinking of running Google Shopping campaigns, this post is for you! Above all, we’ll show you why your products need to be advertised on Google Shopping.

First of all, what exactly is Google Shopping? It is a pay-per-click Google advertising service that will allow you to display your products on Google when people are searching for that specific product. The special thing about Shopping Ads is that they are displayed at the top of Google’s results and display a picture of the products as well as its price, and other attributes. People know what they are in for when clicking on your ad, and that’s why this type of Google advertising network brings higher quality traffic to your online store. 

For instance in the example below, you can see the advertised shoes displaying not only the price but also the brand, a special offer tag, reviews, attributes like free shipping, and more. 

One study performed by Merkle Digital Marketing in 2017, states that Google Shopping campaigns produce up to 53% of retail Google Search ad clicks and and have up to 30% higher conversion rates compared to other types of text ads. 

As you can tell, they are an important tool for your store. Due to this, we want to show you how to make the most of your Google Shopping ads.

So how do you set up your Shopping Ads on BigCommerce?

First you will need to set up your Merchant Center account by uploading all your product information. You can do it manually or get help from any app on the BigCommerce marketplace, such as Google Ads & Shopping by Clever eCommerce Ads. Feel free to choose the plan that best suits your goals.

You will then need to have your BigCommerce Google Shopping ads campaigns created for advertising the products on your merchant center on Google. This can also be done manually on Google Ads or though the previously mentioned app. 

Creating high performing Shopping Ads on BigCommerce

Before creating your Google Shopping campaigns, the first thing you have to take care of is your product feed. It has to be updated by ensuring that all the prices, product images, and URLs are accurate. Take into account that if you want to advertise your products in more than one country, you will need a product data feed per country. 

If it’s your first time creating Google Shopping campaigns on BigCommerce, we recommend starting with a small amount of products that have high margins, so the risk is low while you learn how to everything works.

Once you have properly set up your product data feed, and have your Google Ads account linked to your Merchant center, it’s time to create your Google Shopping Ads campaigns! Don’t worry, it’s very simple. Just select the Merchant Center product feed and the sales country where you want to advertise your products.

Organizing your BigCommerce Google Shopping ads 

Shopping campaigns are divided in ad groups. This means that if you only have a few products that are related, one ad group will be enough. When having larger amount of products, it’s better to divide them into different ad groups that will have a similar performance. However, you shouldn’t be worried about this because ad groups in Google Shopping campaigns are for organizational purposes only. 

Once you divide your products into ad groups, you have to set bids on those ad groups or on the actual products you are advertising individually. It’s more logical to set bids on individual products, so you can calculate the bids taking into account the specific profit margins you get from them, their price and the competition around it. 

If you have to create different product groups because your data feed is huge, organize them based on products where profit margins are similar. This could be by brand, category, type of product, etc. Whatever makes sense for you and your business. 

Once you’ve been running your BigCommerce Shopping Ads campaigns for a while, we recommend you separating the products whose performance stands out from the rest. Put these products into their own ad group or even campaign, so you will be able to keep a closer eye on them.

Tips for making the most out of your BigCommerce Shopping Ads

1. Set your shopping bids lower than you would on the search network, always below $1, and then adjust according to the performance of each keyword or product group. Also, if you have a product group with mixed products that you don’t know where to include, you should lower the bids for the products included in that group.
2. Take specific locations into account when bidding by using geographic bid modifiers. This way you can bid higher for high-value regions that you know have a higher amount of traffic or conversions.
3. Use the Search Impression Share metric to learn how much growth potential each group of products has. This metric gives an understanding of your positioning towards your competitors.
4. The importance of mobile has raised over the years, and its importance in terms of revenue is continually growing. However, many companies find it to not be profitable when it comes to Shopping Ads performance on mobile. We recommend you to start with mobile enabled, but  look at the data closely to decide whether to keep it activated or stop your Shopping campaigns from running on mobile.
5. If you have any special promotions running, you can set a tag on your ad where you can mention it. You can also include a “Free Shipping” tag, or display other tags like: “5% off”, “Black Friday sale!”, etc. Always make sure that the promotions you display are real, relevant and match with what’s on your website. Otherwise Google won’t run your ads.

Did these tips help you out with your advertising strategy? The time is now to create your Shopping campaigns on BigCommerce and make the most of them! If you have any doubts on how to create them or need any extra help, feel free to contact us and we will be happy to assist you through our BigCommerce Google Ads app: Google Ads & Shopping by Clever eCommerce Ads. 

One last thing, are you acquainted with the PMAX campaigns conducted by Google and Microsoft? They’re definitely worth checking out!