As an e-commerce store, gaining exposure for your products is the key to gaining the sales needed to have a successful online presence. Google is often considered as the keeper of keys when it comes to being successful online.
To many of our e-commerce clients a Google Ads campaign can be a quick win to gain exposure for their products, with the ability to ring-fence budgets around product groups or individual products.
Alongside Google Ads, Google also has free Shopping listings, offering e-commerce businesses another way to generate website traffic, at no cost and with little effort. This is a complimentary service from Google that you may already be part of without even knowing.
What are Free Shopping listings?
Free shopping listings allow you to show your products across Google’s various networks with no associated cost. You are not required to have any campaigns within Google Ads set up, and no billing details need to be added. Just a few simple steps need to be in place to achieve the free advertising.
It sounds too good to be true, right?
In 2020, this programme was introduced to e-commerce businesses as a solution to gain organic traffic as a result of a well optimised product catalogue. This programme allows merchants to show their ads across the products tab, YouTube, Google Search, Images and Google Lens (Google’s visual search tool).
The most common place you will see the free product listings is on the Google Shopping Tab. It is helpful to understand the difference between free listings and paid listings so you can identify your own products amongst the other merchants. The screenshot below visually represents what a typical search result would look like on the Products tab. Much like on the main Google search results, you will find the sponsored (paid listing) results situated at the top of the page. These are followed by the organic (free listing) products.
Similarly to the fundamentals of SEO, it is important to ensure that your products are well optimised using high-traffic, highly relevant terms to ensure products are shown to highly engaged users. Feed optimisation is a key aspect here not only for paid results but also your free shopping listings. You can read more about this in our recent blog about the importance of feed optimisation.
We have, in some cases, seen clients receive more than 1,400 clicks per month from the free listings, with potential customers clicking directly through to the product pages on their site. This alone shows the potential traffic uplift that can be gained if implemented correctly. However, it is important to note that the amount of free traffic gained varies widely from business to business. Even if you only gain a small amount of additional traffic from the free listings, it hasn’t cost anything, so is well worth setting up!
What are Google Shopping Ads?
Google Shopping Ads are often the heart and soul of a successful Google Ads campaign for e-commerce businesses; investment in this area of Google Ads is expected to increase throughout 2024. In the ‘State of PPC 2024 Global Report’, 63% of all respondents using Performance Max campaigns with a product feed (a common campaign type used for e-commerce) are expecting to spend more on this campaign type in 2024 – with increases expected to be significantly higher than in any other campaign type across a wide range of advertising platforms – see report here for details.
These campaigns can work very well for those with larger budgets, but also for advertisers with tighter budget constraints.
The key differences between Google Shopping Ads and Free Listings are:
- The cost associated with running paid ads on Google Shopping network
- The control over targeting users based on location and audience segments
- Scheduling, showing your products at certain times and days of the week
- The control over the amount of traffic generated – it is much easier to scale up your Google Ads traffic than your traffic from the free Shopping listings
Due to the control associated with the paid listings, and the machine learning within the Google Ads system, we are often able to achieve stronger conversion rates from the paid listings. Showing products to users when they have expressed significant interest in purchasing is possible with Google’s machine learning capabilities, with 1000s of signals allowing Google’s machine learning to target appropriate users.
Our case studies offer multiple examples of the potential success that can be gained by implementing Google Shopping campaigns into your e-commerce business.
Are you already using free Shopping listings?
Unbeknown to you, you may already be utilising the free Shopping listings and generating traffic – if not, we would suggest implementing this to achieve additional free traffic to your product pages.
Below is or step by step guide to getting started with Google’s free Shopping listings:
- Product Feed – if you are an e-commerce business you will likely have the foundations in place to easily generate a product feed that can be used to start this process. This should include all data about your products on your site, it will likely come in the form of a list from your website that is updated as you update your products on your site.
- Merchant Center – once you have a product feed containing data about the various products on your site, this information will need to be sent to Google through Merchant Center. Google will highlight to you which products have been approved or disapproved, allowing you to take action in case of any disapproved products.
- Returns policy – ensure your site has a suitable returns policy page, then paste this link into Merchant Center and complete the questions surrounding your returns policy.
- Delivery settings – input your packing and shipping times into the delivery section of your Merchant Center account.
Once your products have been reviewed by Google, they should begin to gain visibility.
How to see the traffic from the free listings
Analysing where your traffic is coming from is one of the most important aspects of maintaining a successful presence online. Knowing which channels of traffic are bringing in sales allows you to understand where you need to focus your efforts in the future.
Within your Merchant Center account, under the Overview section, you should be able to see the number of clicks coming from both your paid listings and your free listings.
This does not, of course, show you what happens next – whether or not your products were purchased as a result, for example. To see this you will need to use your website analytics package, which for most people is Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
Visit your User Acquisition report in GA4 and look for ‘Organic Shopping’ as a source. This will show you all of the traffic, users and revenue associated with your free Shopping listings. ‘Paid Shopping’, of course, relates to your Google Shopping ads.
For more information on how Ascendancy can assist you, visit our contact page to call or email the team.
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