What is a Shopping Ad?

A Shopping Campaign offers a number of central benefits. First, let’s cover the basic definition. A Shopping Campaign is a form of advertising on the Search or Shopping Network and while it appears in searches, a Shopping Ad is actually different from a Text Ad. Even if a Text Ad refers to a product, it’s not considered a Shopping Ad. In fact, a Shopping Ad may appear in conjunction with a Text Ad, which makes them an especially effective combo.

You Can Use a Shopping Ad With a Text Ad

The idea behind viewing a Shopping Ad and a Text Ad simultaneously is that it illustrates a broader variety of products consistent with a given search. A better informed consumer is primed for a better decision and repeat searchers. The more you know before you click, the fewer and, therefore, cheaper the Cost-Per-Click (CPC). The reduction of a cost as such is critical for a retailer because a Shopping Ad is priced unlike a typical Text Ad, for example.

Shopping Ad Pricing

While a Text Ad is priced in terms of visibility and priority, a Shopping Ad is priced a little differently. Rather than merely evaluating a cost with respect to a view, a Shopping Ad is only charged in one of two given circumstances. The first is when a user clicks on an Ad that takes the user immediately to your website’s landing page. The second instance is if the click takes a user to a Google-hosted landing page that features your local inventory.

What am I Bidding On?

That said, you still engage in an auction for Ad primacy––you merely bid on a different element of the user experience. A Shopping Ad is effectively framed in terms of everything it enhances. According to Google, advertisers may experience up to double or triple the average clickthrough rates (CTR) for a shopping-related search when they display a Shopping Ad instead of a text ad in the same location of a search.

Advantages of a Shopping Ad

The preference for a Shopping Ad over a Text Ad is understandable in a shopping search, where a user is more interested in seeing a product for him or herself rather than consuming a limited reference or description. Accordingly, the leads generated by a Shopping Ad are often of a higher quality than those otherwise provided by a Text Ad. Moreover, you can include product information in a Shopping Ad.

When a Shopping Ad is Preferable to a Text Ad

A picture is worth a thousand words, so they say, and while a Shopping Ad may not be worth a thousand Text Ads, it is certainly, at times, worth more than one of them. When a user clicks on a Shopping Ad, the user typically has a much better sense of what they are looking at and, as a result, is more likely to purchase whatever they end up clicking on. The ability to further a user down the purchase funnel in an organic manner is essential.

No Keywords

In our next article on Google Shopping Ads, we’ll get into how you set up a Shopping Campaign. For now, it’s relevant to mention the Merchant Center insofar as it pertains to bidding. Sometimes a keyword may feel a little abstract, especially if you engage with a consumer based on a variation of the keyword or keyword phrase you enter. Shopping Ads use product attributes you include in your Merchant Center data feed instead of keywords.

You are Charged Differently

You can make a product group centered around a particular attribute and bid on the collection of your choosing. Much like a Shopping Ad may appear in the same search as one of your Text Ads, a user may actually encounter more than one of your Shopping Ads at once. In this case, you will only be charged for a single click in the event a user engages with one of the relevant advertisements––even though you appeared more than once.

Customizable Data Inference

Finally, the increased complexity of a Shopping Ad––at least when compared with a Text Ad––needn’t hinder the insights you glean from bidding on one. Google allows for a lot of tracking segmentation, so you can see how many clicks a specific item or category of item is getting without needing to filter anything into a new area. Benchmarking information will inform you where your traction is relative to competitors. Both Bid Simulator and impression share data can assist you in determining where your business and its advertising stands to improve.