There are many methods for selling things online, and it’s all about finding as many buyers as possible.
The internet is a massive space filled with consumers, if you can attract loads of them to your products, you greatly increase your chances of making money and being successful.
Bearing that in mind, you must explore ways of generating as much traffic to your products as possible.
Step forward Google Shopping.
Most of you should be aware of Google Shopping, but you probably don’t understand the significance it plays in gaining customers.
Furthermore, you might be unaware of how to actually sell your products using this platform.
In this guide, we’ll explain everything for you and show you exactly how to do things properly.
Google Shopping Explained
To begin, you must understand the nuances of Google Shopping.
At its core, this is a platform where people can shop for products via the Google Search engine.
There’s a shopping tab at the top of your search results page, and you can view the same product from various vendors, comparing the price.
However, it’s important to note that all Google Shopping search results are paid. There isn’t an organic list, companies will pay to have their products shown.
As a result, this leads to particular products on Google Shopping being displayed at the top of normal search results as sponsored links.
In theory, if you put a product on Google Shopping, and someone searches for it in Google, they will see your paid Shopping result before any other organic links.
The main reason you use this platform is to dramatically increase product visibility and bring in more clicks.
People are highly likely to click on the Google Shopping results above regular organic search results as they see an image of the product along with its price and star-rating.
It gives them everything they need, right there.
How To Sell Your Products With Google Shopping
After understanding more about the idea of this platform, it’s time to start selling your products.
How do you do this? Follow these steps, and you’ll have everything sorted in no time:
Step 1: Register With Google’s Merchant Center
The first thing you need to do is head over to Google Merchant Center and register your store.
Here, you can sign up and have access to the hub where you can upload your products to Google, so people can see them on Google shopping.
This part is straightforward as all you need to do is fill in some details about your business, including its website, name, and where it’s located.
Step 2: Adding Products
When you’re in the Merchant Center, you’ll see a section called ‘Products’. Naturally, click on this to start adding your products.
Here, Google will refer to your product listings as ‘Feeds’, and you can add multiple feeds at the same time.
The menu is very straightforward, you have to select your target country and name the feed.
From here, you get taken to the next mini-step which is how you actually add your feed. Google gives you three options; Google Sheets, Scheduled Fetch, or Upload.
With the first option you can use product information in a spreadsheet, and every time it’s updated, Google updates the info on your feed.
Scheduled Fetch is the most popular method as it lets you direct Google to a product list on your website, where it will fetch all your listings for you.
Upload is simply just uploading a file with all the product information on it.
Once you’ve chosen your method – we recommend Scheduled Fetch – you’ll see all your products in the Merchant Center, and be ready to sell on this platform.
Step 3: Ads
Leave things as they are and absolutely nothing will happen. Your products won’t appear in Google Shopping unless you pay for Shopping Ads.
To do this, you need an AdWords account, which you should hopefully already have.
Got your account ready? Good, now you have to create a campaign by selecting the option on your AdWords dashboard.
There’s some non-important information here such as naming your campaign, but the main concerns are your campaign type and the option to Link a Google Merchant Account.
It’s vital you select your type as ‘Shopping’ from the drop-down box, to ensure you run the right type of campaign.
Furthermore, click the option below this that lets you link your AdWords and Merchant accounts.
Following this, you can start bidding for ads and selecting where you want them to be placed. Out of every step in this entire process, this one is the most complex and in-depth.
You want to target very specific keywords that are relevant to your products.
Naturally, this will be hard if you’re selling something generic that lots of big companies sell, as they have more money to outbid you and get the best placements.
For niche products, it’s so important you try and get the best placement possible, so don’t be afraid to pay top dollar.
We strongly suggest you have a long list of keywords before starting your bidding, this will help you figure out which ones to target, and you’ll see what the best value ones are too.
When all this is done, your products will appear on Google Shopping, and people can start clicking on them and spending money.
Bonus Step: Improve Your Listing
If you want to get the most out of your ads, you need to improve your listings to try and get as many clicks as possible.
This can help your product see more traffic than a listing that’s ahead of it in the results.
A few things to consider are titles, special offers, and reviews.
An informative title attracts buyers by telling them everything they need to know about the product.
A special offer tag looks inviting as consumers love a good deal. Finally, reviews help people feel safe when purchasing products, which can put yours in a better position than one without reviews.
Doing all of this might sound hard, but Google makes it as easy as possible for you.
All the menus are very easy to read and come with simple instructions to help you out.
Focus hard on your AdWords campaign, and you can see a direct increase in sales, which makes your bids a worthy investment.
