What is Google Shopping and Why Your Nutritional Health Company Should Be Using it Right Now
With the coronavirus pandemic that the world is facing, nutritional health companies are doing really well right now. Many are probably seeing record revenue. People are genuinely doing all that they can to boost their immune system, treat the virus if they do have it, and generally be more healthy. We have multiple nutritional and healthcare clients asking us to support them as they experience this rapid growth right now – both to help manage that growth and to leverage it for the future. Given that, we wanted to share a critical tool with others in the community that might benefit.
Today’s blog is focused on sharing and distributing your products in Google Shopping to reach far more people than you are today.
Why Google Shopping?
Fundamentally, if you aren’t using Google Shopping for your B2C or B2B ecommerce sites, you may be leaving a lot of customers and revenue on the table.
- Google Shopping, if implemented correctly with the right marketing approaches, has the potential to give you double or triple ROI on ad spend.
- Unlike with Google Search and Display ads, there isn’t a lot of competition in Google Shopping. In fact, we find most organizations are actually not leveraging Google Shopping, particularly in the nutritional health space, but in many other industries, too.
- Google Shopping syncs with your product catalog directly, lending itself to a “set and forget” style of marketing. In fact, if you set it up correctly, it’s a very automated way of marketing.
- If the buyer finds your product via Google Shopping, they are often ready to actually buy. If they have the right product, at the right price, and they trust the ad, then they will buy immediately.
- You get more real estate and exposure on the search engine page as compared to text-based search ads. This is due to the fact that Google Shopping ads actually display your product images and any promotions in the ad.
- Within the ecosystem, you can leverage the price benchmark reporting to strategically price your products against competitors and identify strategies for promotions, special, and sales of your products.
- You can extend your checkout process to sell through Google Shopping directly, which means less steps for a customer to buy from you.
- You can easily promote and build your product ratings and brand reviews on your Google Shopping ads leading to greater trust and higher click-through rates.
- You mitigate spending risk. WIth Google Shopping you tell it what you want to spend and what kind of ROI you need. If Google cannot deliver your defined ROI, it will not spend your money.
- One final point that might sound silly just now while stores are closed is that Google Shopping gives preference to local physical stores. If you can list your local store inventory in Google Shopping, you will get top placement across all Google ads, no matter what you are paying.
So, why should you want to implement Google Shopping? Let me say it again – you might be able to identify 2-3x ROI on ad spend!
Blue Fish Tips for Google Shopping
That said, there are certainly some challenges in deploying Google Shopping successfully. We are going to share a few tips from our learnings (often from trial and error) in this post. I’m sure we’ll have more to share in future posts, too.
- If you are selling something like supplements, include the ingredients in the product description. Knowledgeable customers are often searching for specific ingredients. For example, imagine someone knows saffron is good for sleep, then they might search for supplements with saffron. If you listed saffron in your sleep product, you’ll rank higher than other sleep products.
- Your product titles should include an extended description of the item. For example, you might say “Sleep Advocate Supplement to support better sleep in a 12oz bottle”. This will get your product more real estate in the product listing and help potential buyers understand the benefits of your product.
- If your product spans broad pricing ranges, maybe group them accordingly. For example, your <$100 products are grouped together and your $100+ products are in a separate group.
- Don’t set your ROI too high or you will find google just doesn’t think it can deliver, so your products are never shown.
Hidden Challenges with a Few Bonus Blue Fish Tips
That all sounds easy enough right? For many, yes, but for others – not really. Just because you are comfortable with google display and search ads, does not mean this is going to be “easy” to implement, too.
- Behind the scenes, Google has a product feed format you must adhere to so that they don’t have to work out how to read your Magento, BigCommerce, or other platform catalog. Therefore, it’s not entirely trivial sorting through how to integrate your ecommerce platform to Google Shopping. The key is to understand the mandatory fields and map those.
- Further, you might find that the way your product feed is served up to Google Shopping introduces some wonky characters. You may need to write some rules on the Google Shopping side to parse those and display correctly. A classic example is that the registered trademark ® when fed through a product feed might show up as “®”. The good news is you can easily configure rules to fix those once you figure out what they are.
- Technically speaking, you are going to want to automate as much of this as possible. Without going too deep on this, Google Shopping expects you to update your product feed regularly, and if you haven’t updated it in 30 days, it’ll expire your products and will no longer show your ads. So, once you figure out how to populate your product feed correctly, you are going to want to automate that reproduction and send that feed to Google. Manually managing this will become a headache.
Do You Really Get Results?
We love a fresh skeptical mindset, and truthfully, you might know best about whether this will work for your business. We are certainly happy to discuss with you directly if you are interested in our perspective. That said, we have multiple clients who are seeing tremendous results and very quickly (and not just in the nutritional health space!).
For example, one client in the nutritional health space saw a 3x return on spending with Google Shopping. They saw a 194% increase in revenue over 9 months…. Another client of ours saw 5x ROI.
Now What?
If Google Shopping is something you are interested in activating today, and you want some help with that, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. One of our marketing automation evangelists will set up time to talk with you. If you think you want help implementing this, we can probably help you without even touching your ecommerce platform. If it makes sense, we look forward to talking with you further!
