How to Use Google Shopping for Amazon Sellers

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Did you know that you can effectively use Google Shopping for Amazon product promotion? Google Shopping is for Google shoppers, but it can be used to give your Amazon customers a good shopping experience as well. It can help increase conversions and retention, too.

 

About Google Shopping Ads

 

Google shopping ads, or product listing ads, are Google’s paid shopping campaign program designed to showcase and promote products. They are located on top of paid search ads and organic listings. They show a product image, price, seller’s name, and other details such as shipping information to potential buyers. This allows buyers to preview products before clicking on ads and being sent to a website.

Google Shopping Features

 

Like paid search ads, shopping ads are pay per click (PPC), so advertisers pay each time an ad is clicked. After the user clicks on an ad, they are taken to the advertiser’s landing page. Using AdWords for Amazon, you can get your listing in one of these prime positions for Google searchers to see.

Shopping ads, unlike conventional PPC, cannot be controlled with keywords. Google retains control over what ads to show depending on what information is provided. The advertiser submits this information through the product data feed in the Merchant Center. Advertisers have some control, however. Enhancements are available on Shopping ads so advertisers can showcase product features that Amazon customers like, such as:

 

“Special Offers” with Merchant Promotions

With a promotions data feed, promotions are shown as “special offer” links alongside the Product Ads.

 

Product Ratings

Google Shopping ads rating

These provide critical information to shoppers using a 5-star rating system and total count of reviews. Reviews are specific to the individual products and not reflective of the store or business, and they are based on aggregated ratings from multiple sources.

 

Google Customer Reviews Badge

 

This is a badge available to those who’ve opted into the Google Customer Reviews service. The badge makes the connection between the seller’s website and brand created on Google. It shows a 5-star seller rating and can be added anywhere on the website.

 

Seller Ratings

 

This is a score that can appear on shopping ads, an automated enhancement that utilizes consumer reviews on post-purchase feedback to generate an “XX% Positive” Rating.

 

Google Ad Extensions

 

Another great way to promote a company or products is ad extensions. These also make text ads stand out against the competition in the search engine results. You can showcase the detailed product information that people look for when shopping on Amazon. Google Ads has basic extensions (sitelinks, callout extensions) and advanced ones:

 

Structured Snippets

 

Showing a preview of the advertised products before searchers click through to a page, they use a predefined header (Brands, Models, Styles, and Types) and the retailer’s choice of supporting details.

 

Price Extensions

 

You can display up to eight cards that people can view to see different products or brands and prices. Then shoppers can click straight to what interests them from the price menu. This feature includes a header and small description, similar to sitelinks. Pricing qualifiers include from, up to, and average, allowing for flexibility in the offering.

 

Promotion Extensions

 

These highlight sales and promotions, catching the eye of people who are looking for the best deals. They include the option to emphasize holidays, special events, coupons and offer codes. Promotions can be scheduled so that they are only visible to customers when you want them to be.

 

Review Extensions

 

Share positive third-party reviews or awards with potential customers to give them a good impression of the business even before they click on the ads.

 

Seller Ratings Extensions

 

This is an automated extension that uses the 5-star rating system. Google displays a rating after gathering enough information from reputable sources that aggregate business reviews. These ratings are set to show what the consumer experience is overall, and whether a business has earned 150 unique reviews of 3.5 and over.

Google Shopping snippet

Google Shopping Ads

 

To use Google Shopping ads, you need to link your Merchant Center to AdWords. Once linked, the product data dictates how and where ads will show. Management of the shopping ads is done in AdWords, where you can organize and promote of items using ad groups or campaigns.

You don’t have to create unique manually to leverage Google Shopping for Amazon. Rather, Google pulls information such as the image, title, price, and store or business name from the feed directly into an ad.

One technique often used for affiliate advertising via AdWords is the creation of specific landing pages. This system is also effective with Google Shopping for Amazon. The idea is to design a landing page which advertises a product, shows reviews and descriptions and so forth, with affiliate links to Amazon. You advertise your own page with matching display URLs, circumventing restrictions on affiliate links while directing interested traffic to Amazon.

 

The Up Side

 

Using Google Shopping for Amazon, you can access a much wider range of searchers and direct prospects to any site. With Amazon ads, you are limited to Amazon customers, who are taken directly to a single product detail page and never leave Amazon.

There are several benefits of taking a user to your own website. First, it can help increase your website’s monthly traffic. Additionally, it can give you the opportunity to show them other products in your store, with the hope of increasing the value of the purchase. It can also provide brand awareness and give you the chance to capture the user’s information without a conversion, which is very limited on the Amazon platform. This can be accomplished with the help of a newsletter subscription pop-up.

 

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The Down Side

 

There are, however, some disadvantages to using Google Shopping ads. The main problem you might encounter here is a loss of profits. Let’s say you have a product you are selling for $10 with a profit of $5 for each item sold. Selling through an Amazon storefront means paying a commission – $1 per item for an individual seller – or a scaling variable fee for professional storefronts. Going with the $1 commission for simplicity, let’s peg your profit at $4 per item sold.

If you decide to use Google Shopping for Amazon advertising, it can also cost quite a bit. AdWords, of course, is a PPC program, and you have to compete for various keywords to get a reasonable number of hits. Say it takes $2 per click to maintain the top spot for your competitive keywords. You are now selling at a $3 profit per item sold when those clicks come from AdWords, and $5 per unit if they come organically.  Plenty of people may click the ad but not purchase the item. Every one of those clicks is a reduction in possible profits, since you still have to pay for the ads, but you’re not getting any amount of profit. Using Google Shopping for Amazon can increase traffic but not necessarily sales or profits.

One other thing to consider is the level of control that you get when you use Google Shopping for Amazon. Google technically retains most of the control by choosing what ads to trigger based on your product data feed. You can tweak the information, however, to manipulate the results.

 

Final Thoughts

 

Using Google Shopping for Amazon can be a very valuable source of traffic – everything outside of the Amazon platform. This is an enormous pool of potential customers that you can direct to your own eCommerce website or to your Amazon store – or both. It does have its own set of risks, however. In the end, you will be the one who ultimately decides what can work for you and your business.

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