If you aren’t already listing your products directly with Google Shopping via a Google Merchant account, you should be.
It will get your product to search engine users (in other words, everybody) faster than any other method – and your competitors are already doing it.
Optimizing your product images for Google Image search is an important technique, but paid Google Shopping ads will take you to another level. Advertising with Google Shopping Campaigns often leads to double or triple the click through rates of text based search advertising. Follow these 7 steps to take advantage of Google’s reach, brand credibility, and powerful marketing tools to increase your sales.
Step 1: Optimize your Product Images
Like all eCommerce, Google Shopping is a visual experience. Google essentially combines merchants’ product feeds into category pages for comparison shopping and gives shoppers an image of the product and price. This means your product images are the most important part of your listing.
If you want to be found in Google Shopping, there is a simple method: do what Google tells you.
Google is a data driven company that wants to be useful to shoppers and facilitate sales. They want you to succeed. They do a great job of telling you what to do, and just as importantly what not to do. Get compliant first, and then you can take further action to distinguish yourself from the competition. First, the obvious: don’t break their rules!
Don’t overlay text on your product image or break other Google Shopping rules.
These are Google’s indicators of low image quality:
Don’t submit images smaller than 32×32 pixels or larger than 64 megapixels (apparel images must be at least 250×250 pixels)
Don’t scale up images or thumbnails
Don’t use watermark, logo, or text overlay
Don’t use borders around the image
Don’t include more than one product in the image, unless it’s a bundle
Don’t use a multicolored, dark, or patterned background
If you do any of the above, it won’t just impact your sales; it will prevent them. Google will either not allow (“disapprove”) your initial listing or they’ll delist you.
Select “Google Shopping” from the “Marketplaces” area when creating a spec or placing an order.
You can ensure you have compliant images that are optimized for Google Shopping in post-production processing by using the “Google Shopping” order specification within your Pixelz account. A few clicks now will prevent the headache of regaining Google’s trust after disapproval. Google performs frequent quality checks, and if they find compliance violations it can lead to suspension of your account and a frustrating review process.
If you are selling your product through additional marketplaces, platforms, comparison shopping engines, or other channels, you may be able to combine those into a single Pixelz order specification. When standards are compatible, you can submit a single order and ensure that your images will be compliant at every selected destination. Google Shopping, Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Jewelry, Amazon Product Ads, eBay, and Rakuten are current options within your Pixelz account, and we’re adding more all the time.
Do this with your product images
Start by following Google’s guidelines, then kick it up a notch with planning, quality photography, and professional post-production processing.
If you follow Google’s rules and our advice you can create professional product images for all marketplaces.
Google gives suggestions for improving image quality.
Use a solid white, gray, or light colored background
Show the product in clear, even lighting
Show the product with a view that clearly represents the item being sold. Back views and close-ups can be used for additional images, but not the main image.
Show the product at the correct scale, not too big or too small. A product should ideally fill no less than 75%, but not more than 90%, of the full image.
Make sure the image is free of blur, noise, excessive jpeg artifacts, or other image artifacts like pixelation, fringing, and fading out.
Overarching principles of product imagery
Whether you’re adding images to your own website, uploading them to an eCommerce marketplace like Amazon, or submitting them to a comparison shopping engine like Google Shopping, the guiding principles of product photography remain the same. Consistent high quality images improve sales.
Product category pages should be clean and easy to navigate. Minimize distractions by consistently cropping and aligning. You should consistently use a white or light grey background. Add depth with shadows, and apparel images should be shown on-body to demonstrate shape and fit.
Planning your photoshoot and post-production processing are the key to achieving consistent, professional product images.
Display optimized product images directly in Google search results.
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Step 2: Create a Google Merchant account
Google Merchant accounts are free and easy to manage. In a rarity for Google, you can even speak to a human rep if you need help.
The Google Merchant Center allows you to upload product data and create Shopping campaigns to drive sales. In addition to the millions of Google users you’re opening yourself up to, Google’s location based technology can drive online shoppers to your brick and mortar store with features like “in-stock” availability checking.
Step 3: Optimize your Google data feed
So what is a Google Shopping data feed, anyway?
Optimizing your product images is crucial and is where you should dedicate most of your resources. The next step to optimizing your Google Shopping listing is to understand and target the additional pieces of your listing. What we’re calling “your listing” is what Google calls a “data feed.”
An example Google Shopping data feed.
When you are adding products to your Google Merchant account, you will be submitting the following basic product information in a Google product data feed:
ID, Title, Description, Google product category, Product type, Link, Mobile link, Image link, Additional image link, Condition, Availability, Availability date, Price, Sale price, Sale price, effective date.
There are additional fields that may be provided, like gender for apparel. Take a close look at Google’s attributes chart and make sure you provide as much detail as possible related to your product. Most are self explanatory, but a few allow for subjective interpretation and can influence the success of your listing.
There are many shared Google data feed requirements, but it is wise to follow category specific recommendations. Source: google.com
7 steps to take advantage of Google’s reach, brand credibility, and powerful marketing tools.
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Google data feed attributes to focus on
ID – This is a unique code that identifies your product for the machines. The most important thing to remember here is not to change it. If you change it later, you will effectively be relisting your product and resetting your Quality Score (in essence the reputation your item has built with Google).
Title – Be relevant, clear, accurate, and descriptive. Shorter is better – long titles may get truncated. Don’t overdo keywords by repeating them with slight variations, like “bestselling, bestseller, best seller.” Don’t get gimmicky and do the Internet version of shouting for attention with all caps, exclamation points, or FuNnY Sp3ll1ng and capitalization. Any one of those techniques can result in disapproval of your product listing.
Description – You can submit up to 5,000 characters, but Google recommends something in the 500 to 1000 range. Lead off with relevant information to your customer, like technical attributes and special features, but remember who you’re writing for: it’s as much about informing the search engine as it is marketing to customers. Include visually obvious features so Google can find you when a customer searches for specific patterns, colors, shapes, and other design attributes.
Image link – This is the primary image for your listing and must be the first image shoppers see if they click through to your page. Make it beautiful using our earlier optimization instructions.
Additional image link – Submit more images of your product! The more images you provide the better, as additional high quality images have been correlated to increased sales. When you’re photographing apparel, shoot the front and back, each 45 degree angle, left and right sides, and closeups of any interesting detail. Submit all of these to your Google Merchant account as an “additional image link.”
Step 4: Add your data feed
Press the “+ Data Feed” button when you’re ready to list your products with Google Shopping. Remember that Google Shopping sends customers to your site, so don’t list items unless they’re available at your site.
Add your data feed when your product images and website are ready.
Basic information
Name your feed something descriptive and organized.
Google has a “Test” mode for adding data feeds that we recommend you use the first couple times you add feeds. It will help you iron out kinks in your data.
The “Feed type” option allows you to add new product listings or update existing listings. Select a “target country” where your products will be sold and shipped, and then name your feed. Your name should be something descriptive that will help you stay organized when adding additional feeds in the future.
Input method
Select the feed type that is most convenient for you.
The “input method” step of adding your data feed is flexible and boils down to where you want to maintain your listings. “Google Sheets” allows you to keep your data in the cloud using familiar spreadsheet technology. “Scheduled fetches” will get data from a file on your website. “Regular uploads” puts the onus on you, allowing you to apply updates whenever you prefer through a variety of methods, like FTP or manual upload. Select the option that makes the most sense for you. Scheduled fetches are the easiest to keep up to date if you have the developer resources to automatically output a file that tracks your inventory, while Sheets and regular uploads are user friendly manual options.
Feed setup
The “feed setup” step will depend on the input method you selected. If you are using Google Sheets, you can use an existing sheet or let Google create one for you.
If using Sheets, select an existing sheet or have Google generate one for you.
The Google generated sheet supplies the necessary column headers.
If you have scheduled fetches, you need to provide the name and URL of your file, set a fetch time and frequency, and provide password information if you’ve protected the data.
If you selected “regular uploads,” you need to provide the name of your file for FTP uploads.
You can also manually upload a file immediately.
Your new data feed will appear in your Google Merchant account.
When you have completed adding your data feed, it will appear on the “Feeds” page of your account.
You can also submit data feeds via API (for those with developer resources available), and many eCommerce platforms (like BigCommerce) have account linking methods. Did you know there’s a Pixelz App for BigCommerce? Install it and you can update your BigCommerce store with new and edited product images directly from Pixelz.
7 Steps to Optimize Your Product Images and Be Found in Google Shopping.
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Step 5: Shopping Campaigns
You’re probably familiar with how AdWords works, so we won’t go too deep into it. In a nutshell, you engage in an ad auction where you set minimum and maximum bid amounts for certain search terms. You’re charged when someone clicks on one of your ads.
The Google Merchant Center (where you created your data feed) is a complementary piece to Google AdWords. If you don’t already have an AdWords account, create one by following Google’s guided AdWords setup.
Shopping campaigns (how we actually advertise the products from your data feed) can be created from the Merchant Center or AdWords, but must be managed from within your AdWords account. Before you can create a campaign, you must link your Google Merchant and AdWords accounts from within your Merchant account.
Link your AdWords account to your Google Merchant account from within the Merchant Center.
Login to your Merchant account, click “AdWords” from the left navigation, and then either press the “Link” button or manually input your customer ID if it’s under a different user.
Step 6: Create a Shopping Campaign
You’ve got your product ready, your data feed submitted to Google, and your Merchant and AdWords accounts linked. Now you need to reach out to customers by creating a Shopping Campaign. This is how you choose whom to target with your ads and how much you want to spend.
Shopping Campaigns create Product Listing Ads which have a big advantage over traditional text based ads for a number of reasons:
Your product images are the primary piece of the listing. Shopping is a visual experience and Google reports that Product Listing Ads may double or triple your clickthrough rate compared to text ads.
Anyone clicking on your ad has already seen your product and its price, so they are better qualified leads.
Shopping Campaigns use your data feed instead of keywords, so ads are more targeted.
More than one ad can appear for a given search, which improves your odds of displaying a relevant product.
You can create a Shopping Campaign from either your Merchant or AdWords account, but you can only create basic settings from within the Merchant account. Anything sophisticated must be managed from AdWords.
When your accounts are linked you can create Shopping Campaigns from the Merchant Center.
Because you can only set basic Campaign parameters from within your Merchant account, we recommend you create your Shopping Campaigns in AdWords.
Create Shopping Campaigns from within AdWords.
It’s pretty simple to setup a Shopping Campaign from within your AdWords account. Go to “Campaigns,” press the “+Campaign” button, and select “Shopping” from the dropdown.
Include search partners to display ads at more places than just google.com.
In addition to basic settings, you can choose whether to include Google search partners. You should do so if you want to push your ads into places like AOL, YouTube, and Google Maps.
Ad groups allow you to customize bids for multiple product groups.
Next you’ll have an opportunity to create an ad group. You can get complex and create different product groups within your ad group, like separating out shirts, pants, accessories, and individual brands within those groups.
Creating groups and subgroups is a good idea once you have a handle on how Shopping Campaigns work, but to begin you may wish to simply start with one product group with a single bid for all products.
Step 7: Streamline your workflow and stay up to date
Keep those products coming! Building an efficient production team and running an efficient product photography studio will pay off in the short and long run. You want to be pushing products to your website and channels like Google Shopping as fast as possible. You don’t have to have a huge budget to be as productive as a fast fashion retailer.
Once you’ve set up your Google Shopping data feed, keep it up to date or Google will punish your listings. Optimally, develop a reporting tool that looks at your website or CMS and outputs the required data for Google to fetch.
Be a Leader
Experiment. Innovate. Try new markets and new techniques. If something doesn’t work, look at the lessons you’ve learned and let them inform your next decision. There are millions of eCommerce stores out there and you need to find what makes you unique.
Anywhere you can improve efficiency and remove time waste, you should. Take advantage of resources like Pixelz in order to easily create Google Shopping compliant images. Doing so will free you to do what you do best: sell.
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