Google Shopping

Campaign Objectives

MyLiberty.life, a Canadian online retailer, wanted to know if Google Search advertising could outperform Google Shopping in terms of product sales conversions.

Google Shopping vs Google Paid Search

Google Shopping allows retailers to run advertising campaigns to promote their product inventory. It all starts with the retailer sending, automatically, its product details to Google via Google’s Merchant Center offering. Once the product information has been uploaded, the retailer / merchant can create a Shopping campaign in Google Ads to display its wares.

Shopping ads placements are different from traditional text-only search ads, as they include a photo of the product, product title, price, store name, and more.

“Instead of keywords, Shopping ads use the product attributes you defined in your Merchant Center data feed to show your ads on relevant searches.” Source: Google

The Plan:

MyLiberty.life used a free application to automatically send its product data feed — stored in its ecommerce platform — to Google Merchant Center. From there, the Google Shopping campaign was created in Google Ads. Nearly all of the content for the ads is provided automatically through the data feed.

Here are screenshots showing an example of the creative for Google Shopping ad for Women’s underwear vs a traditional text-only search Google Paid Search ad vs another Google Shopping ad for Men’s underwear:

For launch, Online Authority worked with MyLiberty.life to customize its Google Shopping ads to organize product groups using Custom Labels, reflective of their product collections.

Over several months, MyLiberty tested the performance of its Shopping campaign vs its Search campaign to see which drove the most conversions.

Results:

The Google Shopping Campaign delivered 3x the conversions of Search. Wow!

Armed with this critical data, MyLiberty.life re-allocated its budget accordingly and continues to devote a significantly higher proportion of its media spend to Shopping Ads versus other Google placements.