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Google Shopping Ads During Festive Season

The Big Billion Sale. The Great Indian Shopping Festival. The Big Fashion Festival. Who hasn’t heard of these shopping festivals in India?

At the end of each year, big ecommerce brands like Flipkart, Amazon, and Myntra offer unbelievable discounts to customers to celebrate the festive season.

But that’s not the only reason behind this trend. One source estimates last year’s online festive sales in India alone to be worth approximately $ 8.3 billion (global sales were approximated at $ 1.1 trillion).

Festive season shopping ads on Google

Now that’s a huge, sweet carrot at the end of the festive stick for any business to increase their sales in this or any festive period. But you’re not going to get that carrot without a game plan. And, you’re not going to get it without a game plan that involves Facebook and Google shopping ads.

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According to Google, retail searches grew by 300% in the last quarter of 2020 (read: during the festive period). What this tells you is that customers are increasingly looking to mix online shopping experiences with their traditional in-store ones. This is especially true of the pandemic period when customers are either locked-in or cautious and restricted.
Shopping ads on Google allow you to meet the new demands of your customers.

Why Google Shopping Ads are Important

It allows you to meet your customers wherever they are in the buying journey.

Using shopping ads on Google allows you to:

  1. Reach customers while they’re browsing for your products or services
  2. Engage them while they’re researching products & services
  3. Convert customers when they’re intent is high or are looking to make purchases
  4. Increase your sales during the festive season

Shopping ads on Google help you deliver highly-visual and personalized ads to close to 3 billion Google users. There are primarily two types of Google shopping ads that you need to be aware of:

Google Discovery ads

The key benefit of using Google Discovery campaigns is that you can reach your customer at various touch points like on YouTube’s homepage or watch next on Google’s ad network, while they’re browsing for anything from cooking videos to the latest fashion trends.

YouTube, incidentally, is a great channel to increase brand awareness and to inspire people into taking action. You could potentially turn your video ads into a digital storefront by accompanying them with a browsable product feed (Google Shopping Feed) that increases conversions.

Examples of Google Discovery Ads Examples of Google Smart Shopping Ads Google Shopping Ads Placement

You can get the benefits of running Shopping Ads on Google & YouTube Shopping Ads from a single campaign.

Google’s customer intent signals allow you to effectively target customers who are most likely to engage with your brand seamlessly across all their channels and across all of your customer’s devices. Additionally, you can use Google’s machine learning capabilities to optimize your targeting and audience performance so that they are in line with your overall advertising and business objectives.

Benefits of Google Discovery campaigns

You can drive conversions at scale for any objective like driving purchases, increasing newsletter sign up or your website traffic
You can reach new customers early on in the shopping journey when they’re most receptive to your brand
You can reconnect with your existing customers who are most likely to engage with your brand once again

Using Google Discovery campaigns can be a great way to drive sales this festive season. On an average, advertisers who compliment their Search ads with Discovery ads see their conversions increase by 12%.

But if you really want to do more with your Google and YouTube Shopping ads this festive season, Google offers a special something that you may want to explore.

Google Smart Shopping ads

Google Smart Shopping campaigns allow you to make the most out of Google’s machine learning algorithms to get the best performance and conversions from your campaigns while also simplifying campaign management.

Sounds exciting?

According to Google, advertisers who used Smart Shopping campaigns achieved up to 20% more conversion value at the similar costs.

Benefits of Google Smart Shopping campaigns

  1. Better qualified leads
  2. Broader presence
  3. Easy retail-oriented campaign management
  4. Powerful reporting
  5. Auto-optimized conversion value
  6. Targeting different ROAS for individual campaigns

Google Smart Shopping ads allow you to showcase high-quality product images and store information in multiple places at the same time so that you can increase your reach and get better quality leads.

What makes Google Smart Shopping ads really unique is their orientation towards retail.

Shoppers use Google to determine which product is the best in its category by comparing prices, reviews, offers, and more. 91% of Google users take some kind of product or shopping action after discovering a brand on their Google Shopping feed.

Google Smart Shopping ads allow you to particularly advertise products using Product Listing ads. While running Product Listing ads, you can target potential customers using product attributes, rather than keywords. This offers a new way to reach customers in relevant searches, while they’re browsing or researching for your products or services.

You can also advertise your products by the availability of stock or inventory by running Local Inventory ads that combine your product data with the inventory data that you enter in your Merchant Centre account.

Apart from these unique retail-oriented features, you also get reports on clicks, costs, and conversions by product, brand, category and more so you can effortlessly analyze and optimize the performance of your product listing ads.

Smart Shopping ads also integrate easily with third-party platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce so you can market and track your conversions more seamlessly this festive season.

Where Google Shopping ads appear

You may see Google shopping ads in one or all of these places:

  1. Google search (next to the results)
  2. Google images
  3. Google’s partner websites
  4. Google’s display network, which includes YouTube & Gmail (inventory ads are an exception and aren’t shown on the display network)
  5. Shopping tab on Google Search (in some countries)
Google Shopping Optimization

How to optimize your Google Shopping ads

  1. Use custom and/or remarketing lists with active website visitors and customers
  2. Cross-sell and reactivate existing customers with special offers and messaging
  3. Use similar audiences to reach new customers with interests that are similar to your existing audiences
  4. Use conversion tracking for events like purchases, sign-ups, etc; this helps you automatically maximize your daily budget by increasing the value of your conversions
  5. Explore new ad types like inventory and product ads; these ads are more dynamic and retail-oriented
  6. Keep your ads simple: simple image ads without overlaid text receive 9% more click-throughs on average
  7. Evaluate your performance manually to aid Google’s automatic optimization and get the most out of your ROAS

Apart from these tips, avoid these common mistakes that reduce the conversion rate of your Google ads.

Boost Online Sales this Festive Season

Your digital storefront for the festive season

About 53% of consumers expect to be able to buy things using their smartphone from any brand that has a site or an app. Most of these consumers use Google to find what they need. That’s why Google’s shopping ads can help you achieve a variety of objectives like increasing app installs, driving website traffic, and ultimately increasing sales and conversions.

To make the most of your Google shopping ads, use the information in this blog or simply get in touch with us! We wish you a happy festive season and plenty of sales!

Recommended Reading

Running Instagram & Facebook Shopping Ads During Festive Season
Effective Creative Ad Guidelines with Examples
Featured Snippets and How They are Changing Search and Discovery
How to Create a Free Google Website For Your Business

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