How to Use Google Ads for Shopify Store

Successfully selling products from your Shopify store requires getting in front of as several people as possible. An online store powered by Shopify doesn’t automatically entail success.

By utilizing the power of Google Ads, you can get in front of the people searching for the products you sell. Driving highly qualified traffic from Google Ads to your website, which converts into leads, sales, and revenue.

When Shopify is paired with the right tools, it can indeed be integral to your online success. How do you put your online store in front of as many potential customers as possible?

Possibly, that’s where Google Ads comes in. The combination of Shopify and Google Ads is truly a match made when managed properly.

So, how do you advertise your Shopify store and where do you start?

Shopping Campaigns For Shopify

If you’re new to Google Ads, with Shopify no doubt the best place to start is with Shopping Ads.

Its process is easy and quick, and only requires a couple of steps that can be easily completed from within the Shopify interface itself.

Once you’re in Shopify’s Google channel, you can synchronize all of your products.

It means they will be automatically pushed to the Google Merchant Center, allowing you to easily create Google Smart Shopping campaigns.

Another key to success with Shopping campaigns is the optimization of the product feed, so ensure that your product descriptions in Shopify are as accurate and keyword-rich as possible (no keyword stuffing allowed, though).

You can even bring into line the discounts that you create in Shopify to Google Ads.

And once the campaign is set up and live, Google will simply use its automation and machine learning to optimize it.

Optimize Your Shopping Campaigns

After you synchronize your products, Google will add them into a single ad group by default.

However, you should take the time to review your product list and only advertise items that you know are likely to generate a positive ROI.

Everything else should be isolated in a separate ad group with low priority, or simply excluded altogether.

Taking Advantage Of Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking

If using Google Analytics as your main analytics platform, you can leverage Enhanced eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics to automatically create audience segments based on the customer journey and interaction with your website.
It grabs the low-hanging fruit – cart and checkout abandoners – into segments. It then deploys these audiences in Google Ads to create campaigns that target these users with compelling ads and offers.

Audience Targeting

With all of your marketing activity, you should make use of the platform’s testing features.

This means you’re not only able to innovate and experiment but also be proactive in responding to changes and fluctuations in the market.

In particular, you should make audience targeting one of the priorities.

Google’s focus on the user, has grown exponentially in the past few years. Understanding your customer should always be at the forefront of your mind.

After all, these guys are the ones keeping you in business, right?

Google allows you to test out how different segments respond to your ads and convert by setting audience targeting or even just adding them in observation mode.

The latter is a great way to get to know more about your existing and new customers.

Additionally, you can use and test different layers of audience targeting.

For example, you can use affinity audiences to look for users based on their interests, or in-market audiences to target warm leads and ready-to-buy users.

The Best User Experience Starts From The First (Ad) Impression

Don’t underestimate or downplay the importance of the actual ads.
In life, it’s often the first impression that matters the most and ad impressions are no different.
Undercooked, rushed, or generally poor ad text and ad creative won’t help you to cut through the noise. It also means you miss out on showing potential customers that you’re the better option when they are actively looking for products you stock.
Ensure big selling points such as free shipping and easy returns are clear and easy to understand.
Then, if possible, enhance the ad with a campaign landing page optimized for conversions. Shopify provides many different ways of creating landing pages, including the use of external tools and page builder apps from its own app store.

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)

I’ll be the first to admit that only a few years ago, DSAs were certainly not among my favorite ways of creating ad campaigns.
Since then, however, Google’s machine learning has made a giant leap forward and the performance of these ads is now massively better.
Combine that with the fact it’s now nearly impossible to predict and cover all the possible terms and phrases people might use to search and find your products, and DSAs are quickly becoming one of the last few secret tools in the search experts’ kit.
They can be particularly useful for Shopify merchants with large inventories as DSA can really help to clean up on the long tail and drive cost-efficient incremental sales that you’re otherwise likely to miss.

Retargeting: Check! But How About Cross-Selling?

We get it. Selling is hard graft, and so we are often quite content to be able to just close the deal and move on to the next customer.
But how about the opportunity to increase your customers’ lifetime value (LTV) and offer them the opportunity to buy more from you?
Stop thinking about retargeting as a way to just engage with website visitors that have not converted and start thinking more about using your customer lists.
Luckily, this is an easy task for Shopify customers.
From the Shopify interface, you simply go to the Customers section and find the left-hand side menu.
From there, choose to export all your customers and modify the downloaded file to make it fit the format required to upload it into Google.
Then, go to the Audience Manager section within the Shared Library under Tools in Google Ads, and proceed with the upload following the prompts.
Once done, your customer list will be ready for use and allow you to target or suppress those that Google can match. It will also create lookalike audiences (similar audiences) in Google.

Develop A Full Funnel Strategy

While it’s easier for ecommerce marketers to focus on bottom-of-the-funnel campaigns targeting sales, revenue and ROI, it is important to remember that Google Ads can offer much more than Shopping and Search ads.
Within the same interface, advertisers also have the capability to create ads and campaigns that can help generate awareness and consideration.