The impressions in Google Shopping is the first step towards gaining clicks and sales. So lets jump straight into the different ways on how to increase your Impressions.
Annotations
Increasing your ad appearance by adding annotations is a great way to make your ads visually more appealing than your competitors. For example adding reviews, price drops, etc.
Increase CPC
I know that this is something that nobody likes to do. But we have to be honest with ourselves and understand that increased CPC will increase the impressions. However I would like to warn you that increasing the impressions purely on CPC and not doing all the rest below will result in a lower CTR. Potentially increasing your cost per conversion.
Why does the CTR decrease if I increase the CPC?
Increased CPC will provide you with more impressions, this also means that you will have a higher percentage of diversity and search terms that might be completely irrelevant. I recommend that you first do all the below tips and then change the CPC.
This will reduce the overall costs associated to bad clicks.
Product Data Quality
The first step to perform, before you do anything else to improve impressions, is to have well written titles, descriptions and all other relevant attributes.
Why do we need to improve data quality?
Data quality defines the majority of your ranking; a poorly written product detail will result in a flawed ranking and thus not have an increased impression. This also affects your over-time ranking; the higher your CTR, the higher your ranking, resulting in more impressions. Now that you understand that product details are directly associated with ranking let’s delve deeper.
The Images
Images are a visual aspect of your ad, having a very clear and detailed image will result in a higher CTR.
Be careful not to have the same images as everyone else; consumers can quickly get product fatigue, where the chances of clicking with competitors with the same image are lower than if you have something unique.
- Ensuring you have images that are at least 1300 by 1300 pixels or larger and square.
- The product takes up maximum amount of space, meaning you don’t have too much white space.
- Do not upscale images
Once you have added your images, test your ad results on different devices and screen resolutions. Google often resizes and reshapes your products, and they will not always look nice in certain situations. Please note that it is impossible to account for all conditions, so it is best to focus on mobile first.
As the image quality reflects your business, the better your image quality is, the higher your CTR can be.
The Title
Recommend length : around 70 to 150 characters
While the max length is 150 characters, Google will only show the first 50 to 70 characters on ads, depending on the ad format. So, adding the most important keywords at the beginning of the title is essential.
When writing titles always adhere to Google’s Policy and be on topic for your product. The title has the highest ranking factor. So having a title correctly describing what you are selling will result in better results.
A good way to go about this is by including the following elements. Brand, Product, Category, Size, Color etc…
And any keywords that are relevant to the product, of course, while avoiding keyword stuffing.
For more details have a look here: https://feedarmy.com/kb/google-shopping-title-attribute-optimization-google-merchant-center/
Product Type
The product type value is an essential attribute with nearly equal value to the title. Adding important keywords in your product type attribute is a great way to get a lot more impressions.
First, base your product values on your website breadcrumbs, then merge together your top search terms.
Variant Attributes
Adding variant attributes is also a great way to get a lot more impressions. These include color, size, gender, age group, material, pattern, size system, size type.
The Description
Don’t focus too much on the description, as it does not do much in increasing your impressions.
Recommend length : 500 – 1000 characters
Again as the title, be on topic talk about the product, benefits, size, color etc… Avoid talking about your service and other products. As this will hold no value to a search query. If I’m talking about accessories than Google will think your product is associated to the accessory.
You would think this is great right?
This will result in people searching for an accessory and seeing the main product as a listing. The shopper would not want to click on your product as it shows something they are not looking for.
I don’t want to change my website data! How can I improve my data?
Allot of plugins and tools extract product details directly from the site / database and sends it to Google Merchant. Preventing the merchant from editing the details independently. In most cases due to the policies and requirements of Google you would like to change these details without effecting your website.
There are a lot of tools / SaaS (Software as a Service) that allow these changes. Mostly they are called Google Merchant Management Tools.
Alongside the text, there are also other data quality updates you can do.
Improve your diagnostic warnings and errors. Always fix all issues listed in Google Merchant’s Diagnostics Tab. This will increase the quality value of your data feed.
Free Shipping
Free shipping has become a standard way of getting more impressions and clicks. If you are not already offering free shipping and all your competitors offer free shipping, then doing the same is a great way to get more performance.
Pricing
Pricing is one of the biggest influences on your available impressions. Sadly, if you offer a cheaper product, Google will favor your products over the competitor. This is pretty sad, especially if you are working with slim margins.
So, having more competitively priced products is a great way to increase performance.
Structured Data
Once you have optimized your data feed details, than it is important to have additional structured data on your product landing page. Adding structured data will result in an improved quality allowing Google to correctly correlate your data.
Such elements are :
- Price
- Availability
- Condition
I have written many articles on how to add structured data to your website.
Negative Keywords
If you have already added negative keywords, than I suggest reviewing these to ensure if they still need to be kept. For example shopper behavior might change requiring some search terms to be included. If you are unsure about how to find out if your negative keyword is still relevant than the following tips might work.
- Use Google Trends to analyze popularity
- Use Adwords Keyword Planner to search for impressions
- Check if the search terms in Google Shopping show relevant products, if they do than remove the negative keyword.
When removing existing negative keywords, always keep a close eye on results as this can affect impressions, CTR and sales in a negative or positive effect. Each niche business and account is unique and not all changes are as successful.
Removing irrelevant search terms is an important step for increasing your impressions. You might say, that does not make much sense, well, if you remove the irrelevant search terms, Google will then focus more on the relevant search terms.
Experimentation is required.
Google Product Category
When not adding a Google product category, Google will automatically attempt to add this for you. However, it is not perfect, and checking which category they chose is required. Make sure to check this on a per-product level.
You can then update the categories in the product editor.
However, the easiest way is to simply define your categories without checking using a spreadsheet, as this would be a lot faster.
Here is a list: http://www.google.com/basepages/producttype/taxonomy-with-ids.en-US.txt
If you want to have localized languages, I have a list of all the links here: https://feedarmy.com/kb/google-merchant-taxonomy-list-for-all-countries/
Final Note
As indicated in the initial paragraph, it is recommended your improve everything, this can be a daunting task if you don’t have enough time to manage this by yourself, if you need assistance, have a look here: https://feedarmy.com/managed-google-merchant-feed/