As consumers increasingly turn to ecommerce to meet their needs, it's more important than ever for retailers and interested shoppers to easily find each other where so many searches begin: Google.
Every day, hundreds of millions of people come to Google for their shopping needs, making the Google Shopping tab an attractive place for businesses to list their products.
Previously, the Google Shopping tab consisted only of paid listings, but starting todayfree listings will appear alongside paid adsin relevant search results.
Shopify is partnering with Google to make it easy for merchants to sync, submit, and optimize their products for these free listings through Shopify’sGoogle channel. If you already have products synced through the app, your approved products can start showing up in relevant Google Shopping tab search results—no further action is required on your end.
Merchants selling in the U.S. can access this free feature starting today, and a global rollout is anticipated for the end of 2020.
Update:
As of August 2020, free product listings are also eligible to appear in relevant results on Google Search and Google Images. While listings on the Shopping tab help shoppers easily find products when they’re looking for them, product listings on Google Search and Google Images offer a more visual and descriptive search experience.
Attributes of approved products such as price, availability, and ratings are eligible to appear on Google Search and Google Images for Shopify merchants selling to the U.S. and using the Google channel. To learn more about this expansion of free product listings on Google,check out Google’s Merchant Center.
Lowering the barrier to reach customers through Google
With the introduction of free listings, eligible merchants can submit their products to be listed in the Google Shopping tab. From there, those products have the chance to be discovered by shoppers most likely to purchase them without having to pay for clicks.
While this does not replace Shopping ads, the introduction of free listings in the Google Shopping tab gives small businesses access to a popular online shopping destination when they may not have the resources to effectively run and scale their own Google Ads campaigns. It also gives merchants who are already using Shopping ads a way to supplement their paid advertising with free listings.
Getting your products listed in the Google Shopping tab
Eligible merchants can use Shopify’sGoogle channelto get set up. The first step is to follow the checklist to make sure you meet all of theGoogle Merchant Center requirements.
Once you have synced your product feed to Google Merchant Center and your products are approved, they can appear in relevant search results.
There are also several steps you can take tooptimize your listings in the Google Shopping taband improve their discoverability:
- Make sure your product and store information is detailed and up to date.
- Submit high-quality images of your products that follow Google Merchant Center’sspecifications.
- 确保你的product title attributesfor each product feed are descriptive—searchers will generally ignore vague titles.
- Consider the specific words your customers would type into Google to find your product and incorporate them naturally into the title and description attributes. Conduct somekeyword research来验证你的假设,人们是怎样searching for your products.
- Include all relevant product feed attributes, such as Size and Gender to help the right shoppers finding the right products.
- Optimize the product type attribute with at least 3 levels if possible. For example, if you’re selling Dog Blankets, you might use Home & Decor > Furnishings > Bedroom > Blanket > Dog.
For more information on setting up the Google Shopping integration for your Shopify store,check out our help docs. We’ll continue to update you as we work with Google to make this feature available to more merchants over the course of this year.
To learn more about how Google Shopping can help you get discovered by interested shoppers, check out our Compass course onGoogle Ads for Ecommerce.