Would a fourfold increase in online sales interest you? Then this episode of The Marketing Hub is for you.  Manus Sheridan of Blue Digital explains what Google Shopping is and how it works. You can get free product listings and have your product appear at the top of google searches.

The Marketing Hub series has experienced marketing professionals sharing their expertise, helping you to improve your marketing knowledge and grow your business. The host, Paul McDermott, owner of video agency, Social Video HQ is right there with you learning and hopefully demystifying marketing along the way.

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Transcript

Today’s topic is Google Shopping

and all about using Google shopping.

Welcome to The Marketing Hub. Today to talk

about this topic.

I’m delighted to say we have digital marketer

Manus Sheridan, of Blue Digital.

Here to talk us through it.

Hi Manus. Hi, Paul. Great to be here this morning.

Manus, it’s great to have you on.

We were talking about this

earlier this week, and it’s very I know nothing about it.

So can you just talk to us

about Google shopping, using it and the

advantages of using it?

Yes. So Google shopping is a really handy tool.

It allows businesses to have

their products displayed in a small ticker-tape

type on Google search.

So your product will appear with others

in a horizontal list that displays your price

and the name of your business

at the very top of Google search page.

So it really puts you first

and foremost in front of the

searcher and is a great tool for exactly that purpose.

OK, so that sounds really good. So basically,

if you put your service up there in a native

SEO way, you will appear at the top of searches

when people search for a product or service.

Exactly. Well, actually, it’s just products, Paul.

But yes. In relation to

you’re hitting the nail on the head in relation to

to owning the search engine results page,

you can have a scenario where your products

are appearing first and foremost on the page

and then followed by either paid listings

for your business and also organic listings.

So really, you can potentially

own as much of the information above the fold on

the search engine results page as possible,

which is putting a business

as as far forward as it possibly can.

This seems like a no brainer for most businesses to

get their products on there.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

And if nothing else, actually, it’s

can be considerably cheaper than bidding for expensive and

competitive keywords within just Google ads on its own.

So Google shopping to me, for anybody selling

physical products is absolutely a no brainer.

And so Manus. Do you have any tips for vendors

who might think about using Google shopping?

Yes, absolutely, Paul.

So I’ve researched Google shopping considerably

and found that automated

campaigns work very well in managing a company’s

campaigns. One snag is once a campaign is set up

and put live, no changes should be made to that Google

shopping campaign for 45 days

to allow the campaign to learn effectively.

That could be a long time for to allow a system to

to manage your spend and your performance.

But it really is imperative

to allow no changes for the first 45 days

to a Google shopping campaign.

And it’s also imperative to engage fully with the

full suite of Google products

that are available and free to employ,

such as Google Analytics for measurement,

Google AdWords to run the campaigns,

the Google Merchant Centre,

which is where your Google shopping is based.

And the Google search console which affords you a huge amount

of information, in particular in relation to queries

and the performance of your websites.

Google optimise, which allow you to drive

data driven design.

Google tag manager, which is used to send

formatted events

to analytics to allow you to track your

performance effectively .

And Google my business,

which in short really

operates as as a small social media channel

for your businesses and again

allows you to own more

information on the results pages above the fold.

So all these products can be linked together.

And once the linking is done, they can be used to really

get the maximum benefit from your advertising budget.

One of the main drivers

of success using Google products is showing Google

what success looks like for your business.

Again, Google provide plenty of support

for all their applications.

So if anyone hits a snag, just reach out to Google.

Again, imperative to link all these products

Google Analytics, Google tag manager

or Google ads, Google search console, et cetera,

so that you can benefit from the information sharing,

such as terms customer use to find your product or service.

And these can be shared

between Google search console and Google Analytics.

In turn, you can import

this data to your

relevant campaigns within Google ads to improve

the campaign performance.

So effectively, you’re showing Google what success

looks like for your business.

And then pointing Google in the direction of

finding more of that success.

And given the length of time it can take for shopping

campaigns, start to work with Google shopping.

Now is the time to start to put these

together and allow them to start learning

prior to the Christmas rush.

Google shopping also offers a

certain amount of free product listings,

which we touched off there briefly.

This is when Google shopping

will share your ads with people searching for your products.

And the best thing about it is you won’t be charged.

In addition, further engagement with Google

products has a knock on effect

of increasing your

organic traffic rates, which again, is just fantastic.

You know, Google does say that, you know,

there is no direct correlation between advertising

and the organic rates.

But again, in my experience, that’s vastly understated.

There is a huge knock

on effect on on your organic listings.

And as an example of how Google shopping

could work for businesses.

One of my customers has had their sales jump from 25 K

a month to over 100k a month.

And I was in a period of four

months, including my five day learning period.

So that that’s why

I’m such an advocate

of the system for anybody

that’s selling a physical product.

That’s amazing. And the thing that I

really hate hitched on to there was that it’s that forty

five days for to learn

and just thinking

about the run up to Christmas coming,

that businesses should be

getting on it now sooner than later

so that it’s up and running. Yes, Paul. Absolutely.

It’s it’s that old adage, fail to prepare.

Prepare to fail.

If you have everything

set up and ready to go, if you put the effort in first.

And make sure that it’s right first time that you have all

the errors and everything

corrected, all your ducks in a row, and

then Google shopping will work for you.

It does take courage

to allow a campaign to run for 45 days on its own.

But again, the proof is in the pudding.

For a customer to have a four fold increase on their sales

month on month is is, in

my opinion, is incredible for for any business. Absolutely.

Absolutely. That that was that was great, Manus.

That was so informative.

And I’m sure a lot of people will be now

after viewing this going away and start to research this.

So before we go, can you tell me a

little bit about Blue Digital, your company?

Yes. So Blue Digital was originally set up in 2017

by me and my business partner, Jonathan.

Now, unfortunately, we lost Jonathan

back in August 2020.

But thanks to the work we’ve done together,

Blue Digital was able to move forward and survive.

So now Blue Digital

is expanding and truly becoming a full service

digital marketing agency,

offering a large suite of digital marketing services

from from pay per click advertising.

Search engine optimisation. Social media marketing.

Website design and development. Graphic design

and much, much more.

And now I should mention

that I’m extremely proud

of Blue Digital being a certified Google partner.

And this is an accreditation

awarded by Google for a company’s performance

in delivering paid

advertising across the Google AdWords platform.

It acknowledges that we’re responsible

for managing client budgets of over 100k per annum,

and most importantly,

that we’ve delivered a

positive return on investment to these companies.

So it’s something

that we’ve had for a number of years,

and it’s something that I’d like to mention to to

really to make people more

relaxed and and to provide confidence to people.

Absolutely. That we can

we can look after their advertising.

Yeah. It just gives that level of certainty,

you know, where some agencies wouldn’t have that.

Manus, that that was great and very informative.

And thanks for coming on to The Marketing Hub,

Paul. My pleasure.

Any time I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you.

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