Google Ads for eCommerce: 9 Strategies to Boost Conversion 2024

As eCommerce evolves, staying ahead of the competition requires more than just a compelling product, it demands a strategic approach to digital marketing.

Google Ads has always been a powerful tool that greatly boosts marketing efficiency for eCommerce businesses, especially Shopify merchants. That makes you get lost in numerous Google Ads strategies. So how can you sift through the noise and concentrate on the strategies that will truly make a difference for your business?

In this blog, we’ll share with you 9 actionable strategies in Google Ads for eCommerce for 2024. We’ll cover everything from the fundamental methods to the advanced ones to boost your campaign performance.

Why should eCommerce businesses use Google Ads?

As you may know, Google Ads is one of the largest PPC platforms, accounting for 39% of the digital advertising market globally. With billions of searches conducted every day, Google provides businesses, especially in the eCommerce domain, with great access to potential customers.

A survey by Search Engine Land revealed that 56% of consumers take search engine results, including those from Google and other platforms, into account when deciding on purchases. Also, 63% of consumers find new products through search engine results. Furthermore, as of 2024, around 80% of businesses worldwide use Google Ads for their pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

So what do these figures say? Your target audience is actively present on Google, and your competitors are definitely using the platform. Hence, neglecting Google Ads means you’re turning away numerous potential customers who are interested in your products, and giving your competitors the opportunity to capture their attention instead.

Considerations before launching Google Ads for eCommerce

Before diving right into strategies when running Google Ads for eCommerce, here are some key points we want to emphasize:

Choose among Google Ads types

When deciding which types of Google Ads to use for your eCommerce business, you should understand how it works and when to use it:

Focus on relevant strategies

When considering a strategy or a tip for your Google Ads eCommerce campaign, you should focus on strategies that align with your broader marketing goals rather than trying to implement every available tip.

While there are numerous tactics that can boost your campaign performance, not all of them are relevant or effective for your own business model. So mainly focus on tips and techniques that fit within your overall strategy and reinforce your key objectives. This targeted approach helps your ad spend used efficiently and supports long-term success as well.

Be well-prepared for key selling seasons

Certain times of the year, like the holidays or summer, are when brands see the highest sales. If your brand follows this pattern, it’s crucial to start planning and structuring your campaigns at least six months in advance.

Many brands wait until just three to four weeks before their peak sales season to seek assistance in doubling or tripling their revenue, but this approach is very risky. 

True success often comes from a well-structured campaign that can scale gradually, rather than relying on last-minute changes.

Strategies to optimize Google Ads for eCommerce

Alright, let’s take a look into some of the most actionable and effective strategies to optimize Google Ads for eCommerce businesses.

Customize conversion tracking for better insights

Conversion tracking in Google Ads measures actions that users take after interacting with your ads, such as form submissions, phone calls, or purchases.

It organizes these actions into categories, allowing you to track and optimize campaigns based on specific goals. Therefore, it makes sure your ads focus on driving meaningful interactions.

Pro tips

• Set up primary vs. secondary conversions: Please make sure only important actions (e.g., lead forms, purchases) are set as Primary conversions. Primary conversions affect bidding strategies, so you should also avoid counting minor actions (like page views) as Primary unless necessary.

• Organize conversions into categories: You can use default categories like ‘Purchase’ or ‘Sign-Up’ for clarity. If needed, create custom categories. Proper organization simplifies campaign management and optimizes performance.

Once you’ve set up conversion tracking for your Google Ads, it’s crucial to regularly monitor the data and compare it across different channels for more accurate insights. Relying solely on Google Ads conversion tracking may lead to over-attribution of sales to Google Ads, neglecting the contributions of other channels.

To get a more comprehensive view, we recommend using Google Ads data in combination with another analytics tool like Google Analytics or any third-party solutions. By integrating data from multiple sources, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions and get a clearer picture of what’s driving conversions. This ensures your insights are not only accurate but also actionable for optimizing future campaigns.

Setting bidding smartly

Along with other factors like ad quality, bidding strategies is also a factors that determines the position of your ad on the results page.

Based on our observations of e-commerce campaigns, here are three bidding types that are easy to set up and can still deliver strong results for your store:

	Key features	Purpose	Best for
Manual CPC	Manually set bids for individual keywords/ads	Direct control over cost per click	Precise budget control, small campaigns
Target ROAS	Automatically adjusts bids to hit a target ROAS	Maximize revenue based on spend	Maximizing revenue, performance-driven goals
Maximize Conversions	Automatically sets bids to get the most conversions within budget	Increase total conversions	Driving conversions without manual adjustments

In terms of bidding strategies, setting them at the right time with the right target is what matters. If you establish your target ROAS or CPA too early, it can severely impact your account’s performance.

Besides, setting your target ROAS too high or your target CPA too low can suspend ad spending altogether. As a result, this will reduce the total number of conversions and result in lower revenue. In contrast, setting a low target ROAS or a high target CPA may cause missed opportunities, ultimately leading to overspending on Google Ads.

Pro tips to set bidding

• Delay setting targets: Wait at least 3-6 months before setting Target ROAS or Target CPA to ensure you’re satisfied with the campaign’s performance. Setting too early signals Google to maintain the current results, limiting potential improvements.
• Stick to your targets: Once you set a Target ROAS or Target CPA, don’t adjust it for at least 30 days, even if performance goes down at first. This allows time for results to stabilize before making changes.
• Monitor for stability: You should keep your conversion metrics stable, fluctuating no more than 20% over a 3-4 week period. Consistency in performance is key before setting a specific bidding strategy.

Optimize shopping product feed

Detailed information about your products is included in a shopping product feed. This data is then submitted to Google Ads to create product listings that appear in Google Shopping and other relevant search results.

An optimized Google Shopping campaign heavily depends on the quality of your product feed. Therefore, you need to optimize your Google Shopping data feed.

Pro tips

• Craft clear and keyword-rich titles: Write concise and descriptive product titles that include relevant keywords and brand names. Include key features and modifiers and keep your titles under 150 characters for optimal display. Here’s a simple formula to follow: [Brand] + [Product Name] + [Key Features] + [Modifiers] + [Size/Color/Model]
• Prioritize high-quality images: Product images should be high-resolution, clear, and relevant to the product, as they significantly impact purchasing decisions. A tip for you, follow Google’s image requirements and include relevant keywords in image titles and alt text to improve SEO.
• Maintain accurate and secure URLs: Double-check that the URLs you provide lead directly to the correct product landing page. Always use secure URLs (https://) to ensure compatibility with Google Shopping and avoid misleading your customers.

Target location and language

Effective location and language targeting in Google Ads push your ads to reach the most relevant audience by aligning with their geographic and linguistic preferences.

This precision enhances ad performance, maximizes ROI, and increases the likelihood of conversions by tailoring messages to the needs and preferences of users in specific regions and languages.

Pro tips

• Adjust bids by location: You can apply bid adjustments to optimize costs based on location performance. For instance, increasing bids for high-performing areas and decreasing for lower-performing ones to manage CPA effectively.
• Utilize distinct ad groups: Set up separate ad groups for each language you aim to target within your campaign. This approach enables you to custom ad messaging and keywords for each language for relevance and boosting engagement.

Optimize for mobile

According to Google research, 61% of smartphone owners perform searches from their devices every single day. In fact, consumers are now spending over 15 hours per week researching from their smartphones.

Hence, it’s a must to optimize your ads so that they are effective and engaging for mobile users, and then your click-through rates and conversions may elevate.

A fundamental step is to optimize your image ads. You can follow the requirements from Google for mobile image ads:

Pro tips to optimize ads for mobile

• Use mobile-friendly keywords: The keywords you choose should align with mobile users’ search habits, which are often shorter and more conversational. Tools like Google Keyword Planner can help find these keywords and negative keywords to exclude irrelevant traffic.
• Choose effective ad formats: Ad formats need to be responsive. Each format serves different purposes and should be chosen based on your goals and products.

Leverage AI-powered tools

Optimizing Google Ads with AI can boost campaign efficiency and performance while minimizing manual tasks.

And just only AI-driven tools in Google Ads already help maximize return on investment by automating bid strategies, targeting, and creative development, making your campaigns more effective and streamlined.

Pro tips to leverage AI-powered tools

• Smart bidding: This strategy employs machine learning to adjust your bids for each Google Ads auction, aiming to maximize conversions or meet your target ROAS. When you automate the bidding process, your ads are displayed in optimal positions at the right times, eliminating the need for continuous manual adjustments.
• Google Smart Campaigns: Smart Campaigns automatically generate and oversee ads considering your business goals and advertising budget. Thereby, they enhance ad placements, targeting, and bidding to deliver superior results.
• Responsive Search Ads (RSAs): You can use RSAs to experiment with various headlines and descriptions, and then determine which ones obtain the best results.
• Dynamic Search Ads: This feature automatically generates landing pages and ad headlines based on your website’s content. More than just that, even if users search for keywords you haven’t explicitly targeted, your ads remain highly relevant to their queries.

Advanced Google Ads techniques for eCommerce

Now, let’s come to some advanced Google Ads campaigns for eCommerce to make your campaigns as efficient and effective as possible.

Use auto-apply for recommendations

Google’s optimization suggestions are categorized into different groups, such as ads and assets, automated campaigns, etc. Each assigned a unique score that influences the overall optimization score of your accounts. 

To streamline manual campaign management, you can have Google automatically apply some of these optimizations. We suggest these tips for auto-optimizations:

• Remove keywords that closely match others in the same ad group.
• Eliminate keywords with no impressions over a specified period.
• Adjust keyword bids to match ‘top of page’ bids.
• Prioritize top-performing ads over evenly rotating all ads in the same ad group.

Enhance personalization through audience segments

In the past, marketers primarily relied on keywords and location targeting. But today, Google offers a wide range of audience options across search, performance max, display, video, and demand gen campaigns for you to optimized targeting.

You can apply audiences using both the observation and targeting settings. It’s a good idea to start with the observation setting, and once enough data is collected, switch to targeting.

By adding the following audience types to your campaigns and ad groups, you can sharpen your focus on reaching your target audience through search:

• Custom audience: You can create custom audiences based on various signals such as interests, behaviors, browsing history (URLs), and app usage. Think of targeting competitor brands, industry-relevant websites, apps, or recent Google searches.
• RLSAs (Remarketing lists for search ads): It’s important to set up separate ad groups or campaigns and keep RLSA audiences distinct from custom, in-market, or demographic-based audiences.
• In-market audience: You can explore available options by heading to the Audiences tab in your Google Ads campaigns. Select Edit Audience Segments > Browse tab, and check out the In-Market Audiences section.

Implement exclusions

Regardless of search campaigns or Performance Max, exclusions play a critical role in maintaining an effective campaign structure. These exclusions could include negative keywords, specific audience exclusions, brand exclusions, geotargeting exclusions, or placement exclusions.

Without these exclusions, your ads might be shown to the wrong audiences, appear alongside inappropriate content, or be triggered by irrelevant search terms. This can waste your advertising budget and diminish campaign effectiveness.

Boost your Google Ads performance with NestAds

Hopefully, you can withdraw something from the 9 strategies in Google Ads for eCommerce we’ve compiled in this blog. Applying these strategies effectively can improve your campaign’s performance. However, to maximize results, it’s essential to track your ads and adjust regularly. Then, you may know what’s happening with customers and your advertising efforts.

And to facilitate your tracking process, the easiest way is to employ a robust tool. Choose a tool that provides accurate data and easy analysis so that you can improve productivity and campaign effectiveness.

So we think NestAds is a good fit! Especially, it uses a unique pixel to capture first-party data directly from your server. So it avoids disruptions from ad blockers and browser limitations to give you the most accurate and reliable data.