Web Podcast - Episode 39: Sell with Google Merchant Centre

Read the transcription of this podcast:

Hey Everyone, Episode 39 today; we're talking about Google Merchant Center, so if you've got an eCommerce website you need to listen to this and listen carefully. If you're using Google Ads, even more-so - if you've got a eCommerce site, you're advertising and you're not using Google Merchant Center, you'd want to set one up straight after you've listened to this podcast.

So basically what Google Merchant Center is is it's a facility where you can load your products to their system and basically it'll show those products in search results to people looking for those products. So let's say you sell phones - you sell iPhones, what happens is when someone searches to buy an iPhone; if your products are on Google Merchant Center and you've got it all hooked up - if they're your target audience and they're in the area that you're wanting to show your products in front of, then YOUR product will come up the top with a little featured product image, a price and obviously the products name. So what I'm getting at here is you can basically get your products to show right up top of Google search results, different to Google Ads - where we see the little plain text ads with the headlines and the descriptions, this way is where it's got a visual graphic representation of the product people might be searching for so it's great because when someone searches and they see the photo of what they're looking for, humans operate visually. When you think of your fridge for example, you have a visual picture of your fridge - you don't think the word fridge, you think visual so you get what I'm saying, and if you see what you're searching for you're gonna see it alot quicker than you'd see the words, so basically with Google Merchant Center is you're getting exposure up on Google searches for a product that someone might search for.

Now, there's a few drawbacks and also some very good parts to it. Now, if you're pricing isn't the cheapest, when you're showing beside other retailers, other website - you're gonna find it quite hard to attract a click because at the end of the day the only thing showing on there is the products picture, the title and the price so what do we do? We click the cheapest link first. So if you're in a price driven area which I don't recommend for many businesses because it's quite hard to make any money but if you are or if you're the cheapest anyway - it's important that you do use this, if you're high priced you can still use it and obviously you might have people clicking onto the cheaper one and they go "Actually, I don't like this website" or "Oh, the shipping's $100" or whatever it might be - and they come back out and they click on another one so you still want to be there but what I'm trying to at is the price is the key indicator to whenever you'll get a click or not. Like, I have clients who say they're the cheapest in the country so they'd really highly benefit from this where is clients who offer a higher product but a better quality service aren't necessarily as is expected gonna attract as many clicks but when they do obviously they might get that sale because they offer a better service or it might be free delivery or they offer a certain incentive or a free gift or something, whatever it might be.

So another thing I like about Google Merchant Center which I've found with running a few of these for my clients for their campaigns is the Cost Per Click is alot lower so if you're not familiar at all with what I'm talking about here, Cost Per Click is basically when your ads show up on Google or a search engine - when someone clicks your ad you pay a certain amount of money so it might be $1, it might be $5, it might be $10 depending on what industry you're in. So the good thing about Google Merchant Center is they have a lower Cost Per Click, so at the end of the day it's cheaper in most cases to have your products show up on Google's Merchant Center. So I've had some clients who've been getting like 10¢ Cost Per Clicks so let's do the math; you're selling a $100 product and you're paying 10¢ for a click to get a $100 sale, that's fantastic. Now, in the real world we never generally get 100% conversion rate, so let's say we got twenty clicks on that product and only one of those twenty wanted to buy and it was 10¢ a clicks - it's only still $2 for a $100 sale so if you do the math obviously it works out quite well. Now, I've mentioned this in many episode but you've got to bare in mind obviously if you're selling a lower price item, let's say you sell underwear and let's say they're $10, if you're paying for ten clicks at 10¢ each or even say ten click at 50¢ each that's $5 to sell a $10 pair of underwear, you're already chopping out half your revenue into advertising cost. So when you're selling cheaper items you've got to just be careful that your Cost Per Click - your still getting a good Conversion Rate for the amount of money you're spending; you don't want to spend $10 to sell a $10 product because otherwise you're not gonna make any money and you've still got to pay for the product. So if you get what I'm saying from it that's what I want you to also consider.

And another thing that subconsciously people do is when people are purchasing a product and they see a price on Google Search Result associated with the product, they're usually there to click and buy it - they've got a high purchase intent I guess you can say where as if you have someone for example who is researching, they're more likely to scroll down and click on the text information ads or the results in Google that say 'Reviews' and 'Product Information' and 'Photos' and 'Videos about this product'. Where as with people who are ready to buy, they see the photo, they see the price, BAM! They're ready to click and go and buy it. We have a few of these running for different clients at the moment and I'm really happy with one of them; we've just upped the budget on one of them but they are selling products and they're selling - I should say around three-ten orders a day and they're spending about $30-$35 a day so I won't go into detail about how much people are spending on the orders but some of them are cheap some of them are $20 some of them are as high as $1000, so if you work out the average, even if you've sold $500 of products a day for a $30-$40 ad spend, it's really well worth it.

Now, there's a tricky part about Google Merchant Center and when I first did it, I was abit confused but basically what you need is a product feed from your website - WordPress and stuff will have it all built in - plugins you can probably install but there's a certain type of feed that Google needs to suck regularly from your website to get the product information in terms of pricing, stock levels, product descriptions, the link that they should be taken to, the product. All that sort of information needs to be given to Google in a certain format, so it's not as easy as just loading up your products and away you go; No, it has to be done in a specific way so you might find that you'll need your web developer to help you with that, obviously someone like me or whoever you might use for your website at the moment, even if you want to use a freelancer or something but get someone who knows what they're doing because unfortunately I can see it being quite tricky for pretty much anyone who's not tech savvy to the degree of us sort of web guys are to set that up.

Anyway guys I hope that helps, that's Google Merchant Center, give it a go! At the end of the day you won't know if it's gonna work unless you try it so don't procrastinate - I want you going now or if it's late at night then go to bed and wake up in the morning and make sure you get it done because it is really good. If I was to setup a new shopping website tomorrow I would do that for myself hands-down, that'll be the first form of marketing I'd be doing is getting that set out there.

Anyway guys, that's Matt Reid from the RAZOR Web Design Wire Podcast and that's Episode 39 and join me again next time and have a good day. Cheers.