What are Shopping Ads?
Before we jump into explaining Showcase Shopping Ads, a quick refresher on shopping ads (you can skip this section if you already know).
Shopping Ads (a.k.a. Product Listing Ads) allows ecommerce businesses to showcase individual products on the Google Search results page. It is different to standard text ads as online merchants are able to showcase richer info about their products such as product image, description, price, merchants name and even ratings.
Evolution not revolution
With Google always looking to add value to its advertisers (and making more money.. ehem). Showcase Shopping Ads are yet another stage of the evolution for shopping ads but it truly solves a problem.
With standard shopping ads, online stores were able to display individual products but couldn’t display product categories. Furthermore, people searching on Google with very broad and generic terms such as ‘living room furniture’ or ‘summer dresses’ had to trawl through multiple online store to find what they were looking for. All of this changes with Showcase Shopping Ads.
5 things you need to know about Showcase Shopping Ads:
- It allows online stores to showcase their entire product category
- It allows online stores to position their brand as a specialist in a given category by showcasing multiple products
- Users are able to browse the entire category without even leaving Google
- Unlike standard shopping ads, the bidding model for Showcase Shopping Ads is CPE (cost per engagement). Advertiser will only pay if a user opens/expands their ad to see all products and spend 10 seconds browsing the products or clicks on any of the individual products.
- The Showcase Shopping Ads are only available through the new AdWords interface
