How to use shopping ads in product marketing

Product marketing drives demand and website traffic by launching a product and defining its position in a market. Effective product marketing continues after bringing a product to market—it requires maintaining brand awareness to drive sales throughout a product’s entire lifecycle. Maintaining profitability requires continually updating product marketing strategies, including creating shopping ads.

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Retailers use shopping ads to promote online and local inventory and boost traffic to their e-commerce sites. Unlike traditional text ads, shopping ads appear in a visual format within a search engine results page, giving shoppers a clear understanding of what the product looks like and how it functions before they click on the ad. Improve your product marketing strategy by learning how to create effective shopping ads with Microsoft Advertising.

What are shopping ads?

Shopping ads, also known as Product Ads, provide engaging retail experiences by showing products in an impactful, visual format. These visual ads include custom images, prices, descriptive titles, and the business’s name before a potential customer clicks on the ad and visits the product page. They also sometimes include additional information like a return policy, the average review rating, or special deals.

They can appear separately from text ads, but also concurrently with them, giving shoppers multiple opportunities to visit your e-commerce site. Shopping ads are displayed in several different places online, including at the top of a search engine results page, within a search engine’s dedicated shopping tab, and on search partners’ websites. Because of the multiple types of information shopping ads provide, they dominate search ads and result in better-qualified leads.

Two hands hold a cellphone while navigating through a sunglasses catalog.

How do shopping ads work?

Shopping Campaigns, which host shopping ads, run after product marketers create a feed and upload a catalog feed file. This file contains a list of products and details that define how they will display on the search engine results page.

Details about the product, including the title and brand name, ensure shoppers view only the most relevant results. Creating detailed and engaging titles leads to a better chance of the product appearing for relevant searches. Clear, high-quality product images and accurate pricing are equally important to converting shoppers into buyers.

Benefits of using shopping ads

The unique advantages of shopping ads make them invaluable to product marketers. Consider these benefits when creating your product marketing strategy:

Greater Visibility

Shopping ads primarily appear at the top of a search engine results page. For relevant searches, your shopping ad appears as one of the first results someone sees when they search for a product. Because they are compatible with mobile and desktop devices, you’ll be able to reach a large range of shoppers.

Broader Presence

Unlike text ads, shopping ads appear in multiple places, including within a dedicated shopping tab. They can also appear on the same page as a text ad, giving your ads a greater reach overall.

Better Qualified Leads

Shopping ads provide several types of information about a product before a shopper clicks on the ad, resulting in more qualified leads. When potential customers click on a shopping ad, they already know what the product looks like and how much it costs, putting them further down the purchasing funnel. Some specific types of shopping ads, like Product Audiences, allow you to target customers at different stages of the purchasing process.

Types of shopping ads

Before you create shopping ads for your business, choose the types that best fit your product marketing plans.

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General Product Ads appear as a vertical, rectangular ad that includes a product image, price, a descriptive product title, and business name. General Product Ads appear on search engine results pages, within a search engine’s shopping tab, and on search partners’ websites.

Shoppers view your Product Ad after performing a search related to your product. For example, if a shopper searches for women’s sneakers, the search engine results page will deliver several related product ads for women’s sneakers from various shoe brands above the rest of the search engine results. Shoppers searching for more specific products, like women’s red high-top sneakers, will view a different, more precise range of Product Ads.

Local Inventory Ads look like General Product Ads but offer even more value by bridging the gap between online searches and in-store purchases. After searching for a product, potential customers near your brick-and-mortar store location see your ad with a notification indicating it’s available in-store. The ad leads them to a webpage with information about the product, including the store location and in-stock availability.

These ads drive traffic to your e-commerce site while positively impacting your physical location. Shoppers may also purchase directly from your site and select same-day pick up at the physical location.

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Flyers include Flyer Extensions, sometimes called image extensions. They help businesses advertise their products visually within a text ad. Unlike ProductAds, Flyers operate as an extension to your text ads, in the Flyer Carousel search engine results page, or below mainline text ads. General Product Ads focus on a single product while Flyer Ads may highlight products, deals, or sales events. These visual ads give shoppers more information than a text ad and can help increase traffic from broad queries like weekly deals or sales.
Product Audiences use the format and information of your Product Ads to target a specific subset of shoppers. If a shopper visits your website but doesn’t purchase anything or adds products to their cart without checking out, Product Audiences remind them about it later by showing them your Product Ad. This hyper-targeted way of utilizing product ads reaches bottom-of-the-funnel shoppers to turn them into buyers.

Best product marketing practices for creating shopping ads

When creating shopping ads, consider factors that affect whether they will appear for relevant searches and entice clicks. Follow these best practices for shopping ads to boost the performance of your product marketing strategy:

Conduct Keyword Research

Search engines show shopping ads based on relevancy, making keyword research essential to ad visibility. Relevant product titles better inform shoppers about your product, allowing them to make a more educated decision to click on your ad. Use a keyword research tool, like Microsoft Advertising Keyword Planner, to research keywords and identify the best terms to include in your product title.

Include Brief But Descriptive Product Titles

Effective shopping ad product titles include concise, descriptive content. Titles over 70 characters appear truncated on the search engine results page, limiting the information shoppers see. Create product titles with specific product information like the brand name, physical attributes such as color, size or material, and applicable model numbers.

Use The Best Images

Product images show shoppers what your product looks like and help them determine whether they would like to purchase. A good product image should be high quality to reduce grainy results and include a solid white background to accurately showcase the color. The image should show the entire product to give shoppers a complete picture before clicking on the ad.

Use Negative Keywords Carefully

Negative keywords are specific words or phrases that prevent your ad from being displayed to shoppers who are unlikely to click on your ads. After setting negative keywords, your shopping ads won’t be displayed for searches including that word.

However, you should be cautious about using negative keywords similar to keywords your product should rank for. You can add negative keywords as exact or broad matches, depending on your goals, but broad match negative keywords may unintentionally block relevant queries. To further ensure your negative keywords don’t negatively impact your Shopping Campaign, examine the product negative keyword conflicts report.

Get started using shopping ads with Microsoft Advertising

Incorporating shopping ads into your product marketing plan drives better-qualified leads and increases your advertising reach. Create descriptive product titles based on keyword research and include high-quality product images to improve the performance of your product marketing strategy. Microsoft Advertising Shopping Campaigns are easy to create and include tools to measure the performance of your product ads.

If you already have shopping ads with another advertising network like Google, simply import existing ads with Microsoft Advertising. For more tips on optimizing your e-commerce advertising strategy, explore ways to improve your Shopping Campaigns.