How Build Google Shopping Ads and Facebook Ads combined
Google Shopping ads and Facebook ads are powerful channels for e-commerce advertising.
But instead of choosing one over the other, the best advertising strategies are those that combine Google Shopping ads with Facebook ads to reach more potential customers and increase conversions.
These two channels are very different in how they work and what they offer, but when used together, they can complement each other and create a holistic campaign that covers all stages of the customer journey.
However, creating a multi-channel advertising strategy is not a simple task. It requires careful planning, execution, and analysis, depending on various factors such as your website, industry, and campaign goals.
To help you get started with your Google Shopping ads and Facebook ads combined approach, we have created a 10-step checklist that you can follow to set up your strategy successfully.
Google and Facebook are the undisputed leaders of their respective domains.
Facebook is the world’s largest social media network, with more than 2 billion monthly active users. Google is the world’s largest search engine, with an estimated 5.5 billion searches per day in 2018.
If you think you have to choose between Facebook ads and Google ads when planning your advertising budget for 2019, think again!
The answer is: eCommerce companies should use both advertising channels to market and sell their products.
In the advertising world, they are not competitors, but partners.
Google ads and Facebook ads can work together in a synergistic way to boost your ROI.
This article will show you how to build your combined advertising approach to get more results.
How to Build Your Google Shopping Ads and Facebook Combined Approach
First, you’ll need these essentials:
Then you need to do some work, but it’s not too hard.
Here is the checklist of the 10 steps you need to take:
Enjoy your results!
Step #1) Understand the Consumer Decision-Making Process
Your ultimate goal is to get customers to buy.
But before we dive into why a strategy that combines Google Shopping ads and Facebook ads is the best way to drive conversion, let’s first take a step back and ask ourselves one important question:
What steps do customers take before they buy?
The consumer decision-making process usually follows this pattern:
The purchase decision process shows why Facebook ads and Google Shopping ads work so well together, as illustrated in the Venn diagram above.
Facebook ads can help customers discover a problem through ads that are designed to help them identify their pain points.
Depending on your campaign, Facebook and Google can both help with the middle steps of the consumer decision-making process.
Whether it’s through Google Shopping ads or a Facebook retargeting ad (or both), a customer will go through the process of researching solutions, comparing products and making a final decision about what they want to buy.
Used together, Facebook and Google Shopping ads guide customers along the purchase decision-making process in a smooth, natural, and, most importantly, holistic way.
Step #2) Link Your Merchant Center to Google Ads
To create advertising campaigns on Google, you need to enable data transfer between your Merchant Center account and Google Ads account.
This is an easy process.
Before you start, make sure you have a Google Merchant Account and a Google Ads account. You will need admin access to both to complete this setup.
If you’re not sure if you’re targeting the right audience on Facebook. You can also run split tests with Facebook ads to refine your messaging and keywords.
Step #3) Create a Google Shopping Ads Campaign
Now that your Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts are linked, you can start creating shopping campaigns!
This is also a simple process.
First, you need to create a Google Ads campaign. Log into your Google Ads account, then go to Campaigns > + Campaign > Shopping.
This will take you to a page where you can add campaign details.
Add:
Next, you’ll need to choose your bid strategy.
Since you’re mainly interested in conversion, choose “Enable Enhanced CPC.” You can also choose “maximum cost-per-click bid (max. CPC)” or “enhanced-cost-per-click (Enhanced CPC).” Max CPC means you’ll set bids for clicks by manually setting a max bid that you’re willing to pay. If you want to maximize conversions, however, go with Enhanced CPC. That will automatically adjust your max bids, meaning you get more out of your ads without spending more money.
Save your campaign.
Step #4) Connect Audiences from Google Ads to Facebook
To launch a multi-channel advertising strategy, you’ll want to transfer audience data from Google to Facebook.
Syncing audiences between these platforms can allow you to use Facebook custom audiences to retarget on Google Ads:
It will also help you get REALLY specific about your target market by transferring Facebook data to Google.
Step #5) Create Facebook Ads to Generate Impressions
Google Shoppings Ads are great for driving sales, but customers won’t buy something until they realize they need it. Through Facebook advertising, you can spark that realization by hooking your audience.
Facebook calls this “impressions.”
You should aim to create meaningful impressions before you push customers to buy. Otherwise, you’ll skip ahead of crucial steps in the consumer buying process and will likely lose your audience’s attention.
Facebook is a great way to generate impressions by putting your product in front of potential customers. This will start the wheels turning that lead to purchase.
After you’ve got an audience’s attention, Google Shopping is how you seal the deal.
This is valuable because it gives you a scalable way to introduce an idea, and then a way for customers to follow through with a purchase once they make up their mind.
A strategy for selling the idea is as important as a strategy for selling the actual product; 55% of e-commerce customers make purchases after they “discover” products through social media.
To run ads that will bring in the most engagement, you need to figure out what will generate the most impressions for your product.
There are so many ways to do this depending on what you’re actually selling. These include but are not limited to:
Another example is Mustelababy’s.
Notice that the advertisement below sells an idea rather than a product for purchase. They don’t even mention any prices. There is no direct pressure or call to action to buy.
Why do they do this? Because Mustelababy’s knows that giving customers a reason to buy the shoes motivates them to follow through with a purchase. Put simply:
More Impressions = More reach. More reach = More conversions
Facebook impressions facilitate the critical steps between discovering a problem and choosing a product.
If someone saw the ad and later decided to look for the flats online, they could run a Google search for Mustelababy’s or simply “recycled flats” and find Google Shopping ads that smoothly guide them to purchase.
Remember to use Facebook Custom Audiences to drive engagement. As the biggest social network in the world, Facebook collects huge amounts of rich user data to help you get your ads on the right screens.
Use Custom Audiences to specify the demographics, geography, and interests your ad should reach. These should be based on your customers and target audiences. If your ad gets to the right Facebook users, you’ll benefit from more engagement, impressions, and reach – all of which can indirectly result in more conversion.
Step #6) Set Up a Facebook Retargeting Campaign
Google Shopping ads and Facebook ads are the perfect partners for creating a holistic, multi-channel advertising campaign that works together to drive conversions.
One way to do this is with retargeting.
Have you ever visited a website, checked out a product, and closed the tab only to see a Facebook ad for the same product later? It’s not a coincidence. It’s retargeting.
For example, to see the Facebook ad above, you would have to show interest in the product by viewing it on sebastian7 website. Then, sebastian7 would identify you as an interested and ready-to-buy customer.
In that case, the Facebook ad nudges an already-engaged customer further along in the decision-making phase to hopefully drive a purchase.
To re-engage an already-interested audience, you need a Facebook tracking tool called Facebook Pixel. It’s a piece of code that’ll help you track your campaign audience (read more about it in our guide).
To get your Facebook Pixel, go to your Pixels tab here. (You can also find it on the left of Ads Manager on your Facebook page.) Click “Create Pixel.”
Next, you’ll need to install your Pixel code.
Facebook will give you two options:
For basic tracking, that’s all you need to do.
But for more advanced tracking, you can add some more code to monitor user events such as:
You can also set up Facebook Pixel to work with WordPress using the Pixel Caffeine plugin.
Each of these will be shown as a toggle. If you toggle a specific event, it’ll generate code to add to the relevant area on your website. After you get the code you need, make sure you click “Done.”
You can learn more about mastering your Facebook Pixel here.
Step #7) Set Up Link Tracking and Reporting
When you’re advertising on multiple channels, you need a way to understand web traffic patterns and what is driving conversion. Then you can focus on the efforts that are most closely related to conversion.
You’ll do this with “UTMs.”
UTMs are “Urchin Tracking Modules.” They’re how you keep track of the activity associated with your Google and Facebook ads.
For example, to track the clicks on this Facebook ad, Rothy’s will create a UTM for the link attached to this ad:
When you click on the link, you’ll land on a page showing the shoes featured in the ad:
But notice the link at the top. It’s not a neat and tidy slug. Rather, it’s a long and awkward-looking string of text:
<a href=”https://sebastian7.com/sandals?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=PaidSocial&utm_campaign=NEpurchase_Retargeting_WebEngagement&utm_content=NE_Pixel_NewArrivals_Visitors0-30days_multiplacement&utm_term=rhc&fbclid=IwAR2U3lHPiiVO46qZ7zYF9kvpjI0vpN4I4kea0A9K_mVbxFBX4RuNGDLQKLI”>https://rothys.com/womens/new-arrivals?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=PaidSocial&utm_campaign=NEpurchase_Retargeting_WebEngagement&utm_content=NE_Pixel_NewArrivals_Visitors0-30days_multiplacement&utm_term=rhc&fbclid=IwAR2U3lHPiiVO46qZ7zYF9kvpjI0vpN4I4kea0A9K_mVbxFBX4RuNGDLQKLI</a>
Notice the structure of the link. It’s the normal site link (women’s sandals, in this case) plus the UTM associated with this specific Facebook ad. That makes it really easy to attribute traffic to its referring source (e.g., Facebook or Google).
To create your UTM, you can use the Google Campaign URL Builder. You can also download Chrome extensions, such as UTM.io.
Step #8) Track campaign performance with UTMs
You can use UTMs to monitor multi-channel campaign performance in Google Analytics.
Step #9) Send Shoppers to a Dedicated Landing Page
Your goal is conversion. In e-commerce, that usually means your goal is sales. So, when someone clicks on your Google Shopping ad, they need to be taken directly to a way to complete the purchase.
Landing pages are how you do that.
Let’s say you’re looking for polarized sunglasses. You run a search in Google and voilà, you see a bunch of Google Shopping ads showing polarized sunglasses.
You click on one option, which takes you here:
Since you’re still shopping around, you try another option:
Different product, different brand, different company. But the two options have one very obvious similarity: their landing pages.
Both landing pages are very simple. Their only purpose is to drive customers to conversion.
What you include on your landing page can vary. In fact, it’s worth testing out a few ideas to see what performs best in terms of percentage of conversions per click. For sunglasses, it looks like the winning landing page layout is a big photo of sunglasses and a very clear “Add to cart” button.
Ultimately, how you design the landing page linked to Google Shopping ads is less important than making the landing page in the first place. Making the landing page is essential to conversion.
Step #10) Highlight Product Benefits in your Google Shopping Ads
With Google Shopping ads, your product is often listed next to similar products from other companies:
This means that you need to stand out. In just a few words, you need to make your product stand out by highlighting the benefits that differentiate your product from the others.
In the example above, the companies use the following ways to grab your attention:
The better your ad is at capturing customer attention, the better it’ll be at encouraging people to select your ad, visit your landing page, and potentially make a purchase.
To make your Facebook ads lead into your Google Shopping ads, use consistent wording to help guide shoppers to your ad. Because Google will determine shopping ad relevance based on your website and Google Ads bid settings, it’s important that the same keywords carry through from your website to your Facebook AND Google ads.
Guide Customers to Conversion
The combination of Google Shopping ads and Facebook ads gives you the power to boost your 2019 advertising results.
Thanks to Facebook impressions and Facebook retargeting and Google Shopping ads, you can strategically guide customers along the buying decision-making process.
And you can do all of this without being pushy about your sales process. The best-combined advertising strategies are the ones that seem so natural to customers that they don’t even notice it.
