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By using machine learning to personalize users’ Shopping homepages, Google is effectively replicating the Instagram experience. In fact, they’re improving the Instagram experience. Google can use the data it collects not only to show users the brands and products they want to see, but also to predict the brands and products users may want to see. We’re no longer talking about a channel designed to simply capture commercial intent; we’re talking about a channel designed to inspire commercial intent. (Conor Bond, Wordstream, June 11 2019)
Ready to start selling on Google? Contact Cote Media today! We can configure your merchant services account with Google to begin promoting your products immediately online.
Google Shopping gets a tough rap among many designers and advertisers. Some find the platform perplexing and challenging to navigate.
There's good reason advertisers balk on Google Shopping campaigns. Unlike traditional Google advertising campaigns, keywords are driven from the products themselves. Rather than entering your target keywords into the Google Ads platform, advertisers must make sure these keywords are in the original product listing.
That's why it's important to partner with an e-commerce developer like Cote Media who understands all the nuances of online shopping from the get-go. This type of work can be streamlined well in advance of a website's launch. Streamlining this work vastly reduces production time and costs, as well as headaches when the store inevitably wants to start advertising on Google.
Believe it or not, these keywords are best written and crafted before you ever upload any products to Shopify or your e-commerce channel. Where do you do this? The best time and place to craft your keywords is in Excel or Google Sheets in the original product spreadsheet before you ever upload it to Shopify.
Why create these keywords in the original product spreadsheet? By creating these keywords in the original product spreadsheet, you greatly reduce production time. You can quickly add these keywords line by line in one spreadsheet.
This also allows the developer to collaborate with the shop owner. Once the products are in Shopify, most shop owners do not want to meddle with keywords and other details. If you work on these keywords in Google Sheets BEFORE uploading them to Shopify, the client can edit the keywords themselves if they choose to do so.
In that instance, Google Shopping will default to your product title. But that might not be enough. If your product titles are insufficient or not what you seek for your Google Shopping goals, you will then have to edit the products using the bulk product editor.
You can still use the bulk product editor to add in these keywords in Shopify. However, it is far more efficient to have the keywords populated into the original product spreadsheet and upload them to Shopify.
The problem arises if you need to collaborate with the shop-owner on the keywords and the shop owner does not wish to use Shopify. In that case, designers must receive the information from the shop owner and reenter it into Shopify. By collaborating from the get-go with the client on the keywords in Excel or Google Sheets, the production time for a shop is greatly reduced.
These are the nuances of online Shopify set-up that only seasoned professionals like Cote Media can make you aware of. We learned these lessons through training and experience. We know how to build you an online shop in the most efficient manner from the get-go.
Google Shopping does not use traditional keywords for its campaigns. Instead, advertisers use negative keywords. What are negative keywords? These are words you do not want your ads to appear for in Google searches.
For example, in traditional Google Ad campaigns, you would put in a keyword like "Golf Clubs" if you want to be discovered for those terms. But in Google Shopping campaigns, you cannot do that. Those terms must be in the original product in Shopify. You can only add into Google a term you do not want to be discovered for in Google Shopping as a negative keyword.
Therefore, if you notice that you are appearing in searches for "Happy Gilmore" for your golf business, you can put the movie title as a negative keyword strategy. This allows you to prevent showing the ad to searchers who are not looking for your product.
On average, millennials now make 54% of purchases online.
According to a Statista report, ecommerce is expected to hit $4.5 trillion in sales by 2021. Driven largely by an increasing reliance on smartphones and other devices, ecommerce is more than thriving; its rise is forcing the closure of brick and mortar businesses.
Customers are growing more and more comfortable with online engagement. Simultaneously, they are finding it convenient to find products that appeal to their niche interests online. Once engaged, these customers enroll in loyalty or subscription programs to reap their discounts and rewards. They are then motivated and triggered by timely social media prompts that keep customers consistently engaged while producing trackable and actionable data.
Ecommerce competition is now at the starting gates, with rivals jockeying to position themselves for the anticipated huge ecommerce boom. It’s not too late to saddle up; in fact, now’s the time to start positioning your business.
While Amazon garners most of the media attention, small mom and pop ecommerce businesses have been quietly and stealthily cornering markets and hardening their valuations—some into the millions of dollars.
A quick glance at sites like the Shopify Exchange (https://exchangemarketplace.com) or Flippa (https://flippa.com) might shock the entrepreneur who has been distracted by other attention-grabbing business trends (Bitcoin anyone?). On the Shopify Exchange, for example, ecommerce site are selling for close to 1 million dollars. And this valuation is based on pure, hard, incontrovertible data produced by Shopify itself—for a site that was only launched 2 years previously.
How did this happen? There are hundreds of ecommerce websites like this, and yes the data is stunning. How did this happen seemingly overnight while everyone was focused on Amazon?
The answer is that these sites are not mutually exclusive. These sites are feeding Amazon and other sites with goods. Shopify (now the leading online ecommerce platform) greases the way for anyone to post onto sites like Amazon, EBay, Google, and Facebook. It’s a one-click installation process. These sites are not always competing with Amazon; often these smaller sites are competing with each other on Amazon.
A budding ecommerce entrepreneur should check the existing market on Amazon for their products. They will learn not only the major retailers selling these products, but also the smaller mom and pop businesses that are shipping these items from their stores.
However, Amazon and the other major online retailers are not the sole bread and butter of the ecommerce market. Large numbers of Americans are distrustful of mega conglomerates and, therefore, more ready and willing to shop with businesses that appear more personable. This is a result of the niche trend in online retail.
“You’ve heard it before — your small business’s indie cred has market cache. It makes you personable, unique and accessible. It makes you desirable. And I’m here to tell you that you can have all of that plus a speedy and accurate delivery system, just like the big guys. Indie cred with two-day delivery — the David that slays Goliath.” Jake Rheude, Entrepreneur
Ecommerce sites are being developed and tailored for specific audiences, and retailers are targeting these audiences on social media based on their data. And while social media users may find targeted advertising from larger retail conglomerates like Wal-Mart as creepy or “Big Brother,” they often welcome targeted ads from smaller niche sites as if they were a fan-base, and not just a data point.
Facebook houses data on billions of users, and advertisers can drill down very specifically to these users’ data points including:
Advertisers can also market based on similar pages liked. For example, advertisers can choose to display an online ad for their lingerie item if you like Victoria’s Secret via Facebook advertising. Successful ecommerce sites are targeting niche audiences, and if you have expertise in a particular area, now is a good time to begin breaking ground in this market on an ecommerce site.
“Thought leadership,” a driving label on sites like LinkedIn, is a newer phenomenon whereby experts in particular fields share their knowledge via blogging, posting, YouTube videos, public speaking, and other online efforts. While their work appears almost impartial and journalistic in its nature, it is often a calculated positioning within social media. It is an unavoidable fact that even “unbiased” publishers these days take into account an individual’s social media follower network; with larger networks eliciting greater rewards.
Ecommerce is not much different. While ecommerce business leaders often choose to remain anonymous, an in-depth awareness of a particular niche combined with a disarming social media presence are the cornerstones of a successful online shop. If you have knowledge of a product or field, and if you think you can build a social media following within that niche with a combination of video and article posts, you are well on your way to a successful ecommerce website.
Take the case study Jake Rheude writes about the company Buffalo Jackson in Entrepreneur magazine:
Here’s a story: A few weeks ago I ordered a shirt from one of my favorite clothing outlets, a boutique men’s apparel company called Buffalo Jackson out of rural North Carolina. Now, Buffalo Jackson does a lot of things right. Its clothing is rugged and good-looking, rough-and-tumble chic. They have a mission statement that reads like a novel, about how the owner, who was raised a “southern gentleman” became disillusioned by men’s fashion and decided to create apparel that he’d be proud to wear; about how he marketed the company by word of mouth because he didn’t have money for anything more than that. He ends with a call-to-action that invites you to be a part of the Buffalo Jackson family — this, he writes, is “our story of how we began. We sure would love to have you part of it.” Buffalo Jackson has indie cred to spare. And it’s appealing.
Buffalo Jackson is thought-leader meets ecommerce. An attractive origin story combined with industry know-how and savvy social media strategies has given this mens’ clothing online a firm footing in the competitive online mens’ clothing marketplace.
Do you have a similar story and expertise in a particular industry? We can offer you the social media and web design expertise to build your ecommerce platform.
Cote Media can develop an ecommerce website for your business. Contact us today.