What's the difference between Google Ads and Google Shopping campaigns?
Search campaigns show text ads when someone types a keyword you've chosen. Shopping campaigns show your products, with image and price, built from your Merchant Center product feed instead of keywords. Shopping is one of the campaign types inside Google Ads.
How each one works
Google Ads is the platform, and Search and Shopping are campaign types within it. A Search campaign is built on keywords and ad text that you write. A Shopping campaign is built on your product data: Google matches the details in your feed to what people search for. Shopping ads can show in the Shopping tab, in Google Search results, in Google Images and on Search Partner sites.
What Shopping needs
- A Google Merchant Center account with your product feed.
- Your Google Ads account linked to it.
- Clean product titles, prices and images, because that data does the targeting that keywords do in Search.
What we do
For lead generation, which has no product feed, we build Search campaigns on phrase and exact match, with shared negative lists and search-term mining. For an online shop we've set up Shopping and Performance Max with Merchant Center feeds, keeping poor-return products out of the campaigns. Performance Max is a goal-based campaign that runs across Google's channels from one set of assets, and for a shop it also uses a product feed.
Judging them
Either way the account bids on what you tell it counts as a conversion, so we keep real leads and sales as the primary conversions. For a shop, break-even return is the number to judge against, and Pacing Numbers works it out from your margin.
See the Google Ads tool page and our paid marketing service.
Also worth asking
Other answers about the same tools.
What is paid marketing and how does it work?
Paid marketing means paying to put your business in front of people, usually through ads on Google, Meta or LinkedIn. You set a budget and an audience, and you pay per click or per thousand views. The hard part is knowing which ads bring customers.
What platforms do you use for paid marketing campaigns?
Google Ads and Meta (Facebook and Instagram), plus LinkedIn for B2B work. We use Microsoft Ads where a campaign needs it. Which ones we use depends on whether people search for what you sell.
How much should I budget for paid marketing?
Start from what a customer is worth to you and what a lead costs in your market. The budget then needs to be big enough to get meaningful conversions in a month, and small enough that you can afford to find out it isn't working.
Want a quick starting figure from your revenue and a growth goal? Try the budget planner.
What is ad platform integration and why does it matter?
Ad platform integration means joining your website, tracking and CRM to the ad platforms, so they receive the leads and sales that came from their ads. Without it, bidding learns from clicks and form fills instead of customers.
What’s the difference between paid search and paid social campaigns?
Paid search (Google Ads) shows your ad to people typing a query. Paid social (Meta, LinkedIn) shows it to people browsing. Search catches demand that's already there, and social creates interest in something new.
Still have questions?Talk to us
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- A concrete planAds, a custom build or both, as a one-off project or ongoing.