The coronavirus pandemic has changed the nature of online shopping. The crisis and the lockdown measures have boosted online shopping, with more people spending online. This means a great opportunity for google shopping.

According to the BBC, online shopping reached a record high of 22% compared to the year 2019.

The winter months are often a great opportunity to boost sales, with Black Friday Cyber Monday Sales, Christmas and Boxing Day offers. Some consumers also start looking at the upcoming Spring/Summer collections for clothing and accessories. In 2020, the shopping dynamic definitely changed forever and there is even more potential for the new year 2021.

In March 2020, in-store clothing sales dropped by 34% and the UK retail sales dropped by 5.1% after many stores closed during lockdown. The inability to access physical stores resulted in millions of searches online. This continues to create a huge potential for google searches.

The “COVID-19, Commerce and Consumer” research surveyed 2,000 UK consumers on their shopping experience during the COVID-19 pandemic; they found that the need for safety during lockdown has resulted in a huge shift in shopping habits with a particular trend towards online channels.

According to the Office for National Statistics, online purchasing accounted for 62% of all shopping during lockdown, compared to 43% before the pandemic. After the pandemic has ended, shoppers will ditch physical store shopping forever, and over 51% of all spending will be online in the future. This can only mean one thing: businesses that only use in-store retail experience must reinvent their strategies to survive.

In this article, we acknowledge the increase in google shopping potential. We look at best practices that e-commerce businesses should put in place to take their google shopping campaigns to their full potential. We also look at a case study, a fashion e-commerce that successfully increased its revenue through our incremental google shopping growth software.

Optimise your product feeds

As we cover on our product feed optimisation page, your google shopping feed is essentially the data that organises your product catalogue to enable Google to easily crawl it. To ensure a good performance for your google shopping campaigns, we suggest high-quality and optimised product feeds.

People are spending more time at home and an average of 4 hours per day are spent on the internet. This is a great opportunity to ensure that products within your shopping ads can be searched and appear on google shopping results.

The main elements for optimal product feed optimisation are:

• Product titles
• Product types
• Product categories
• Images
• Product attributes

Read our article on product feed optimisation best practices here

Custom labels

As mentioned above, UK consumers are shopping more and more online. This means that competition in shopping and paid ads is high. At Shoptimised, we always recommend maintaining a good campaign structure. Using Custom Labels is essential for a well-structured shopping campaign that performs well.

Track your google shopping performance

When we say track every single shopping campaign, we mean do it meticulously. In your Google Shopping Merchant centre, you can keep track of Clicks, Impressions, Click through Rate, Conversions, Revenue and ROAS. These are all essential factors to keep an eye on for real-time performance and quality score of your Google Shopping campaigns.

Consider incremental sales

Google Shopping is a great way for retailers to drive online traffic and increase revenue. During an especially competitive season for paid ads, you can try Google Incremental Growth. It is designed specifically to increment your google shopping growth and it focuses on all products that are currently receiving no clicks and no conversions.

Now that users are shopping more online, you should take advantage of this opportunity to boost your sales potential.

Oxygen – A success story

Fashion e-commerce ‘Oxygen’ increased its revenue with the Shoptimised Incremental Google Shopping Growth tool. Here is a brief summary of the success achieved.

Retailer: Oxygen

Sector: Clothing & Accessories

Client Overview: Since opening in Newark, Oxygen clothing has built an online presence and excellent reputation selling high premium designer clothing for men, women and children. Customers can shop Shark, Moschino, Boss, Ralph Lauren, Paul Smith and more.

Results: Increased revenue by 103% to date via Incremental Sales

Start Date: 15th September 2020

Undoubtedly, 2020 has been an interesting year for the e-commerce world. The figures sound promising, with more potential growth to come. More research by Wunderman Thompson Commerce says less than two in ten (16%) of UK consumers intend to return to their old shopping habits post-lockdown.

Following these best practices will enable you to boost your digital potential. Get in touch today for a free demo and more tips to see excellent shopping performance.