Google Shopping Optimization Guide to Increasing Conversions: Product Descriptions

September 4, 2018

Product titles and descriptions are important and can affect your Google Shopping campaigns. They can influence your conversions, traffic, and even increase sales. Exactly how difficult is it to title and describe your products? Crafting a well-rounded listing for your shopping campaign will need energy and thought. For your listing to drive sales, we want to share some tips on effective writing. Your writing can convince your shoppers to follow through with a transaction. Google shopping optimization will be in two parts: The title and description. Let’s get started!

The Title

They say to “never judge a book by its cover,” but a title has so much power. As a hook, a compelling title can either captivate or turn online shoppers away. The title and image in Google’s Product Listing (PLA) are the first visible elements. Online shoppers determine if a product is what they are looking for based on the first few words they read. In most cases, sellers underestimate the power of their product titles. With a thought out product title, you can drive more clicks, traffic, conversions, and sales.

Do Google shopping product titles actually benefit online merchants?

FindWAtt, a SEO product, performed a case study in 2017 to understand the benefits of enhanced product titles. The team took 1200 products and separated them into 2 groups. The first group kept their original title (control group) while the other had an enhanced title (treatment group). In 23 days, FindWAtt was able to detect a significant difference between the original and enhanced titles.

According to the results, enhanced Google product titles exemplified various benefits such as an increase in impressions (70%), clicks (151%), CTR (47%), and a reduction in CPC (28%). FindWAtt’s case study demonstrates that an “improved product title can also improve the performance of your Google Shopping Campaigns.”

After all, Google’s search engine is a powerful tool that determines the order of one’s search results. It uses a special algorithm to generate specific results depending on the words people use to search. This is why incorporating keywords in your product titles is crucial. Not only can keywords be used to identify your product, but “Google uses it to determine the best match for consumers’ search queries.”

What does a successful product title listing look like?

Understanding the gist of Google’s algorithm is the first step to grasp how product titles can be optimized.There are subtle ways to help improve your listings to get you on track in increasing your conversions.

Start thinking in your consumers’ perspective and use their language. If you were searching for a particular item to buy, what would you type in Google’s search engine? Keywords. Specific keywords are very crucial to incorporate in your titles as shoppers use them to search for what they are wanting to buy. This is important, because Google’s search engine will list products in a particular order from most to least relevant to consumers’ search query. For your Google Shopping Campaign’s PLA, use several keywords in your product titles while keeping the most important details.

Depending on the product in which you are selling, include the brand, gender, product type, additional attributes (such as color, size, material, weight, dimensions, and so on), as well as manufacturer product number (MPN) if necessary. There is no particular order in which this should be listed in your product as long as all of your products are formatted the same way (I will say, as an online shopping veteran, the first thing I look for are brands so it would be advantageous to always use the brand name as the first word in your product title).

To give you some ideas on how to began enhancing your product titles, we developed a loose guide to help you get started:

That’s it for product title listing! You’re halfway there to stepping up your Google Shopping campaigns. Remember, this is only the first of a two part blog. The next step is to craft a good corresponding product description which can be found right in Part II coming soon!

Did you learn anything new about Google Shopping Product listing? Comment below to share your thoughts!


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