Want to cut your webshop's ad spend?
Although it's still less well known in Hungary, Google Shopping is an excellent advertising surface for webshops to reach even more buyers with their products. What's more, thanks to an EU regulation, you can use this service at a particularly favorable rate. In this article we explain what Google Shopping actually is, and how you can advertise your webshop's products on it 20% cheaper!
What is Google Shopping?
Since the summer of 2019, Google's service named Shopping has been available in Hungary too, giving companies in the e-commerce space a great opportunity to use a new advertising tool. With Google Shopping, you can target consumers at the bottom of the advertising funnel who have a concrete intent to buy, extremely effectively.
Google Shopping is essentially a price-comparison site (like ÁrGép or ÁruKereső), and there are several similar ones on the Hungarian market. Its advantage lies in the fact that it appears on Google's search interface among the search results, and on a separate subpage (like Maps or Images), where users can compare products complete with an image and a price. So if someone searches for the phrase "women's running shoes," they won't just find pages that sell women's running shoes, but concrete offers too, the Shopping ad surface is usually located above or beside the search results, in a prominent spot.
Google Shopping ads appear in a prominent spot among the search results.
Why is it worth appearing on Google Shopping with your webshop?
- The ads appear in an eye-catching spot
- They also include images, and users particularly like seeing concrete images of a given product.
- They're simple to run, there's no need to specify keywords as with Google Ads, just a product feed, from which Google automatically filters out the necessary keywords.
- Your ads can appear multiple times at once, for example, if you sell women's running shoes and someone searches for women's running shoes, they may end up seeing mostly your products.
… and what is a Google CSS Partner?
So with Shopping, Google gained a huge advantage over the traditional price-comparison sites, which also came with the fact that at first only its own partners could appear in Google Shopping ads, creating a monopoly situation. The European Union, however, didn't like this monopoly that had formed, so at the end of a long procedure it imposed the following sanction: Google must provide visibility on the Shopping ad surfaces to other price-comparison services as well, and, on top of that, 20% cheaper than they could appear directly through Google, and they were also handed a fine. As a result, the Google CSS (Comparison Shopping Service) Partner service came into being, through which the partners that have joined make this cost advantage available to businesses.
How does the Google CSS Partner service work?
One of the key components of Google's auctions is the bid price you set, and the discount applies to this, it doesn't show up in the form of a "coupon." As a result:
- You can get more traffic at the same price, for the same amount, your ads appear in a more prominent position.
- You can get the same traffic at a lower price, the same position, cheaper.
It's important to note here, however, that the cost advantage only applies if the user clicks the ad among the search results; if it's on the "Shopping" subpage, then it no longer applies, but about 85–90% of users don't click through.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC7cfJjlTgM&ab_channel=GoogleAds
Google's demo of the CSS service.As you can see, it's that simple, and setting it up takes just a few clicks. So why isn't everyone using it yet?
- Not everyone knows about it yet
- For lower-spend accounts, it wasn't necessarily worth it at the known pricing
Markestic's offer, however, is already worth it for your webshop even at a monthly ad spend of HUF 30,000.
When and how will you feel the benefit?
The switchover is extremely fast, it takes 1–2 days, though with Smart Shopping campaigns it can also take 1–2 weeks, due to the algorithm's learning period.
You'll feel the change in the improvement of the following advertising metrics:
- Better impression share
- Better click-through rate (CTR)
- Lower cost per click (CPC)
There's no need for a new Merchant Center.
There's no need to switch your current agency.
So with Google Shopping, another advertising surface becomes available for your webshop across Google's platforms, making you more competitive against your rivals. And the Google CSS Partner can help you cut your Shopping spend, since you can reach more people at the same cost.
Markestic surveyed the offers of Hungarian and international providers and partnered with an English company, so we can provide an offer that's favorable for everyone, from as little as HUF 5,000 a month!
What are you waiting for? Get in touch with us and enjoy the cost advantage too!