15 Top Google Ads (AdWords) Strategies for eCommerce Sites

Note: This post was updated in February 2023.

In the wild world of eCommerce paid search advertising, knowing exactly which strategies to throw at the Google machine can be a hit-and-miss operation. 

Fortunately, we’ve done all the hard work for you — and we’re ready to share some tips that will help.

In this piece, we’ll take a systematic look at how our paid strategists optimize Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords) eCommerce campaigns to find the best-performing strategies. We’ll present a total of 15 different strategies that apply to Google Shopping ads and Performance Max campaigns, Dynamic Remarketing, Search ads, In-Market Audiences, and, finally, Dynamic Search ads.

For each type of ad, we’ll cover:

• The core strategies we use to get the best return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Use-case scenarios where we’ve seen good results from implementing these strategies
• Some of the newest features and product offerings — and how to make the most of them

To help you find the eCommerce Google Ads strategy that’s right for you, we’ve split this guide into three parts:

1. Google Shopping vs. Google Search: We’ll review the different platforms and why you might use each one.
2. Google Shopping ads: We’ll walk you through seven different strategies that bring the best ROAS for eCommerce companies. We’ll explain how to build out and optimize your shopping ads from scratch.
3. Google Search ads: We’ll give you eight of our favorite strategies for maximizing ROAS from search ads and tell you whether you need to run search ads in tandem with shopping ads.

Who We Are: At Inflow, we work with dozens of eCommerce companies to increase traffic, conversions, and sales. You can talk to one of our Google Ads specialists to learn how we can help increase your business ROAS. Get started now.

What’s the Best Google Ads Platform for My eCommerce Business?

Before we get into the details of our Google Ads eCommerce strategies, let’s cover a bit of background info on the Google Ads ecosystem. 

There are two main platforms within which you can advertise your products: Google Search and Google Shopping.

For some context, here’s a visual comparison of their placement in the search engine result pages (SERPs):

Google Search

Google Search ads are perhaps the most well-known of the Ads products due to their longevity. It was Google’s flagship ad platform (previously known as Adwords), displaying text ads when a searcher uses keywords specified by the advertiser.

Google Search is different from Google Shopping because of the way the platform operates. Search gives you more control over the keywords you wish your products to be seen for. Google Search ads also allow more copy, including a description to grab the searcher’s interest — but, unlike Shopping ads, Search ads are text only.

Google Shopping

Google Shopping ads (also known as Google Product Listing Ads or PLAs) are probably the best fit if you’re a B2C brand selling products online. All you need to participate is a product feed, Google Merchant Center, and an eCommerce website.

As you can see, Google Shopping ads show up at the very top of search results. You can’t beat that kind of visibility.

While Google Search uses keywords to serve your ads to searchers, Google Shopping is a bit more complicated. Whether or not your product appears is based on your product feed. This is all the necessary information relating to your product: brands, quantities, sizes, colors, and so on. 

You need to carefully optimize your Google Shopping data feed to target the right searches.

All this data renders a shopping-product ad within the Google SERPs, including relevant pricing and review information.

Our Suggestion: Use Both in Your eCommerce Ads Strategy

If you’re a big online retailer, you’ll probably be investing most of your paid ad spend on a mixture of Google Shopping ads and Google Search ads. Participating in both platforms often leads to enhanced product visibility across the buyer’s entire journey, from research to purchase.

Consider how your customer’s research and purchase journey spans across multiple devices and is made up of many micro-conversions, long before they seriously think about buying. If you’re only running search ads to cover branded queries, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to optimize your strategy.

Before implementing our tactics below, confirm that your reporting tool (typically Google Analytics 4) is ready to go. (If you haven’t yet configured your accounts, start with our GA4 setup guide and tracking toolkit.)

We find it helpful to review at least six months — 12 months is even better — of historical data before optimizing an existing Google Ads campaign. After all, if we can’t measure performance to a good degree of certainty, we can’t measure the growth we’re about to deliver. 

Then we can’t create case studies like this one.

7 Ways to Optimize Your Google Shopping Ads for eCommerce

Here at Inflow, we’ve helped hundreds of online retailers from all kinds of eCommerce industries maximize their ROAS with a few proven strategies. 

Of course, every client and business is different, but if you’re looking for the best way to set up eCommerce Google Shopping campaigns, start with these tips:

1. Bid More Aggressively on Specific Search Phrases

We use a three-tiered campaign structure to focus ad spend on the search phrases that drive the most sales — something which isn’t as easy as it sounds. There’s no point wasting time and money on non-performers, which is why getting specific is our first suggestion for any eCommerce shopping ads strategy.

Here’s how we make the most of this bid strategy:

Step 1: Review your historic search data volume to find the search terms that drive your revenue.

First, you need to find the search query themes that generate the most transactions for your company. The goal here is to create two groups: one with high-converting search terms and another with low- to medium-converting search terms.

The best-performing group will likely contain several branded terms, with specific model names, SKU codes, part numbers, and other searches that show a high purchase intent.

Step 2: Set up three shopping campaigns — Tiers 1, 2, and 3 — with required priority levels.

Create three campaigns with a shared budget, and assign each with a different priority level. (Remember that in this context, priority setting doesn’t reflect the group’s priority; it’s just the order in which Google will cycle through the campaigns).

• Tier 1 will have the highest campaign priority setting, which indicates to Google that search queries should start here. This tier, like all the others, contains every product available on the site but with many negative search phrases applied (we’ll talk about that next).
• In Tier 2, we’ll adjust the priority setting to medium. This is where the average- to medium-performing search terms will live.
• In Tier 3, we’ll adjust the priority setting to “low.” This is where the best-converting search terms will exist.

Step 3: Build and apply the negative keyword lists.

In Tier 1, we’ll apply negative keywords based on the search queries we want to be active in Tiers 2 and 3. Adding these negative keywords prevents them from landing in Tier 1 and pushes them to the next tier in the funnel — Tier 2.

In Tier 2, we again add negative keywords but this time only the best-performing search terms.

In Tier 3, we don’t need any negative keywords applied, because any of those lower-value search phrases should have been filtered out already from Tiers 1 or 2. This was the ultimate goal — to be able to exclude those lesser-converting searches and to bid more aggressively on all searches making it to Tier 3.

(Note: We’ve seen some agencies get a little zealous with the number of tiers they create, and it becomes very difficult to maintain. The smallest change in any campaign can completely wreck the entire system. For that reason, we typically keep our clients to a three-tier setup).

2. Identify Your Store’s Best Sellers and Prioritize Your Budget Accordingly

One of the easiest ways to grow your ROAS is to identify historic best sellers — then bid higher on those. You can combine this strategy with the tiered approach outlined above, where you bid your best sellers up on the product or group level.

Take a look at your historic data (if it’s available) and identify your business’s top-selling products. You can also use Google Analytics to find best sellers and eCommerce conversion rates, plus any relevant ROAS/ROI metrics.

Find your best performers with our Top Products & Categories Data Studio Template.

3. Regularly Audit and Optimize Your Google Product Feed for Better Overall Performance

If you take away just one thing from this piece, it should be this: Your Google Product data feed is essential for succeeding with Google Shopping ads. It’s a vital cog in the algorithm, so it deserves a lot of attention.

In short, you need to ensure your feed contains all the required product information. If not, you risk:

• not showing up when people are searching for your products
• and being charged a higher cost per click (CPC) to show your ads.

It’s also vital to keep product titles relevant without keyword stuffing. This not only helps to enhance visibility for those high-intent searches, but it also helps to boost click-through rate (CTR).

Auditing a Google Shopping data feed is one of the first things we do when working with a client. Start with our guide on how to optimize your Google Product data feed, where we explain exactly why and how you should optimize your feed and how to set up and execute your campaigns.

4. Optimize Your Strategy for Mobile

Our own research has confirmed that mobile shoppers behave differently than desktop shoppers. No surprises there: The actual queries that convert on mobile aren’t necessarily the same ones people use on desktop.

But many eCommerce businesses don’t have a specific approach when it comes to mobile users, aside from reducing mobile bids — which can be a wasteful approach.

We start by determining the historic mobile-only ROAS. We repeat our search query analysis tiers to segment mobile customers. If we find a gap, we set up our own tiers with the appropriate negative keywords for mobile users. 

In the end, we may have six tiers set up for a client: three for desktop and three for mobile.

This is much more successful than simply adjusting bids on mobile or desktop. It’s a more holistic and strategic approach to optimizing for the customer’s device at that moment — and for the entirety of the customer’s journey.

5. Discover Seasonal Opportunities and Bid Aggressively

If your business operates in a very seasonal industry, it’s crucial to keep time of year in mind and bid on products/product groups within the tiered structure accordingly.

For example, you should bid higher on flip-flops in the summer and snow boots in the winter — but keep your tiers the same, no matter the season. By bidding higher on the best-converting products in summer, you can maximize ROAS during these peak months when there’s a bigger search demand.

Take one of our wholesale retailers as an example. They operate in the back-to-school vertical, so understandably they get peak traffic ahead of the new school year. We ensure we’re visible during periods of high-search activity, whilst ensuring the budget for the year isn’t exhausted.

We’ve seen this work across a range of seasonal verticals, and it isn’t something that we’ve noticed many other agencies or in-house teams doing.

Note: You’ll need to fully understand the three-tiered approach before diving into this strategy or the mobile-specific one. The inventory will need to be the same across tiers; otherwise, you may experience leakage!

Learn more about adjusting your bids based on seasonality analysis by downloading our Google Shopping Seasonality Analysis Tool.

6. Let Google Optimize (With Supervision!)

Performance Max campaigns use a mix of your product feed, your supplied text and creative assets, and Google’s machine learning to take care of campaigns on your behalf. In essence, Google pitches PMax as a one-stop solution to access all Google Display Network channels from a single shopping campaign, including:

• YouTube
• Display
• Search
• Discover
• Gmail
• Maps

While this can beneficial for advertisers looking to quickly set up their paid campaigns by leveraging all of Google’s platforms, it’s not a perfect solution just yet — and we’d warn against using it without some expert oversight, for a few main reasons: 

1. It takes time. Because this is an all-encompassing campaign strategy, PMax takes longer than any other Smart campaign to ramp up performance and spend. You have to be patient and let these campaigns run for at least six weeks before evaluating performance.
2. There’s currently no control over ad placement. Google does not allow you to allocate spend based on ad placement preference. While an ad placement report shows where traffic is going by channel, you can’t yet adjust them manually (which can be risky for advertisers who are particular about where their ads and brand name show up).
3. The more SKUs, the better. Like most Smart campaigns, Google’s PMax algorithm works better with more data. The more SKUs in your product feed, the more likely you’ll find success. If your eCommerce store only sells a handful of items, it will be tougher to optimize a Performance Max campaign.

If you want to automate your campaigns, take caution — and a strategic approach. Leave plenty of room for testing and experimentation before investing your entire ad spend into these campaign types.

The more you do so now, the better off you’ll be when Google switches entirely to automation later this year.

7. Using Dynamic Retargeting

If you want to craft the best Google Shopping ads strategy for eCommerce, don’t slack on retargeting.

As annoying as some people might find them, retargeting ads do convert — and extremely well. Over time, they’ve been shown to have a great ROI, so they work well to supplement your search marketing strategy.

The dynamic retargeting feature from Google Shopping enables you to automatically show responsive display ads to people who came to your site without completing a purchase. It makes use of your product feed to determine which products to display and can intelligently group these together based on what’s likely to convert best.

Using dynamic remarketing ads is a fairly straightforward strategy to skyrocket eCommerce performance — and it’s a must for any online retailer running Google Ads.

8 Ways to Optimize Your Google Search Ads for eCommerce

Remember: Running Google Search ads in tandem with Shopping Ads is a good strategy to cover all your bases. 

Start with these tips when setting up your Google Search ads (Adwords) for eCommerce success.

1. Structure Your Google Ads Account for More Granular Control

Starting from scratch? The best way to set up eCommerce Shopping ads (Adwords) campaigns is to mimic your own navigation menu.

If you have a top-level page that contains a category of products (shoes) and then sub-categories that contain brands (Adidas, Nike), then it probably makes sense to have a shoe category and individual brand-specific ad groups within your Google Ads account. This method will save you time and will make budget control easy, too.

With this approach, you can also get as granular as you like when it comes to ad group and keyword grouping. It will also help when other people on your team need to manage the account, as well as keep things clean for the reporting team.

2. Deep Link to Best-Sellers Within Text Ads

Within your store’s categories, there will often be a handful of outstanding, top-selling products. So, instead of directing potential customers to an individual category page, direct them to the best-selling product page instead. That’s usually where they end up anyway.

You could easily set up a few text ads which deep link to a handful of your top-selling products. Then, simply monitor which ads bring in the most conversions. You can run A/B tests on this in the background and keep a close eye on the products that really push the needle on your ROI.

This makes the path to purchase cleaner for the customer and helps to improve your Google Quality Score, too.

In this instance, the keyword/search intent, ad copy, and landing page experience are all well-aligned and optimized. 

In the cases where there is no clear best-seller, it would make sense to direct the customer to the most relevant category page instead. This approach is often used when bidding on less specific, short-tail keywords.

3. Have an Industry-Specific (But Agile!) Approach and Test Everything

The strategy we use for running Google Search Ads ultimately depends on the industry our client operates in, and, of course, the eCommerce platform they use. 

It’s important to have an agile approach when it comes to eCommerce marketing; things change quickly and the search landscape is constantly evolving. You need to always be open to new opportunities and test everything!

We like to use Google Experiments within Google Ads to test how variations of campaign set-ups perform against our original campaign, helping to shape our ongoing strategies.

4. Don’t Neglect Google Ad Extensions, Especially Price Extensions

Ensure that every possible extension has been built out when a campaign goes live. Setting up all eligible extensions will give you a better Quality Score on your account and enhances your chances of taking up more valuable real estate within the SERPs.

The obvious choice when it comes to eCommerce clients has to be the Price Extension. This highlights the product price within the text ad when someone’s shopping for your product.

Your account should have the following extensions active and optimized:

• Callout extensions
• Structured Snippets
• Promotion Snippets (essential for Black Friday and other sales)
• Sitelink Extensions

5. Bid on Product SKUs, Part Numbers, and Model Numbers

When running search ads, you’ll want to bid heavily on product SKU and other identifier codes, model numbers, replacement part keywords, and so on. While these might not have a huge search volume when compared to some other non-brand search queries, they’re going to have a super high conversion rate.

Someone entering a search query for “washing machine” or even “best washing machine” is probably going to be fairly high in the purchase process. They’re probably still shopping around and trying to come to a decision about the particular model they want.

But what about someone searching for a specific washing machine model, like “Samsung WW70K5413UX”? You should be throwing your money at Google for that search query.

We often scrape our clients’ product feeds to get a list of these numbers or SKUs before using Dynamic Insertion within the headline of the text ad and the display URL. We also use keyword-level final URLs to send the user to the exact product they are searching for.

6. Continue Scheduled Maintenance and Optimization

Let’s say your ROAS is ticking over nicely at 300% each month. While that’s great, it’s not to say it’s bringing in the most possible revenue.

You shouldn’t neglect campaigns even when they’re performing well (that 300% could all be based on a few branded search terms and nothing else that’s going to drive sales).

Ongoing scheduled maintenance and optimization ensure your search strategy doesn’t get left to stagnate.

From regularly reviewing the “Search Insights” report and checking in on the “Search Impression Share” to verifying that rogue searches aren’t eating up your budget, there’s always plenty to do.

Remember tips #4 and #5: Mobile search behavior is different than desktop search, and seasonality is an important factor to consider, too.

Check on an ongoing basis how those two variants might affect your search campaigns — especially if you’ve got an old account that has gone a bit stale.

7. Take Advantage of In-Market Audiences

In-market audiences can be used within your Google Search campaigns to ensure your ads are being seen by a wider audience than normal with a different matching criteria applied.

Let’s consider an online retailer of car wheels and accessories. If somebody searches for a product that is similar to one that the car retailer sells, Google will place them in a particular audience group.

As an advertiser, you can then choose to target that particular audience group with your own search ads.

It sometimes makes sense to adjust bids according to your audiences, upping them when they match a particular, high-intent group. It can also give you flexibility when it comes to your keyword strategy; you don’t need to be quite as granular, because you know this person is (in theory) already interested in what you’re selling.

8. Don’t Forget about Dynamic Search Ads

The last Google Ads eCommerce tip we’ll share is using Dynamic Search Ads. This is Google’s offering for those who have a massive inventory of products to sell — but no time to list individual ads for each product.

If you enable Dynamic Search Ads, Google’s ad crawler will scan your entire website and create ads automatically based on what it finds. That might be a bit too much control for some, but for others, it can be a real time-saver.

We love to use this as a keyword research tool — letting Google find queries that we may have missed or not deemed valuable when setting up our campaign. Although this is getting tougher now that Google continues to decrease the visibility into search terms, it can still be a valuable tool. 

Note: If you do make use of a Dynamic Search campaign, add your normal search keywords as negatives to ensure there’s no overlap.

Ultimately, Dynamic Ads can be a good low-budget and minimal-fuss campaign type to run in the background with low ongoing maintenance required.

Set Up Your Google Ads eCommerce Strategy Today

You’ll want to play around and test these pay-per-click ad strategies before you jump right in and make any drastic, lasting changes. Try a few at a time, and let us know how they work out for your eCommerce store.

If you’d rather have a PPC expert implement them for you, we’re always willing to help. Request a free proposal from our team now to see what results we can bring for your traffic, conversions, and sales.

Of course, don’t forget that SEO, social media advertising, and conversion rate optimization will also play a role in the success of your paid search advertising. We live in a world where customers are constantly bouncing from one channel to another, which means you need to appropriately configure your digital marketing efforts to take advantage — as our client Tactipup did.

Until then, check out our other Google Ads resources below to help you optimize your paid advertising campaigns.