Google Shopping is a good start to market your online business and convert more sales. However, if you’re a newcomer, it is essential to watch and learn how your competitors brand and market their products from Google Shopping by using a web data extraction tool (web scraping tool).
Table of Contents
· Why should you use Google Shopping for your e-Commerce Business?
· How does Google Shopping Work?
· Why Web Data Extraction?
· How to Scrape Google Shopping using Web Data Extraction
· What you can learn from your competitors:
· Wrap-Up
*Why should you use Google Shopping for your e-Commerce Business? *
Google Shopping has a significantly high conversion rate. That is because Google Shopping only attracts customers with purchase-intent. For example, a user wants to pick up a pair of running shoes as a birthday gift for her mother. And she probably starts by searching for “running shoes”, Google then will deliver all relevant product information. Users can compare the prices and features in a matter of seconds.
Google Shopping not only makes the shopping process much more convenient for consumers but also allows marketing campaigns to match with targets more accurately for merchants. No wonder, Google Shopping would gain its popularity among successful e-Commerce entrepreneurs. It’s literally an effective method to boost your sales if you can make the most of it.
How does Google Shopping Work?
To best optimize your Google shopping campaign, we need to first understand how it works. Google Shopping is very easy to get started as you can follow official guidelines to set up your account in the Google Merchant Center. Once you get your account ready, we are ready to sync your online stores. Then your product information will go on live via Google Shopping when the specific product search term kicks in. Google Shopping works in an auction bidding system and product page quality score. That being said, in order to make Google Shopping give your campaign ad the first slot for a given search result, you have to:
Offer higher bids than what your competitors offer,
Create conversion-magnetic listing description to improve the CTR
For most starters, they don’t have a clue how to create a successful campaign. In this regard, the best way to kick off is to watch how others, especially your competitors, sell on Google Shopping.
Why Web Data Extraction?
There was a saying, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Google Shopping has tons of valuable information that you can feed your marketing campaigns. There are many prices and product monitoring platforms on the market. However, before you test out an effective marketing strategy and get ready, you are throwing away the money if investing in these fancy monitoring tools. Most monitoring tools are designed for mature online businesses with large scale product lines in various channels.
This is how data extraction comes into play. It can extract any data from the websites automatically and turn into a feasible format like excel for analysis. And the optimization strategies are rested upon an adequate amount of product data collected from Google Shopping.
How to Scrape Google Shopping using Web Data Extraction
Web data extraction involves high technical skill sets to accomplish. Luckily, there are web extraction tools that are intuitive for anyone to extract web data within clicks. Octoparse stands out as the leading web scraping software, as an absolute no-brainer for beginners. Anyone can customize and set up a scraper to get data from most websites.
To extract product information with Octoparse from Google Shopping, we need to customize a new task by clicking the plus sign on the right-hand corner and throw the URL in the box.
It has a built-in browser that should load the webpage for us to point-and-click. The new version of OP 8.X will read the web page and identify data fields automatically.
Follow the guide tip, click “Save Setting”. It will generate the workflow by itself
Click” Start Extraction” to execute the task.
It will take a couple of minutes up to the volume of listings. Once it finishes extracting, download the file into excel or CSV.
As we get sufficient information, we can move forward to analyze the results. And you can build graphical charts to visualize the data intuitively.
Here is a YouTube video for reference: https://youtu.be/6TWJ2LKGWQk
What you can learn from your competitors:
The lower price improves CTR:
A competitive price always will get higher CTR which lets Google Shopping bring your products more often on a given search product. And the impression you gain will reinforce your CTR. However, there is a limit on how low you can go. That’s why keeping tabs on the price of your competitors can be helpful to stay competitive.
Don’t strike the roke with an egg:
Pay attention to major players like Amazon, Target, and Walmart. If there are a lot of big players on a given product, don’t try to outrank them by raising your bids. Instead, you can pick a niche product that they wouldn’t bid hard on.
Optimize the quality of the image:
Product images are dispensable in Google Shopping. A good photo can entice more users to click. Your photo should be clear and simple enough. In this regard, pay close attention to you may need Photoshop skills to make your photos look more appealing.
Pay attention to promotional text:
If your conversion rate drops, it’s likely your competitors are running promotions. Promotional texts are more appealing which would drive more CTR. Your promotions can be seasonal like “Winter Blowout Sale.” Even “Free Shipping on All Orders” can be very helpful in getting more customers. However, sneaky retailers will lower their price points by leaving the shipping costs to the customers. Some customers didn’t realize that they actually paid the shipping cost out of their own pockets and got angry later. So just make sure customers are crystal clear about the promotions and won’t cause any trouble.
Wrap Up
Google Shopping is easy to get started, but still, you need to be more proactive and stay alert. So does other information from Google for example Google Play Review. Google has immense information to pick, which would be like going on a blind date. Web data extraction is your holy grail to keep tabs on your competitors automatically without any effort. Autopilot your market strategy so you can focus on gaining a competitive edge when available.
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