How we launched advertising for an online gift store

Working with product feed

After uploading the feed to Google Merchant Center, we used the built-in quality check tool. It is very important to pay attention to this feature: the more products are error-free, the higher the chance of successful campaign launch. “Errors” refer to incorrect names or descriptions, missing or low-quality images. Google, for example, often rejects images with logos or photos with too low a resolution. Therefore, as a first step, we cleaned up the feed as much as possible and made sure that all products were correctly formatted and that the system did not flag them as problematic.

Products categorization

At the same time, the correct transmission of categories was also checked: the name of the product category, its belonging to a specific section of the site, and so on. This is important because Google takes this data into account when calculating the ad rank. Essentially, when you launch a product ad, the product itself becomes the ad, which means that its characteristics (name, description, category) must be as accurate and relevant as possible.

This is particularly important in the gift niche. For example, when preparing for the March 8 holiday. People will be looking for gifts for this date, and in order for Google to “understand” the relevance of the products, a separate category “Gifts for March 8” is created in advance. It is important to do this not on the day of the holiday, but at least a couple of weeks in advance so that indexing has time to take place and the search engine displays these products correctly. All suitable products are collected in the category, thus creating a thematic selection.

Categories for holidays and themes ultimately work better both in free product search results and in paid advertising because the ads are more relevant.

We periodically grouped and regrouped products. There are so-called “evergreen” categories: “gifts for men,” “gifts for women,” “gifts for moms,” etc. For these, we collected key queries, analyzed their popularity, and pinned basic product selections on the website. However, holiday categories are seasonal. For example, two weeks before March 8, we moved products to a separate category for this holiday so that Google would start showing them in fresh search queries. After the holiday, interest in these products declined, and we returned them to the evergreen selections.

In parallel with product advertising, we launched category advertising. We don't usually recommend this approach, as it is less effective in terms of conversions. But there are exceptions — for example, before holidays. In such cases, you can launch search advertising for categories that contain relevant products. Yes, the conversion rate is lower, but it also works for brand awareness. In addition, we set up banner remarketing for visitors to these categories, which proved to be quite effective.

Key points

If you have an online gift shop, on the one hand, it's a standard e-commerce project: you upload products to Merchant Center and launch product advertising. But on the other hand, working with categories is critically important here. For proper categorization, you need to analyze search queries, see which gift categories are most popular in your country, and create product selections based on that. This helps Google better understand what you are selling and shows your products for the most relevant queries.

Don't forget that gifts are sought for both personal occasions (e.g., a loved one's birthday) and mass holidays (March 8, New Year's, Valentine's Day). Therefore, it is important to have product selections specifically for mass holidays and indicate them in the feed so that the system can rank your ads correctly. Ultimately, this approach allows you to increase product visibility, reduce the cost per click, and increase the number of conversions.