The Power of AI in Google Shopping: Smart Strategies and Tools for E-commerce Growth

How can you use Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a performance marketer in e-commerce? While Google is pushing fully AI-powered campaign types like Performance Max, the application of AI to boost the results of your campaigns goes far beyond.

In this article, we will focus on how e-commerce businesses can benefit from using AI solutions and, specifically, how those e-commerce businesses that use Google Ads to promote their products can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their Shopping Ads strategy by using Artificial Intelligence tools. 

Moreover, we have put together more than 10 AI tools that can help advertisers boost the efficiency of all the different processes and steps involved in Google Shopping ad creation.

Finally, we will take a look at 3 challenges derived from incorporating AI technologies and we will delve into the future of AI applied to e-commerce and advertising.

Article Outline:

1. How incorporating AI technology can benefit e-commerce businesses

2. AI Tools for every process involved in Google Shopping ad creation:

1. AI solutions for landing page and webpage creation and optimization
2. AI tools to optimize product titles and descriptions
3. AI tools to make great images for your Shopping ads
4. AI solutions for feed management and optimization
5. AI solutions to build audiences
6. AI tools to define budget and bid strategy
7. AI-powered solutions for analyzing data in your campaigns
8. Other AI tools to improve your Google Shopping campaigns

3. 3 Challenges that e-commerce businesses face when adopting AI technologies 

4. The future of AI in e-commerce and online advertising

How incorporating AI technology can benefit e-commerce businesses

The adoption of AI can add significant value to different aspects of the e-commerce industry. 

Firstly, it can greatly impact customer experience by not only providing highly customized (and thus more relevant) recommendations, but also by constantly assisting customers through the shopping journey, ultimately leading to an increase in customer satisfaction and retention and, of course, to a rise in conversion rates.

As Baptiste Tricoire, Fintech & AI Strategic Marketing Advisor, states “[…] Artificial intelligence-powered chatbots and virtual assistants offer scalable and instantaneous customer care, enhancing satisfaction and retention rates and removing language barriers with real-time translation capabilities.”

In addition to that, artificial intelligence can also have a significant role when it comes to simplifying and optimizing processes like reducing overstocking, predicting high-demand periods and improving inventory management. 

“[…] AI doesn’t just enhance customer-facing interactions; it also revolutionizes backend operations. For instance, AI-driven analytics can identify patterns and trends in customer behaviour, enabling businesses to optimize their supply chain management and ensure products are stocked efficiently where and when they are most in demand.” Tricoire adds.

Finally, AI can also contribute to avoiding fraud: “Artificial intelligence is also essential for protecting e-commerce companies from fraud. AI-powered fraud detection solutions help reduce the risk of revenue loss and safeguard both businesses and customers by continuously monitoring transactions and identifying suspicious patterns.” states Tricoire.

AI Tools for every process involved in Google Shopping ad creation:

1) AI solutions for landing page and webpage creation and optimization

When running Google Shopping campaigns, the first requirement is an e-commerce website where customers can follow the shopping path and make purchases. However, creating a website or landing page from scratch demands significant resources and time. This is where AI comes in. 

Solutions like Landingfolio or Unbounce use AI to build customized landing pages focused on getting conversions. These platforms also help you with the content creation of your website.

Regarding website copywriting, Hubspot offers an AI Landing Page Copy Generator that will help you with the text for your landing pages.

Additionally, user experience (UX) also plays a key role in the effectiveness of a landing page (ultimately affecting conversion rates). In this regard, we can also find AI-powered tools that help you improve the UX of your websites.

An example of this is UXsniff. This tool records how users interact with your landing pages and then leverages the power of the ChatGPT API to provide you with a summary of every recording, thus simplifying the identification of possible user frustrations that can be improved.

Source: UXsniff

Another example would be Attention Insight, which leverages the power of AI to provide predictive analytics and insights through the creation and analysis of heat maps. This enables the validation of design concepts and the optimization of their performance before launch. This is not only applicable to landing pages but also to ad designs. 

 2) AI tools to optimize product titles and descriptions

Titles and descriptions are among the most important features of Shopping ads in terms of relevance. The more optimized the titles and descriptions of your ads are, the more likely they will be displayed for relevant search results.

Producthero’s Title Optimization Tool (also known as Optimizer) combines the language and search behaviour of users to provide smart content recommendations for titles. This solution takes converting search terms, keyword analysis and product descriptions and attributes into consideration to provide keyword suggestions based on different data sources and AI features.

This solution not only has a drag-and-drop function that allows us to add relevant keywords in just a few seconds, but it can also provide keyword recommendations for different languages. That way, advertisers running ads in different countries can also optimize titles in languages they don’t speak. 

In addition, Producthero’s Title Optimization Tool offers the possibility of editing titles in bulk, which is especially useful for adding seasonal keywords to enhance the likelihood of your ads being displayed when users search for items associated with specific seasons or events like Christmas or Halloween.

3) AI tools to make great images for your Shopping ads

Images play a key role in potential customers’ purchase decisions. Additionally, it is also an essential element in Google’s free listings. Thus, it is crucial to carefully pick images for your Shopping ads to increase the chances of your ads appearing to users seeking products similar to those we offer, particularly after Google released its new feature ‘Shop with Google AI’. 

This new feature, which, for now, is just available for a few selected users, allows them to create AI-generated images for the products they are interested in buying. After entering the prompt, they can choose the image they prefer and Google will display products that resemble that image.

Some of Google’s key recommendations for images include selecting high-quality images that clearly showcase the actual product, opting for solid white or transparent backgrounds, and ensuring that images are at least 800×800 pixels and up to 16 megabytes in size.

When making the images we took to look the best and meet the mentioned requirements, we can use various photo editors with AI-powered features like Photoshop (which is more oriented to professional designers) or Clipping Magic. 

In February 2024, Google announced that they were starting a partnership with Canva. Therefore, the upcoming Canva integration app will make it easier for you by allowing users to directly publish the images created with this tool into the Performance Max campaigns. 

Finally, Google is aware that image creation is often assigned to external agencies or designers. Therefore, they also stated that in the coming weeks, they will add the possibility of sharing a link to the previews of your ads from Performance Max, which will simplify the workflow.

4) AI solutions for feed management and optimization

Google Shopping campaigns rely on a Product data feed —a comprehensive and extensive file containing all the details about the items in your inventory, including product images, brand, pricing, availability, and much more. This information is crucial for Google to determine how and where to display your ads.

Feeditor, or feedoptimise are examples of feed optimization tools that rely on AI to identify missing information, offer error-fixing recommendations, and optimize product feed elements to comply with Google Shopping’s recommended guidelines

Google introduced Feed Gen, which is an open-source tool to help you optimise your product content based on Large language models by using Vertex AI. It makes the hideous task of optimising product content easier. The set-up is quite technical for most PPC specialists, while the optimised feeds give advertisers a competitive advantage.

Although optimisations look strong, the technical skills required to use Feed Gen will be a roadblocker for most e-commerce advertisers. At Producthero we always pursue the goal of creating smart, powerful, and easy-to-use tools. Additionally, we are constantly developing resources, like Producthero Academy, that provide users with all the knowledge needed to leverage our solutions effectively.

“Embracing FeedGen’s AI for product data optimization transforms the daunting task into a strategic advantage, significantly saving time and redefining feed management.” Martijn Beumer, PPC Specialist and Produchtero’s Co-founder.

5) AI solutions to build audiences 

Targeting the right audience is crucial when running Google Shopping campaigns, as this ensures that your ads are relevant to the people most likely to be interested in your products. The greater the relevance of your ads to users, the higher the likelihood of receiving clicks and conversions.

Identifying and crafting your ideal target audience can be a quite time-consuming and complex process. However, PPC specialists are not alone in this task, since they can count on AI algorithms to simplify and optimize this labour. 

A few years ago, Google started using artificial intelligence to help advertisers create relevant audiences for their campaigns. Google’s Performance Max campaigns harness the power of AI to identify the most relevant and responsive audiences for advertising campaigns by analyzing audience signals —indicators that originate from data as information advertisers supply about their existing customers, remarketing lists, demographic information, users’ online behaviour, etc. Then, thanks to machine learning, Google can use this data to discover new audiences that advertisers might not have identified.

Apart from Google’s own AI technology, we can find other AI-powered solutions that can help you create audiences for your Google Shopping campaigns, like KeywordSearch’s AI Audience Builder. 

This tool streamlines and simplifies the process of creating high-performing audiences (which will ultimately contribute to achieving better campaign results while saving time) by using AI algorithms to build Google ad audiences and synchronise them with your Google Ads campaigns in a simple click, eliminating the need for manual data transfers or complex configurations.

6) AI tools to define budget and bid strategy

Artificial Intelligence can also help you streamline processes like defining and adjusting your Google Shopping campaigns’ budget and bid strategy.

For instance, Optmyzr offers comprehensive budget management and optimization features for PPC advertising campaigns with a particular focus on Google Ads. In terms of budget definition, this tool provides users with “AI-based projections for ad spend based on account history, seasonality, and recent budget changes”. 

Optmyzr also offers a feature called “Enhanced Scripts”. That way, this solution generates pre-built scripts that allow you to perform tasks like automatically adjusting bids based on aspects like Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), or Target Cost per Action (CPA).

It is also worth mentioning that Optmyzr provides users with different tools for managing bids for product groups in Shopping Campaigns.

Another option is Acquisio Turing, a PPC bid and budget management system powered by machine learning. This technology takes into consideration aspects like time, day of the week, seasonality or location to make decisions regarding bid and budget management. Additionally, as stated on their website, it does not necessarily require historical data.

Among the more than 30 intelligent algorithms that comprise Acquisio Turing, we can find an algorithm that is focused on budget distribution. This algorithm “allows campaign managers to indicate their campaign’s priority between maximizing budget or maximizing clicks.” After indicating the priority, the algorithm will ensure that the budget is allocated accordingly to achieve the defined goals or priorities.  

In summary, by using solutions like the two mentioned above, PPC specialists can save a lot of time by quickly and easily identifying those aspects within campaigns that require attention or improvement, whether it be redefining bidding strategies, optimizing budgets, or automating various tasks or processes.

7) AI-powered solutions for analyzing data in your campaigns

To continually improve the performance and effectiveness of your Google Shopping campaigns, it’s crucial to constantly monitor and analyze your results. This ensures that you make informed decisions when adjusting or maintaining campaign elements. 

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is one of the current top tools for campaign analysis as it provides very detailed information. Many of the data-driven insights provided by GA4 are AI-powered, including automated and custom insights, recommendations, or predictive metrics.

Within Google Analytics, Artificial Intelligence plays a crucial role in behavioral modeling for consent mode. GA4 leverages machine learning to estimate the behaviour of users who have declined analytics cookies by drawing insights from the actions of similar users who have accepted them. This innovative approach enables you to get useful insights while respecting users’ privacy. 

For GA4 to do this, you have to enable consent mode across all the pages of your website, among other prerequisites. Check this PPC Mastery article to learn how you can set up Consent Mode.

8) Other AI tools to improve your Google Shopping campaigns

Lastly, this compilation would not be complete without including ChatGPT, a versatile tool that can be helpful in almost every process involved in your Google Shopping campaigns and mentioned in this article. 

Some PPC specialists have even used the help of GPT to create scripts aimed at overcoming pMax’s limited reporting and insights and gaining back control by getting more comprehensive performance insights on Google campaigns.

An example of this is Mike Rhodes, who created PMax Insights Script, a script that gives you additional insights about your Performance Max (pMax) campaigns by extracting data on PMax and Shopping campaigns from a Google Ads account and pushing that information to a Google Sheet

In particular, this script displays the allocation of the Performance Max campaign budget across Shopping, Video, Display, and Search through graphics and charts on the Google Sheet. With these insights, you can make informed decisions regarding your pMax campaigns. 

3 Challenges that e-commerce businesses face when adopting AI technologies 

At this point, it is indisputable that incorporating AI technologies comes with countless benefits. However, it also it also entails numerous challenges. In this article, we focus on the three most frequent ones:

1) Inversion and technical capacity

When implementing AI technologies, it is not only essential that e-commerce businesses carefully choose AI tools that precisely match their specific needs but, also that they count on the necessary technical infrastructure to seamlessly integrate them.

As Sergio Rico Crespo, Head of several e-commerce businesses, states: “Adopting AI technologies can be a great challenge, especially for smaller businesses. And, of course, we can’t forget about integrating these solutions with the systems we already have, which is sometimes like fitting pieces of different jigsaw puzzles together.”

2) Data quality and availability

According to the Cisco AI Readiness Index, only 14% of organizations worldwide are fully ready to integrate AI into their businesses. 

This can be partially explained by data fragmentation across different departments. In particular, the same study showed that 32% of the companies have partially fragmented data and 11% affirmed that their data is highly fragmented. 

When it comes to advertising, data quality is also essential. For example, in pMax campaigns, the quality of the data input can significantly impact your campaign results. Understanding how the algorithm works and consequently providing accurate and relevant data, will help optimize your ad campaigns and improve performance. On the contrary, imputing irrelevant or incorrect data can harm the performance of your campaigns. 

“It is essential to start with making sure your conversion tracking is set correctly and optimise your product data to improve your campaign performance,” states Martijn Beumer. 

In summary, before starting to incorporate AI tools and technologies into your daily processes, it is important to overcome the fragmentation barrier by making sure that there is enough quality, unified, and normalized data that AI algorithms can effectively work with to produce valuable results. 

3) Data Privacy 

When working with AI tools, we cannot forget their dependency on data, often comprising sensitive information. Thus, ensuring that we comply with the pertinent regulations while handling data is a must to maintain ethical and legal standards.

“The massive volumes of personal data that AI systems handle highlight how crucial it is to implement strict data privacy and security measures. Robust safeguards must be in place to prevent unauthorized access to or misuse of sensitive data, preserving user confidence in the platform.” Baptiste Tricoire says.

Regarding AI-generated image creation, it offers a promising opportunity to streamline processes in the e-commerce and advertising industries. However, we can still find some uncertainties regarding the images’ uniqueness and the ownership of their rights.

For example, the image generation process implies using both machine outputs and human-created artworks (which are frequently copyrighted) to train algorithms. As a result, questions arise regarding the rightful ownership of the generated images and the potential legal implications of using copyrighted material in the training data.

The future of AI in e-commerce and online advertising

As artificial intelligence algorithms keep developing and becoming more sophisticated, we can expect a surge of innovative technologies revolutionizing both the e-commerce and advertising industries. Let’s take a look at some of the possible trends in the upcoming years: 

1) Augmented reality (AR) shopping experiences

At the beginning of 2024, e-commerce businesses, especially in the fashion and make-up industry, are already offering potential customers virtual try-on experiences. These experiences allow customers to have a better idea of how a specific product will look on them before purchasing it. This leads to an improvement in customer satisfaction and, therefore, a decrease in return rates. 

An example of this, in 2023, Google included a “Try On” badge for some US customers. This new AI shopping feature shows the user how a cloth piece being advertised on the Google Shopping tab looks on different real models from different size ranges, with different skin tones, ethnicities and even hair types.

Similarly, some other big fashion and makeup brands like Sephora, L’Oréal, or Zalando have already adopted this technology.

In the upcoming years, we can expect not only a refinement in this specific technology, offering a more realistic and accurate result but also smaller e-commerce integrating virtual try-on features into their online platforms.

2) Voice commerce

The use of voice search (that uses Conversational AI technology), now goes beyond scheduling appointments or checking weather. Its popularity has grown to the point where it’s getting more common for users to use their voice at the first stages of the online shopping experience. 

Currently, voice assistants mainly engage with users by giving product recommendations or giving updates about their orders. 

Given the early stages this market is still in, and the legal limitations implied, the use of voice search is still quite limited. However, the rapid advancements in machine learning algorithms might lead voice commerce to not only play a crucial role in accessibility and inclusivity but it may also make an impact on the way users conduct searches, influencing the simplicity and speed of the customer’s buying process.

3) Automated ad creation

In November 2023, Google announced that they started rolling AI-powered asset generation and image editing in Performance Max (pMax) campaigns for US customers. With this new feature, advertisers can create assets (headlines, descriptions, and images) for their campaigns more simply and quickly, as well as generate new variations of the generated or existing images. 

Image source: Google

These developments are hinting at a shift in how ads are created, with AI assuming an increasingly prominent role in creating more targeted, personalized, and effective campaigns. Consequently, PPC specialists can anticipate streamlined workflows, simplifying their daily tasks.

Conclusion

In summary, the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Google Shopping campaigns has emerged as a transformative force, revolutionizing many aspects of e-commerce.

In this article we have delved into how AI tools can benefit e-commerce businesses and assist you in the different processes involved in Google Shopping ad creation, addressing crucial components such as image creation, feed management or title and description.

The incorporation of AI with these processes cannot only streamline operations but it can also improve the overall efficacy and performance of Google Shopping campaigns. However, despite the exciting prospects that it brings, AI technology also comes with its challenges, which makes it crucial for e-commerce businesses to ensure they are fully ready to seamlessly incorporate this technology.