The best Google tools for eCommerce

Being an owner of an eCommerce company means that you must constantly be looking for new ways to grow your business and improve the understanding of it. For small businesses or entrepreneurs just starting out in eCommerce it can be confusing to figure where to look for the right tools. 

Google is one of tech’s most trusted names. Google is a technology company that offers many marketing and analytics tools you can use to help your eCommerce business get ahead in this industry.

Selling products and services online doesn’t usually bring overnight success. It can be difficult to find new marketing strategies or hire data analysts to facilitate sales. Google can help. Most of their tools are well-suited for small business use—meaning there’s no steep learning curve or fees. 

Each small business needs tools. Delving into what Google has to offer can help a business owner better understand what’s out there, and get a sense of what might come in handy for current or even future stages of their entrepreneurial journey. So, read on to gain some valuable insights into Google’s best eCommerce tools. 

Google Ads is your friend for eCommerce marketing

Google Ads is the initial stop for eCommerce companies interested in using Google as a marketing tool. Google Ads can be used to market your services and products online. Since Google is an enormous platform with a ton of options to choose from, it’s important to study up to determine which features are most relevant for your business.

But there are certain things to keep in mind if you’re thinking about using Google Ads—from accurate budgeting (you don’t want to spend too little on ads and have them not perform, or too much and break the bank) to store prerequisites required by the Google Ads platform. But once you get started, you’ll find that Google Ads can be a great, relatively stress-free way to advertise online using a variety of different ad formats and campaign structures. 

Google Ads offers a user-friendly interface that is easy to use and can be customized for a wide range of budgets. But remember: it’s important to research different campaigns and ads types to find the right strategy for your Google Ads before you dive in.

Google Analytics (and more!) Google Analytics (and beyond!)

Analytics tools can help you monitor and grow your eCommerce businesses. Reporting tools can help you understand the effectiveness of your product advertising and increase sales. You can also track your customers’ searching and buying habits.

Analytics tools can help identify potential growth areas and spot red flags regarding past sales and inventory. This will allow you to avoid costly mistakes and make your business grow faster. These are some of the most popular tools for eCommerce analytics:

• KISSmetrics
• Putler
• Clicky
• Crazy Egg
• HOTJAR
• Google Analytics
• More! 

Since this is an article all about Google-specific tools, we’d like to spotlight the Google Analytics Tool specifically. Google Analytics is an easy-to-use web-based reporting tool that site owners can use for everything from simple metrics such as page views or clicks, to detailed reports. Google Analytics offers flow visualization, campaign measurement, traffic, custom and audience reports. You can also track how you are tracking your website conversions as well as user activity.

For businesses that depend on online sales or website-based marketing, these metrics are an important part of any strategy. Analytics tools are a great way to maximize the effectiveness and impact of your business plan and ensure the funnel is closed. Google Analytics is a popular tool for small businesses. It’s a popular tool for small businesses. You can find a wide range of quality metrics within an intuitive interface. 

You can also get insights from analytics to enable an easy and seamless evaluation of your products’ performance, content, market, and campaigns. Ultimately, an analytics tool like Google’s can be an excellent resource for understanding your business on a deeper level, to see where the gaps and possible links for failure are, and to take appropriate action to safeguard against them. It can be a safety blanket for your company. 

Google’s analytics tools also give valuable insight into the number of people visiting your website each day, compared to those buying your products or services. You can use these two numbers to increase your conversion rates by knowing how many people are visiting your website without purchasing.

Google Analytics, in short, can assist any eCom business owner to improve their website and gain a better understanding of their customers. What’s the best thing about Google Analytics? It’s a free tool, meaning that you don’t have to break the bank to gain insights into your business data. Analytics is an integral part of any business strategy, regardless of whether you use Google Analytics. Analytics is essential for scaling up your company. 

Google Merchant Center or Google Adwords may help you expand your reach

You can upload product data to the Google Merchant Center. This will allow you to list products on Google Shopping, and other similar services. Google Merchant Center can help you get your products in front of more people. This will increase conversions and revenue.

Google AdWords campaign give you full control of your keywords. This allows you to better target certain audiences. The ad will appear in search results when customers type the keywords you specify.

Google Merchant Center allows you to link your product feed to the search engine. Their API connects to other platforms such as Shopify or Magento. Other information can also be manually added by entering the relevant details regarding the type of information.

Google SEO Tools: To increase conversions, and many other things 

Google structured data can be a powerful and efficient way to expand your eCommerce marketing strategies. Google SEO is also called Google Search Console. It refers simply to Google’s ability to read and digest pages from web sites. Google then aggregates information from different sites and arranges it according to relevancy. Google is able to tailor its search results according to the users’ actual searches.

A website’s data can be labeled so that potential customers are able to easily find it when they search for the relevant categories or keywords. Thinking about SEO and using Google’s SEO best practices to your advantage is a great eCommerce business strategy, because it means potential customers will more likely be able to find your business as they explore the internet. Optimize structured data with specific actions, labeling content with relevant keywords and enabling them to be activated.

The markup content method is one of the most important ways you can harness Google SEO for eCommerce. To create markup content, you have to determine what type of content you want to publish on your eCommerce website to increase traffic—whether that be adding a blog component with frequently updated articles, adding dynamic images, or even adding music samples or other creative work. Knowing what kind of content is best for SEO will help you plan how to maximize your online store.

You’ll also have to decide which properties will work best for your store’s efforts to boost your SEO. You can use your markup references to search for the relevant data on each page. Once you’ve set this up, you can test each page with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to see which are working well and which could use some improvement.

After that, you can go to action markup, where you create a markup template for yourself to develop values needed in your website’s HTML. Your site can have other features, such as a subscription option that allows customers to order recurring products. Features like this can help boost SEO by distinguishing your product from the competition, so that when customers search for your product plus the word “subscription,” they’re more likely to be directed to your store than one of your competitors. 

Google Drive can help organize your business

Google Drive is an established suite of collaboration writing and editing tools that Google offers. You can also track content with the document feature, and even use spreadsheets. It is used by many companies to organize content and share it with their coworkers, external partners or for editing. You can even publish the content on blogs or on your website. 

Google Drive contains the Google Sheets spreadsheet creator Google Docs as well as Google Slides (a PowerPoint-like tool) and a Google Forms survey maker.  

Google Docs is one of the most popular tools because it allows content writers to easily create articles, landing pages and emails promos. Writers can also easily change a text’s formatting, track changes, and even add images as you go along. But don’t neglect the other tools in the Google Drive family, as they can prove just as useful for editing and organizing your business from the inside. 

The best thing about the tool is its accessibility anywhere you are connected to the internet. All content in your Google Drive are cloud-based and connected to your email account. You can log in on different devices or in multiple locations depending on what you need. Google Drive has an offline version, which makes it possible to access documents even if you don’t have an internet connection.

Google Alerts to stay on top of the industry

This last tool, though small in stature, is a powerful one. Google Alerts is a handy little tool for discovering what’s happening in your industry around the internet and beyond. You can use it to expand your understanding of the vertical you are in and those who compete with you. In just a few mouse clicks you can set up Google Alert and receive a summary of news coverage on your brand/all other brands that are added to your feed. 

Final thoughts

The eCommerce industry has seen a tremendous growth over the last few years. This has created countless opportunities for new businesses. It can be difficult to identify the right ways to grow sales or boost overall performance for your company in this vast marketplace. It is possible to scale up or even think of scaling. 

You can find a lot of resources online to help you maximize your potential as an eCommerce merchant. It can seem overwhelming to choose just one. A suite of tools from a trusted company such as Google will take the anxiety out of ad spend and analytics. Google, along with Small Biz Sense’s blog, can help you take a bigger role in shaping your company. We have a lot of great tools that are waiting for you to use to realize your business goals.

Find out more about Small Biz Sense for eCommerce. You can find out more about Small Biz Sense here.