As a brand, your online retail strategy needs to be as comprehensive as possible. Selling your products across the right channels is important — if you don’t cast out a wide enough net, you’re missing out on many potential customers. That’s why utilising a massive ecommerce platform like Google Shopping properly is vital.

With Google Shopping, it’s less about how much you pay and more about how detailed and comprehensive your product listing data is. The more relevant information you have that matches your product’s data on your brand’s retail website, the more Google will view your product as a trusted and reliable product.

Once you ensure you have added all of the relevant information to your product listings, it’s also important to take advantage of Google Shopping’s filtered search feature. In this article, we’ll go through exactly what Google Shopping’s filtered search feature is, the benefits of it and how to set it up.

Google Shopping filtered search is a tool that makes it easier for shoppers to search for the products that are relevant to them. Since there are so many products listed online from so many different sellers, looking through them can be time-consuming and tedious.

Filtered search has become a very popular means by which shoppers can limit their search results and find only the things that they want. As you can imagine, leveraging this can be extremely useful.

Why is Google Shopping filtered search important?

If shoppers are using Google Shopping filtered search, it usually means that the kinds of shoppers who use filtered search are intent-rich and know exactly what they’re looking for. These are exactly the kinds of shoppers you’re trying to target. The kind who don’t require an investment of time and effort on your part to get them to convert.  You don’t need to worry about moving them through your funnel because there barely even is a funnel.

The only battle for you as a product listing manager is getting your products in front of them before they get the chance to click on your competitor’s products.

When your products are search-optimised in line with Google Shopping filtered search, there’s much more chance of attracting the kind of high-intent, low-funnel traffic your brand wants that converts in profitable volumes.

A familiarity with Google Shopping filtered search can work wonders for conversion rates and help you to leverage one of the biggest channels in the digital realm. But how do you set up Google Shopping filtered search? Don’t worry, we’re about to explain all.

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Category

To appear in filtered search, it’s imperative to learn all of the search categories shoppers use and how they correspond to different search terms. It’s also essential to make sure that those descriptions correspond with the categories that you use on your own website.

Some categories are simple and easy to align with your website’s own listings such as price and brand. However, there are other more intricate categories which can make submitting detailed product listings complicated and time-consuming.

These may include item colour, size, style, cut, material, length and silhouette to name but a few. As if this didn’t muddy the waters enough, different filters are applied to different products. What’s more, results may vary depending on region.

Learn how forward-thinking retailers optimise their product listings to win more sales on Google Shopping. Click here to access the complete guide to Google Shopping.

Region

Then, of course, there are regional discrepancies of dialect to factor in. For example, while UK customers may type in “trousers” when searching for legwear, some may instead use the US alternative “pants”. Think it won’t make a difference? Think again! The search term ‘trousers’ provides 9 colour categories: black, white, grey, brown, red, orange, green, blue and pink. The American term ‘pants’, on the other hand,  introduces beige into the mix for a total of 10.

A channel-agnostic approach to ecommerce can yield great success, but it’s also important to consider the idiosyncrasies of each platform. And Google can be particularly fussy about exact-match data and ensuring that listings are in sync can make all the difference to their visibility. Even when you think you’ve nailed it, Google can still occasionally update these options, reducing your products’ visibility once again.  Filters may even change in line with shoppers’ previous search history.

Making your listings visible on Google Shopping filtered search is undoubtedly important, but it’s seldom quick or easy when you’re going it alone. Retailers struggle with effectively enriching their product data to ensure that it’s not only channel-ready but, most importantly, visible. Due to the extensive range of category filters available, for an ecommerce team to do this manually, it would be a hugely time-consuming task. AI-enabled ecommerce platforms can effectively map product specifics from a retailer’s ecommerce site to the correct Google Shopping categories.

In fact, these software solutions reduce time spent on product listing by over 90%. Think about what you could do with all that saved time!

You can’t afford to not utilise the filtered search feature!

If you choose to ignore the filtered search feature on Google Shopping, you may be missing out on a significant portion of consumers who may have the desire to purchase your products. However, if you neglect the filtered search tool, you’re simply not getting the most out of one of the world’s biggest and most trusted platforms.

Organising the myriad filtered search categories for different items can be intricate and time-consuming work, but remember that you don’t have to do it all yourself. Ecommerce platforms can help streamline the process of setting up filtered search on product listings and ensure that product data is up to date and matches what is on your brand’s retail website.

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