Should I use search with my e-commerce business?

Shopping campaigns are way more effective than Search campaigns when you’re targeting a wide audience. This is because search campaigns require search terms to run whereas shopping campaigns use Google’s 70 million signals to determine whether to show the product to someone. The former is inbound and the latter is outbound.

However, always build both Search and Shopping campaigns for your eComm companies, because:

• Shopping Ads and Text Ads (from Search) have different formats and they do appear in different placements/properties throughout Google network

• Being different, there are instances when both shopping and text ads can appear at the same time. This increased exposure is beneficial.

• In most cases, shopping ads do perform better but this is no guarantee so you also need to, at least, test search ads.

• There are accounts where the reach for the shopping ads is not sufficient to spend the monthly budget. Thus, you need to supplement shopping with search.

• Aside the above reasons, presenting a setup with search and shopping ads (and explaining the differences and the performance projections for each ad format) is better than the alternative (not having Search ads and wondering "why not").