How to structure Google Shopping campaigns
Updated on March 6, 2024 | 3 minute read | Olivia MacCunn
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Google Shopping is undeniably a valuable platform for ecommerce, but optimising your Shopping campaigns can be extremely complex and time-intensive. You can also read our guide to Shopping campaigns and their purpose.
Unfortunately, there is no catch-all approach to structuring your Google Shopping campaigns. Here, we’ll explore a few different ways to structure your account, starting with tips for those taking their first steps into Google Shopping, advancing into advice for more experienced merchants looking to elevate their approach.
First of all, if you have a large inventory (in the thousands), you will see greater optimisation and analysis by breaking it down into main categories. The following factors might help you break down your campaigns.
Let’s say you sell camping equipment and accessories: it’s more likely you see an uptick in sales of cheap tents, folding chairs and other festival favourites over the summer months. Autumn and winter probably see much more traffic through product listing ads for high-tog sleeping bags, mid-layers and coats.
By splitting the products into different campaigns you can keep on top of your bid management during the peak seasons of your SKUs, and be able to monitor year-on-year performance and distinguish important trends.
Read how Bidnamic outperforms Google Smart Shopping
There are a couple of reasons to set out different campaigns if you sell higher ticket items as well as cheaper products, and segmenting by their pricing.
Cheaper products are often purchased as ‘impulse buys – your consumers are unlikely to put in much research or consideration into items of low cost. However, they’re far more likely to visit your site (amongst others) several times before they choose to purchase high-value products, such as furniture.
Segregating your campaigns provides you with more relevant data, as well as the ability to set more suitable budgets to avoid wasting ad spend on shoppers who aren’t ready to purchase.
If you’re still growing your catalogue, it might be worth creating new campaigns for new SKUs, keeping your existing campaigns separate. For the first few months, you’ll want to track bidding of your new campaigns without risking your optimised bidding for other products.
If you’re using automation, be mindful that a large influx of new products may reduce the overall ROAS for the campaign, causing the automation to decrease bids for the other more profitable products in the campaign.
If you’re managing a catalogue with a wide range of margins, it makes sense to divide your products into campaigns based on the necessary ROAS target.
You might find filtering by condition type helpful if you sell both new and refurbished products, such as smartphones. Inventory filters help to prevent your new items from being advertised when your consumer is looking for a refurbished model. This way, you’re only directing the most relevant traffic, helping to reduce your wasted ad spend.
You can use campaign priorities to highlight the products you wish to sell more of. In Google Ads, this feature provides a way of selecting a bid price when you’re selling through multiple campaigns. The campaign priorities can be split into high, medium, and low. Although new Shopping campaigns are defaulted to “low priority”, they can later be modified to “medium” or “high”.
The priority levels override the bid at auction time, so a high priority campaign with a lower bid will be used before a medium priority campaign with a higher bid. However, campaigns assigned the same priority revert back to the bidding system. Make sure to keep an eye on the budget for your campaigns: if your high priority campaign runs out of budget, then the bid from the medium priority campaign will be used.
Creating multiple ad groups in your campaigns will prevent Google from directing traffic to the wrong items., and negative keywords are not to be forgotten when building your bid strategy. If your potential customers are searching for Stan Smith trainers, it’s important to serve Shopping ads for that style and not promote your ad for Superstar trainers. You would need to add ‘Superstar’ as a negative keyword in your Stan Smith ad group, and vice versa.
