With all the new features for Shopping product feeds, extensions, and labels, it’s easy to overlook the basics of what makes Shopping campaigns successful for ecommerce accounts. The oversights listed below are common with new accounts at Hanapin Marketing. Avoid these to develop a sophisticated Shopping campaign structure and increase overall performance.
Only Running One Shopping Campaign
Shopping campaigns can be intimidating at first depending on how many products you are advertising and how your product feed is set up. One of the most common mistakes advertisers make is lumping all of their products into one campaign. Yes, this is the fastest way to get product ads to show, but if you have specific ROAS goals you should invest time in planning out a more in-depth strategy for Shopping structure. There isn’t one best way to break out Shopping campaigns. Below are some examples of how Shopping campaigns can be constructed.
Product Group
Splitting out Shopping campaigns by product group allows you to segment by various product features, including types, brands, condition, and more. By having separate campaigns, you can easily point out which product groups are seeing performance shifts without digging through specific product information.
Promotion/Sale Products
If you have regular sales on specific products, break them out into their own campaign. This allows you to increase bids for these items and again, easily identify performance shifts.
Profit Margin
Consider creating separate campaigns if you advertise for products with a higher profit margin compared to the rest of the products in your feed. Since transactions from this group will bring in higher revenue, you’ll want to bid higher to beat out the competition and maximize Impression Share.
Top Sellers
Running a Top Sellers Shopping campaign allows advertisers to not only get quick insights on high priority products that typically perform well, but also serves as a way to increase spend for these items. Since transactions and conversion rates are high for this group of items, make sure your bids are high enough to show ads throughout the day at a competitive position.
Not Using Priority Settings
When running multiple Shopping campaigns with overlapping products, it’s important to use priority settings to control which bid is of highest importance. For example, say The North Face is running a Shopping campaign containing all of their products with ad groups segmented by product type. In the Women’s Backpack ad group, there is a product group for one of their top sellers, the Wavelength Pack. The bid for this product group containing one product is $0.50.
The North Face advertisers are also running a Top Sellers Shopping campaign to make sure they are competitively bidding for their most popular products. One of the ad groups in this campaign is Women’s Backpack (similar to their All Products campaign). The Wavelength Pack is one of the products in this group and is set at a bid of $1.00. If these campaigns are both set to a Medium priority, the Wavelength Pack should show ads through the Top Sellers campaign first since the bid is double what is in the All Products campaign. This is not always the case, however, with Google’s algorithm. To ensure products show through the Top Sellers campaign first and that the Top Sellers campaign budget is being depleted first, The North Face advertisers would need to use a High priority setting for Top Sellers and a Medium or Low priority setting for All Products. Then if the Top Sellers daily budget is depleted at 6 pm each day, the same products will show in search results from the All Products campaign.
To set up priorities, go to Shopping settings (advanced) in your Shopping campaigns. Google will serve ads through the highest priority campaign first if products overlap in your account.
Failing To Exclude “Everything Else”
When creating specific Shopping campaigns for a certain product category, one of the worst oversights is leaving the “Everything Else” product group included. Using The North Face example, the Wavelength Pack was the only product being targeted in a specific product group. Even with that specific product chosen as a target, AdWords also automatically targets the rest of your products.
Be sure to exclude to exclude everything else by going in to change the Max CPC bid as you can see below. If the rest of your products are not excluded, performance will likely be poor since this creates an accidental All Products Shopping campaign.
While taking advantage of the new opportunities in Shopping campaigns is important to stay ahead of the competition, the details won’t impact your overall account performance at the same level as your overall Shopping campaign structure. Make sure you aren’t making any of these common mistakes and then find fun ways to take your Shopping campaigns to the next level.
