Shopping campaigns are a powerful ad type provided by Google Ads, allowing users to see product images and prices directly from the Search Engine Results Page.
Driving Value by Splitting Your Shopping Campaigns
However, despite the strength of shopping campaigns it’s not uncommon to see accounts with just one shopping campaign running all products, limiting both performance visibility and optimisation efficiency. By splitting your shopping campaigns by brand and generic a much greater level of control is acquired, allowing optimisations to be made specific to either brand or generic searches, alongside providing better visibility about the performance of each.
As shopping campaigns use product feeds rather than keywords for targeting, splitting your shopping campaigns by brand and generic requires the use of negative keywords to direct the flow of traffic. By implementing negative keywords in the correct locations traffic can be maneuvered as desired: placing all brand terms into one campaign, and all generics in another. Moreover, shopping campaigns can also be structured in a way that minimises generic traffic, if you only want to be appearing for branded searches.
How to Split Your Campaigns
Firstly, your main shopping campaign needs to be setup: link your Google Ads account to the Merchant centre account that houses your shopping feed, create your shopping campaign and add all of the products that you wish to appear for. Once the campaign is created make a copy so you have two of the same campaigns, naming one generic and one brand.
In the campaign settings the campaign priorities can be adjusted, telling Google which campaign to trigger if a search term matches multiple campaigns. By setting the campaign priority for the generic campaign higher than that of the brand campaign, and adding your brand terms as negative keywords to the generic campaign, all searches not including brand terms will trigger the generic campaign as this has higher priority, and the brand traffic will be pushed into the lower priority brand campaign due to the negative keywords.
This setup ensures that the generic shopping campaign will only receive non-brand traffic and the brand campaign will only receive branded traffic, as the generic campaign has priority whilst blocking all brand traffic. One setup we typically use at MightyHive is to place the generic campaign’s priority at max and the brand campaign’s at medium, allowing us to create a catch all shopping campaign with a low priority to capture any new products as soon as they are added to the feed.
Furthermore, the same structure can also be used to largely block non-brand terms if desired, allowing accounts to show shopping ads only for brand searches. By using the same structure and having bids of $0.01 for all products in the generic campaign, all generic search terms will still trigger the generic campaign, however as the bid is so low the ads will very rarely (if ever) appear. On the off chance that your shoppings ads do show for generic searches with this setup, you’ll be getting visibility and clicks which only cost $0.01! Just remember to switch enhanced CPC off so your bids aren’t automatically bumped up.
Measuring Results with Better Performance Data
Structuring your shopping campaigns this way allows for far greater visibility into the performance differences between brand and generic searches across shopping, whilst also making optimisations far more effective. Just remember to ensure that the generic campaign doesn’t run out of budget, otherwise all of the generic traffic will begin triggering ads from your brand campaign. Using a shared budget for your shopping campaigns is a great way to mitigate this issue, as once the budget is used both campaigns will stop running simultaneously.
Want to see how MightyHive can boost your shopping performance? Get in touch with one of our Biddable specialists today!