How To Create A Successful Google Shopping Campaign: Part 2 - Google Ads

So now that you’ve created your Product Feed and got it in great shape (see part one of this blog series if you missed it), we’re ready to use it within Google Ads to market your products. In part two of our blog series, we’ll look at:

• Campaign Types That Use Google Shopping Feeds
• Google Shopping Campaign Structure
• Catch-All Shopping Campaigns
• Measuring Shopping Campaign Performance

…as well as a bonus section on using your Google Merchant Centre data within the Microsoft Ads platform.

Campaign Types That Use Google Shopping Feeds

Google Shopping Campaign

The default shopping campaign will form the basis of our guide as it's the most common campaign type available. These campaigns use your Google Merchant Centre shopping feeds as target criteria, working to match users’ search queries with your product information in the feed to serve relevant product ads to the right users on the Google search results page. You can find out more on Google’s Help Centre for Shopping Ads.

Google Dynamic Display Remarketing Campaign

By adding your Google Product Feed to a Google Display Campaign, you can turn it into a Dynamic Display Remarketing campaign. 

When targeting audiences who have already visited your website and viewed product pages, the Responsive Display Ads will show products within their banner ads that the site visitor has previously viewed, encouraging them to return and complete their sale. 

This is a great way to close the loop in your online customer journeys using an ad format that tailors the products to the specific user session and I would always recommend trying a trial of the campaign to see if it works for your ecommerce business.

Google Smart Shopping Campaign

A combination of standard Shopping campaigns and Display Remarketing campaigns, Google’s machine learning uses your bidding strategy, your campaign budget and its algorithms to automate ad placement and work to generate performance that meets your set targets. 

Smart Shopping campaigns typically perform best with good amounts of volume and conversion data to work from, as well as an automated bid strategy such as Target ROAS bidding. If your account has this, and you’re not fussed as to whether the sales come from new customers or existing customers, then Smart Shopping could be a great campaign type for you.

There are some limitations to this campaign structure, though. For example, you can’t set any device bid modifiers, ad schedules or negative keywords which means you’re at the mercy of Google’s AI for when and where the ads show - as well as potentially appearing on your own brand searches which can be an issue for some retailers.

You can read more about Smart Shopping campaigns in the Google Help Centre to decide if it’s the right campaign type for you.

Google Video Campaign

Google’s YouTube video campaigns can now use Google Merchant Centre feeds to supplement video ads. When video ads run, products from the Merchant Feed can show with the video to encourage clicks to the ecommerce website from YouTube. A couple of ways to use this approach could be as follows:

Remarketing - As with Dynamic Display Remarketing campaigns, you could target audiences of previous website visitors with branded video ads, supported by product placements of products they have already viewed on the website. This can encourage them to return to the site and complete the sale.

Themed Videos - You could choose which product ranges to show based on the content of your videos in a given campaign. In the case of the example company Tees4All, if the campaign videos are all themed around workouts and active exercises, we could set inventory filters to the Activewear product type. This would mean that when the video ad is viewed, the products that show with the ad will be relevant to the content of the video - such as running leggings, base layers and more.

Now that we know how the product feeds can be used, let’s talk about campaign structure.

Google Shopping Campaign Structure

Shopping Ads are effectively product listings using data from your product feeds, so no ads need to be created. This, alongside the lack of keyword targeting, means it can be all too easy to just lump all products in together with a single bid rather than taking the time to organise it all.

There are many ways you can organise your products within campaigns, ad groups and product groups, which is made easier by the fact that we did all the legwork in part one of this guide to give ourselves plenty of options.

Structuring Google Shopping Campaigns By Type

Going back to our example company from part one of the guide, we discussed Tees4All’s website sections and product type structure:

Creating Useful Product Types

Imagine the Google Product Category, but with complete flexibility in how the products are categorised - that’s how Product Types work. For example, Tees4All has the following sections on its website:

• Everyday Wear
• Loungewear
• Activewear
• Collaborations

Product Types can be organised in the same sections, with the ability to add subtypes for further specificity. Examples for Tees4All could include:

• Activewear > Running T-Shirts
• Activewear > Running Hoodies
• Activewear > Base Layers
• Collaborations > BBC Earth > T-Shirts
• Collaborations > BBC Earth > Vests
• Everyday Wear > T-Shirts > Long-Sleeve

By breaking it down to this level of detail, you will be able to organise the products by product group in Google Ads - enabling you to see their performance at a glance and set specific bids for the groups as well.

Using the structure we created in the product feed, we can organise products to give clearer targets for each section.

Inventory Filters can be set at campaign level to help you break it down at the top level. For example, when creating a campaign for Activewear you could set a filter that product type must be “Activewear”, and all products within that campaign will be Activewear only. 

In this example, Tees4All’s Activewear campaign could have separate ad groups for Running T-Shirts, Running Hoodies and Base Layers to allow them to set different bids and ROAS targets per product range.

You can also set the filter to target all products and target/filter these yourself at Product Group level if you wanted to. This is useful if you’re containing your entire product range in one campaign and using ad groups/product groups to split the bidding and targeting - especially useful for small retailers to begin with.

Structuring Google Shopping Campaigns By Price

Not all products are priced the same, so it’s unlikely that all products will want or need the same bid. You’ll likely be tailoring your bids in line with your product prices, so it makes sense to organise them in that way.

Imagine Tees4All has a Timeless section that covers its range of Tencel, Merino Wool and Bamboo clothing, with each tee costing £50 rather than the £20 tees within its Originals range. The ROAS target is 20% for the advertising.

If we have a higher sale price then we have more room to play with in terms of bids to hit our return on ad spend target, but at the same time, the higher price point may reduce conversion rates as it’s more of a considered purchase for customers. These factors will mean that the approach will need to differ compared to the £20 originals range, which may convert better due to the price point but may have a stricter bidding target to meet the return on ad spend requirements.

At 20% ROAS, you may be able to bid more aggressively for the premium products to get it in front of the right customers for the Timeless range, as this would be a cost per conversion of £10 (£50/5) to meet the target, whilst the Originals collection would need a cost per conversion of £4 (£20/5) to meet the target.

By organising products in this way, where price is a separator, it allows you to better tailor bidding and budgets to your campaigns in a way that can meet your goals.

Structuring Google Shopping Campaigns By Season

Another consideration if you are a seasonal retailer is to organise products by time of year, allowing for quick pausing and activating of campaigns based on the season. For example, Tees4All may want to push their activewear in the New Year after the New Year’s Resolutions, as well as in the summer months, but they might not want to push it as much in autumn.

This setup can be done in a variety of ways including:

• Setting seasonality values as custom labels - e.g. Custom Label 1 could be Summer, Winter, Autumn, Spring to help you decide when to push products
• Setting up campaigns by product types that correspond to seasonal weather - having shorts in a campaign for the summer months and long-sleeved running leggings in a campaign for the winter months

Another aspect of seasonality can include the sale season, such as Black Friday and Christmas. Using custom labels to tag up products for your Black Friday sales or Christmas Sales will allow you to filter these products into their own ad groups or campaigns, giving you the option to set specific bids and budgets for them to ensure a focused push during peak retail seasons.

Catch-All Shopping Campaigns

Remember how I said not to lump all products together in a single group? Now I’m going to backtrack slightly, because catch-all campaigns can be a useful addition to your shopping campaign strategy. 

By setting a campaign, or ad group, that targets all products and giving it a cost per click bid lower than your other shopping campaigns, you’ll have a low-risk sweeper campaign that can pick up cheap traffic and sales from areas that you aren’t targeting aggressively in your main campaigns. It also works as an opportunity to see which of your products are attractive to customers and are selling in Shopping results and could lead to you building out dedicated ad groups or campaigns for those products in future.

Importing Google Ads Shopping Campaigns Into Microsoft Bing Ads

We’ve talked a lot about Google in this guide, but I don’t want to dismiss the Microsoft Bing Ads platform and the potential opportunities that are available for your ecommerce business. 

To begin with, you'll be pleased to know that all the work you’ve done so far doesn’t need to be repeated to get your campaigns on Microsoft Ads. Now that your product feeds and Google Shopping campaigns are set up, you are able to import them seamlessly into Microsoft Ads to target users on Microsoft Bing search engines, allowing you to reach a wider audience on a new search engine effortlessly. 

Once your merchant store is set up on Microsoft Bing Ads - you can learn how to do this using Microsoft’s guide - you can import your feed directly from Google Merchant Centre by connecting the account to a Google account with access to Google Merchant Centre. You can schedule the feeds to pull automatically from Google into Microsoft Ads too, whether it’s monthly, weekly or daily, which is a great way to ensure your product inventory and stock availability is up to date across both platforms.

You can also import your campaigns from Google Ads to Microsoft Ads, linking them up to your new Microsoft merchant store in the process, allowing you to move over your campaigns and structures into Microsoft Ads without the need to recreate the campaigns from scratch - it’s a real time-saver.

For more information on how to use Microsoft Bing Ads and whether it’s a viable platform for your ecommerce business, you can check out our two supplementary articles:

• How To Improve Your PPC Campaign Targeting Part 2 - Ecommerce
• Is Microsoft Bing Ads Worth It?

Measuring Shopping Campaign Performance

Now that your Google shopping campaigns are up and running, and volume is coming in, it’s crucial to stay on top of search terms in the early days to snuff out any irrelevant search terms before they waste your budget, using negative keywords to do so. In the case of Tees4All, we may see a few search terms for “active workouts”, “t shirt fitting guide” and “where does merino wool come from” which we can remove immediately, allowing the budget to focus on more relevant search terms.

You can also look at metrics such as click share %, impression share and benchmark CPC to see how you’re settling into your target market and whether there is room to grow your volume further.

Another metric to look at would be device performance, especially mobile. If your site’s mobile experience is poor then you may suffer poor conversion rates here, so consider your device platform performance vs your budget to work out the best way to meet your ROAS targets.

After a few weeks, you will have a better understanding of baseline performance, and from there you can make adjustments to the campaigns, budgets and bids to maximise your returns.

We’ve worked on a lot together across these articles, so let’s recap the actions since the start of this two-part guide.

In part one, you worked on your Google Product Feed:

• Your product names are in good shape and will appear for the right search terms
• Your product types are set up to enable sensible and simple product group categorisation within your Google Shopping campaigns
• Your custom labels are set up to give you further filters for your products

In part two, you used your Google Product Feed in your Google Ads Account:

• You're aware of which Google Ads campaigns can use your product feeds and how they use them
• You understand how you can organise, split and build Google Shopping campaigns to fit your business
• You know what a catch-all campaign is and how it could be used to supplement your main Google Shopping campaigns
• You know that Microsoft Ads can also be used for Shopping campaigns and the seamless import process from Google Ads and Google Merchant Centre to action this

Hopefully, this guide has helped you understand how to create a successful Google Shopping campaign. If you have any questions or need any help with this, don’t hesitate to contact us online or call us on 01536 316100 to find out how we can help your ecommerce business grow.