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There are 4 pillars to a successful Google Shopping campaign that will completely change the way you work on your ads in the future. You will need all 4 in order to really enhance your full potential.

Recently, many companies have re-discovered their true potential with google shopping campaigns. While many are now benefitting from maximised conversions and sales by prioritising ad formats, content optimisation and pricing strategies, others are still to discover the real success of google shopping campaigns.

Our product feed management tool is a great starting point, to get your product feeds structured and to have far better chances of successful google shopping campaigns. So, without further ado, let’s dive into the 4 tips that will help you get your google shopping campaigns right.

 Tip 1 – Campaign Structure and Settings

A poor campaign structure can seriously hinder your growth and profitability. This is a common mistake we see every day.  

We all know the All Products, Low Bids campaigns will provide a great ROAS. But, it’s difficult to scale when you have all your products sharing one bid. There is no one perfect structure to suit all advertisers but there are principles that should work for everybody.

Most advertisers and agencies choose to build campaigns based on one or a combination of the following:

• Google Product Category
• Product Type
• Brand
• Product ID

This was originally done because most Google Shopping advertisers or PPC Agencies had little to no control over the feed.

So, you could end up with Ad Group focused on a Google Product Category such as Clothing & Accessories > Clothing > Trousers & Jeans with a bid set of £0.45. However, this category could contain 100 pairs of jeans where the price ranges from £65 to £295 per pair. How would one bid of £0.45 maximise the potential ROAS within this Ad Group?

We believe you should base bids and structure on price and margin. There is no point bidding on a category of Jeans with one bid when the prices could range from £10 to £500.

Get granular. Over time Google will prioritise the products which get the most clicks and have the most history. If your structure is thin, then the percentage of products that actually get clicks and sales will most likely be under 10%. This is also a big problem for any new products which come into your feed.

We’ve put together another post here, explaining how your campaign structure impacts your product visibility. We recommend that you split these into separate categories initially to avoid the frustration of seeing new products struggle to sell.  

Tip 2 – Bidding

You can’t have an intelligent bid strategy without a good campaign structure. As mentioned above, you need to ensure your bid strategy will maximise the return on your investment. Make sure you take the margin of your product into account when setting bids.

Depending on your desired goals, test the different Automated Bidding Strategies such as Target ROAS, Maximise Clicks or Enhanced CPC. We’ve tested that each of them works incredibly well and Google’s level of automation capabilities is improving every day.

Tip 3 – Negative Keywords

There are various optimisations you can create to improve your Google Shopping Campaigns. Optimising content for your product titles, descriptions, product types are all essential to ensure searchability. But the one constant you can never stop is negative keywords. Depending on how much you spend, this could be a daily, weekly or monthly exercise.

You shouldn’t be surprised to find that anywhere between 80 to 90% of what you spend on a Google Shopping campaign is spent on search terms that DO NOT CONVERT. Even at that level, you can still generate a good ROAS. But imagine how much better it could be!

You also need to consider that 15% of searches on Google are brand new every day! That’s over 5 hundred million brand new searches per day and around 6,000 brand new searches per second. If you’re not adding negative keywords, you’re not working towards reducing your wasted budget.

Extra tip: Create a Negative Keyword List which you apply to all Google Shopping campaigns. Add your common negative keywords to list instead of each campaign.

Tip 4 – Product Feed Optimisation

A hugely important element of managing a profitable Google Shopping campaign is Product Feed Optimisation. Worryingly, it’s probably the most overlooked pillar due to this sitting outside of AdWords and the Google Merchant Center.

Effective Product Feed Optimisation can increase impressions, clicks and sales while reducing your wasted budget. In other words, it can cut costs and increase your ROAS.

Ensuring your Product Feed meets Google best practise requirements isn’t just a ‘nice to have’, it’s a must-have. Optimising your product titles to ensure they contain key information and relevant search terms. It’s fair to say that many retailers and agencies have made their life easier by doing this through the Shoptimised product feed software.

We highly recommend adding custom labels so you can target new products easier within your structure or to better manage prices and margins.

If you’re not optimising your product feeds or your client’s product feeds, you’re not fully managing every element of Google Shopping and you will never fully achieve the returns you’re capable of. If you never thought of these tips as essential for your google shopping campaigns, then today is the day. Sign up for for a 14-day free trial of Shoptimised. Get in touch and give it a whirl – you’ll wonder how you ever worked without it.