Image Credit: Unsplash @Rodion Kutsaev

Shopping campaigns are useful to promote your products and services online by giving shoppers and potential customers detailed information about what you're selling before they even click your ad to access your website. Because your shopping campaign is the first thing users see when browsing and searching for products online, your Google Shopping campaign structure should be built carefully and not be underestimated. Structure plays a significant role in performance and growth, so optimising your campaign structure will allow your Shopping campaigns to flourish.

Now that consumers are shopping everywhere, at any time and from various devices, it is important that as a retailer, you put yourself in the best position to be found and be visible to users, from the moment they start searching for inspiration, up to the final stage of their shopping journey when they hit the 'buy' button. As an online business, you should take advantage of this increased shopping demand across digital devices and create an effective strategy for your Shopping campaigns to build a strong presence and sell more.

Your campaign structure has a significant impact on your product visibility. In other words, your campaign structure will determine whether your products are going to be visible in search results.

Getting your structure in order is critical because your overall revenues will depend on this very starting point. It’s important to get it right and as professionals, we direct people towards a good product feed management tool, which will make your life a lot easier and ensure that all the elements within your product feeds are correctly input. Each element within your product feeds together builds up a well-structured google shopping campaign.

To understand the impact of Google Shopping campaign structure against budget, we analysed 100 accounts for 30 days prior to Black Friday and on the actual day of Black Friday.

As we write in our ‘5 Top Tips to Ace Your Google Shopping Campaigns This Black Friday’ blog post, this sales period represents a huge growth opportunity for e-commerce businesses.

Of the 100 accounts we analysed prior to Black Friday, we discovered the following product visibility funnel. Of all the products added via a Google Shopping Feed, 91% were active and eligible to show in Google Shopping campaigns. However, of all the active products, only 54% received impressions during the 30-day period. Of the products that received impressions, only 11% received clicks and of those that received clicks, only 7% generated conversions. This is a startling drop-off, especially if you consider the fact that of all the products added to the feed, only 0.41% generated conversions.

Black Friday presented us with the perfect opportunity to understand whether increasing budgets would increase product visibility. However, of the 100 accounts we monitored, not all of them increased their budgets on Black Friday. To make this a fair test, we only compared the impact of increasing budget on the accounts that increased budget and discounted the other accounts from the 30 studies.

The average increase in budget for every account that went for an increase on Black Friday was 40%. However, this only resulted in a 6% increase in product impressions, followed by a 1% increase in product clicks and a 1% increase in product conversions. So, despite a large increase in budget, we saw that product visibility did not increase by the same or even by a similar proportion.

There was one common difference amongst the accounts that achieved a higher uplift in more products receiving impressions, clicks and conversions on Black Friday. These accounts created more robust Google Shopping campaigns for Black Friday rather than just increasing budgets within existing campaigns. These new campaigns featured more robust and highly-optimised campaign structures which guaranteed better product visibility, which as a result, brought more impressions, conversions and sales.

Campaign structure best practices

1. Define you shopping campaign objectives
2. Select your campaign subtype. You can choose between a Standard Shopping campaign subtype or Smart Shopping campaign subtype
3. Choose the right bid strategy for your Standard Shopping campaign
4. Build a robust Standard Shopping campaign structure
5. Based on audience, differentiate your bids for Standard Shopping campaign
6. Monitor and optimise your shopping campaign structure to measure its success

So, how do you optimise your google shopping campaign structure?

The Shoptimised team has put together 10 ways in which you can structure your Google Shopping campaigns. You can use a combination of a few of these but most importantly, make sure you utilise campaign priorities effectively. We recommend always having one All Product campaigns with low bids, running on a low campaign priority.

We also recommend splitting out your Product IDs within each Ad Group so that you can apply granular level bids or exclusions.

1. Google Product Category. To help reduce the irrelevant search terms your shopping ads might appear for, you should always aim to select the most granular and relevant product category that best suits your products and be as specific as possible to increase your Click-through Rate.
2. Product Type. As we know, Product types are key to create your preferred campaign structure and Google matches approximately 5% of search terms to the information within your product types, so make this a priority without overstuffing with promotional messages.
3. Brand. Include a brand name where possible to enhance the chances of gaining more relevant search terms within the Product Description.
4. Price. Creating price band custom labels helps you to create an intelligent bid strategy
5. Margin. Know your margin bands for each product and keep these monitored. 
6. Best Selling. It is beneficial to know your best-selling products to emphasize them within your google shopping campaign structure. -
7. Gender. Utilise Custom Labels  
8. Size. Utilise Custom Labels
9. New Products. Utilise Custom Labels
10. Stock. Utilise Custom Labels & Custom Development

Contact us today and receive a free automated product feed audit or schedule a free demo with one of our Google Shopping experts.