When initially setting your Google Shopping campaign strategy, it can feel like you're fairly limited with what you are able to target with the Shopping platform, in comparison to the Google Search & Youtube network. 

Now that’s not to say you can’t expand your targeting, maximise your reach, and get granular with your bidding, it just takes a bit of “out the box” thinking to reap the rewards of the network. 

Today we are going to talk about what we do on the Google Shopping network to maximize our client results by setting up highly targeted campaigns, with efficient bidding, and a bonus tip that will help you generate new search terms & increase your product reach!

Let’s begin…

Depending on the size of your product library we can tackle the campaign set up in different ways, but at a base level, the best practice goes as follows:

• We like to break our campaigns into 3 separate tiers - the first campaign (high priority) is our brand & the SKEW (product number) campaign. This campaign contains all products with negatives on everything other than the brand name, branded product name, or item id / SKEW number. Here we can afford to spend a much higher average CPC based on the search terms within this campaign being the most relevant to the business. 
• Our second campaign (medium priority) contains our top-performing generic product terms/products, excluding brand terms, and SKEW numbers. If we are selling home office goods for instance, here we have our top-performing office appliance terms with our full product library (or just top-performing products if already discovered). Depending on if you have data available or not is when we have the top-performing terms included within this campaign. Though if you are still awaiting data to be collected, then we want to exclude all branded terms, and negative out all terms that aren’t converting right away. Note - This campaign can be created after we have discovered top-performing search terms from our base level (lowest priority) campaign.
• Lastly, we have our third campaign (lowest priority), which contains all products filtering out our brand terms, SKEW numbers, and top-performing search terms (if we have data available). This will be the campaign that picks up all the new terms outside of your branded and top performers. Once we discover a term within this campaign that has converted more than once, then we add it to our Lower priority & Higher priority negative lists to filter it through to our Medium priority campaign

Depending on the priority of the campaign is also how we set up our bidding. For the highest priority campaign, we can afford to spend the greatest amount on our average CPC, based on our base conversion rate being higher for the exact branded or product SKEW number search terms. 

For our Medium priority campaign, we can deduct 20% - 30% from our max CPC (taken from the Highest Priority campaign). Here we have terms that have already been converting and or just including our top-performing products, meaning again the conversion rate will be higher, allowing us to spend more on our average CPC. 

The lowest priority campaign is where we set our lowest bids (normally between £0.15 - £0.20 depending on demand within the specified market). This is where we generate new terms that haven’t previously converted, and or are not related to the brand or product skew numbers. We don’t want to waste our budget here, so by setting a low average CPC, we can generate new terms we might not have acquired otherwise.

And that's it really, we could get more granular but in a simple format that's how we would set up a Three-Tier Google Shopping campaign.

We didn’t forget, don't worry, you're waiting for that bonus tip, right?

Something we didn’t like about Shopping was how we weren't able to generate new search terms quickly without changing our Shopify product titles, and sometimes we don’t want those specific keywords on our site. That's when we found an app made by Simprosys on Shopify called Feed for Google Shopping….

This app allows for so much customization, but the main tool we utilize is the product title & description adjustment tool. This allows you to export your product titles & descriptions via CSV giving you the option to introduce new keywords into your titles & descriptions without adjusting your Shopify product listings. Think of it as the middleman between your Merchant centre and the Google ads platform. Adjusting your feed without passing the information back to Shopify!

Let us know what you think & how the Three-Tier System works for you, test out the Feed For Google Shopping and start generating new terms 10x faster!

Love from Team SV