Google Shopping Best Practices

Let’s talk about Google Shopping and I want to share with you my 3 best practices for campaign set-up & optimisations. 

Now I want to stress that I am talking about Standard Shopping campaigns and NOT Smart Shopping Campaigns and this is because that from July your Smart Shopping campaigns will be automatically be updated to Performance Max Campaigns. 

Before we get into my 3 best practices for Google Shopping campaign set-up & optimisations, I want to make it very clear that it is my firm belief that:

1. It is very likely that not all of your products will be suitable for Google Shopping campaigns. 

So don’t feel like you have to target your full product catalogue with Google Shopping. 

And this especially true if:

•  Your product is not the cheapest & you don’t have a well established brand. In this case you might find better success with Google Search campaigns where you have the extra headlines & descriptions to be able to point out your core differences like better product quality, better reviews or extra product features. 
•  Or You have large resellers who are currently offering a product discount and cheaper price

The main thing you need to remember is how your ads appear in the Google Shopping feed where price is a main driver especially if someone else is selling the same or very similar product for a cheaper price. And in these cases even a price difference as little as 1 or 2% can change the profitability of your campaign.

2. Make sure you only have each individual product being promoted in 1 campaign that is using your Shopping feed. 

With the introduction of Performance Max campaigns, I am seeing a common mistake of people marketing the same product in their shopping campaign and Performance Max campaign.

This means that you are uses 2 difference shopping campaigns to promote the same product. 

So if you complete optimisations in one of these campaigns it does not change anything as the other campaign will continue to override any optimisation you just made.

My whole point being that it is very common that you will have some products that perform very well with Shopping campaigns and others that just continually perform very poorly which brings your total account performance down.

So never think that Google Shopping is a 1 in all 1 scenario. Test all your products with Google Shopping and then just focus your spending on the products that are performing well and generating the sales your business needs. 

Tip #1: Use the correct campaign structure & Break your products into product groups

This has 2 core advantages of

•  Allowing you to quickly find under performing products filter by cost and then pause under performing products or whole product groups
•  Increase and decrease budgets depending on factors such as conversion metrics & seasonality. With this one remember that budgets are set at a campaign level, so if you set your core product categories into difference campaigns you can then have better control over your budgets. For example if you have outdoor focussed products these may sell a lot better in Summer (hotter months) and not sell as well in the cooler winter months. So by having this proper campaign structure you can increase and decrease the budgets depending on the season.

If you have all of your products in 1 campaign this becomes a lot harder to complete.

Tip #2: Review Search Terms 

One of the core reasons for why I like Standard Shopping campaigns is that you can actually see the actual search terms that have triggered your ads and then add in extra negative KWs.

This is an option which is not available for Smart Shopping or Performance Max campaigns. 

And then if you do see that individual products continue to generate unrelated search terms you can review those products and then update their product titles. 

Tip #3: Don’t forget to optimise by Locations, Devices, Audiences & Demographics

With standard shopping campaigns you also have the ability to review your the data by locations, devices & audiences.

And the once you have reviewed this data you can then add in extra bid optimisations or add exclusions so that you are focussing your ad spend not only on the best performing products.

But you are then focusing on the best performing products, in the best performing locations who are who using the best performing devices and are in the best performing demographics or audiences.