Google Ads Shopping campaigns are powerful for promoting your ecommerce products and driving direct sales. With visually engaging ad formats that showcase the products’ image, price, and other relevant information, Shopping campaigns can help businesses attract potential customers and boost conversion rates.
To maximise the Return on Investment (ROI) and unlock the full potential of these campaign types, it is essential to monitor and optimise their performance. I have won clients over the years that have had their accounts run by agencies who have just setup the campaigns and left them to run. This is not getting the most out of your Shopping campaigns and is likely to be limiting your ROI and profits.
By implementing the best practices in this guide, you can not only improve your campaigns’ effectiveness, but also gain a competitive edge over your competitors who aren’t actively optimising theirs.
Structuring Your Google Shopping Campaigns
Campaign Segmentation
- Group products by Category or Brand: Organise your campaigns by grouping your products according to their category or brand. This allows for more granular control over bidding and targeting, making it easier to allocate budget and optimise performance for specific groups of products.
- Separating best-sellers and low-performing products: Identify your best-selling and low-performing products and separate them into different campaigns. This will allow you to allocate more budget and higher bids to your top-performing products to get more of the impression share, whilst allowing you to test new strategies for the low performing products.
Optimising Product Feed
- Provide accurate and up-to-date product information: Ensure that your product feed contains accurate and current information, such as product titles, descriptions, images, prices, and availability. Google uses this data to display your Shopping ads, so any inaccuracies or outdated information can negatively impact your ad performance, or have products disapproved.
- Enhancing product titles and descriptions with keywords: Optimise your product titles and descriptions by including relevant keywords that potential customers are searching for. This will improve the visibility of your ads in search results and increase the likelihood of attracting qualified traffic.
Setting up Custom Labels
- Importance of custom labels for bidding and reporting: Custom labels allow you to tag products with specific attributes, such as profit margin, seasonality, or inventory levels. These labels can be used for more precise bidding and reporting, giving you greater control over your campaign performance.
- Examples of custom labels: Some common custom label categories include profit margin (high, medium, low), seasonality (spring, summer, fall, winter), and inventory levels (high stock, low stock). These labels can help you identify trends and optimize your campaigns accordingly.
Bidding Strategies and Budget Management
Choosing the Right Bidding Strategy
- Manual CPC bidding: With manual CPC bidding, you set bids for individual products or groups of products. This approach offers greater control over your ad spend but requires a more hands-on management. I prefer this strategy, particularly for low or non-converting products, as it prevents me from overspendning on products whilst I am testing new strategies to improve their performance.
- Automated bid strategies: There are several automated bidding strategies available, such as Maximise Conversions and Target ROAS, which use Google’s machine learning algorithms to optimise your bids in real-time. These strategies can save but offer less control over ad spend. These are best used on products that have a few conversions over the past 30 days. But make sure to monitor their performance if/once you make the switch to automated bidding in order to make sure there’s no loss in performance, increase in CPA etc.
Adjusting Bids Based on Performance
- Increasing bids for high-performing products: Monitor your campaign performance and identify high-performing products or product groups. Increase bids for these products to boost their visibility in search results and drive more sales.
- Decreasing bids for low-performing products: Conversely, identify low-performing products and consider reducing their bids. This helps free up budget for higher-performing products and improve overall campaign ROI.
Allocating Budget Effectively
- Allocating more budget to high-performing campaigns: Allocate a larger portion of your budget to campaigns or ad groups with strong performance. This will allow you to capitalise on their success and drive more sales, which in turn increases your overall ROI.
- Monitoring budget pacing to avoid overspending: Regularly review your budget pacing to ensure you’re not overspending on campaigns or ad groups. Adjust your budget allocation or bids accordingly to maintain a steady spend throughout the campaign duration.
Targeting and Audiences
Device Targeting and Bid Adjustments
- Analyse device performance: Review your campaign performance by device type (desktop, mobile, tablet) to identify trends and areas for optimisation.
- Adjusting bids for specific devices: Based on device performance, adjust your bids accordingly to capture more traffic from high-converting devices or limit ad spend on low-converting devices. In some circumstances you may simply want to switch off certain devices. You can do this by setting a -100% bid adjustment.
Remarketing and Audience Targeting
- Setting up remarketing lists: Create remarketing lists to target users who have previously interacted with your website or ads. These audiences are more likely to convert, making them valuable targets for your Shopping campaigns.
- Targeting high-value audiences: Utilise audience targeting options, such as Customer Match or Similar Audiences, to reach high-value customers or prospects who share similar characteristics with your existing customers.
Monitoring and Optimisation
Regular Performance Analysis
- Identify key performance indicators (KPIs): Determine the KPIs most relevant to your business’ objectives, such as the ROAS, CPA or Conversion Rate.
- Monitoring campaign performance against KPIs: Regularly review your campaign performance against your chosen KPIs to identify areas for improvement and optimisation.
Ongoing Optimisation
- Testing different bidding strategies: Experiment with different bidding strategies (manual CPC, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions) to find what works best for your company and goals.
- Updating product feed and targeting settings: Continuously optimise your product feed and targeting settings based on performance data and trends. Regular updates will help ensure your Shopping campaigns remain effective and relevant.
Optimising Google Ads Shopping campaigns is an ongoing process that requires strategic management, data-driven decisions, and a willingness to adapt to changing circumstances. By focusing on campaign structuring, bidding strategies, targeting, and continuous monitoring and optimisation, businesses can significantly improve their Shopping campaigns’ performance and, ultimately, drive more sales and increase their ROI. As the e-commerce landscape continues to evolve, it is essential for businesses to stay informed and embrace new opportunities to maintain a competitive edge and achieve long-term success.
Need help or management of your Google Shopping campaigns? Get in touch today and I will be glad to help.