Before you set up your first shopping campaign for your online shop, it's important to do a little professional research on the basics.
The Google Ads interface can guide you through the process of setting up a campaign in just a few minutes and a few steps, but be careful! It makes a difference what type of shopping campaign you create. In this article, we give a brief summary of what you need to think about and prepare to run your first successful shopping campaign!
What is a shopping campaign?
The shopping campaign is a type of Google Ads campaign designed specifically for online shops. Within this category, shopping ads run as display ads, which show some important details of your product before the interested user clicks on your ad.
This particular ad format incorporates an image, the product's name, its price, and your store's name. Interestingly, while these ads are showcased during user searches, there's no need to include specific keywords within your campaign. Instead, you'll need to follow a specialized approach when uploading your products, a method we'll delve into shortly. This means that your ad's visibility is driven by the attributes of the product itself.
What's even more remarkable is that these ads share the same results page with text-based ads. You have the option to have both your text ad and your shopping ad coexisting on the same results page. In fact, your shopping ad has the potential to extend its reach to platforms such as Google Display, YouTube, and Gmail.
What conditions must be met to run a shopping campaign?
First and foremost, you'll need to create a product feed—a specialised dataset containing the product information defined by Google for the items you intend to promote. Typically, this involves the work of developers, especially for webshops. However, some webshop platforms, such as Shopify, ShopRenter, UNAS, offer ready-made solutions, and there are plugins available that can automate this process.
Alternatively, webshop owners have the option to manually input product data into a dedicated table, which can then be used to generate a product feed. These feeds play a crucial role in ensuring that product information, including prices and availability, remains up to date, aligning the advertisements with the data on the webshop's product pages. Failing to maintain this synchronization can result in Google suspending the product's display until the data is properly aligned.
You also need to sign up to Google Merchant Center and make all the important settings there, such as entering your business details, the country you're shipping to and uploading your product feed.
Last but not least, you need to link your Google Ads account to Google Merchant Center. This step can be a little tricky, but it is absolutely crucial to get this right. If you need help with this process, we recommend reaching out to to a professional digital marketing agency, who can set this account up for you in no time and quickly troubleshoot and solve any potential problems as well.
Standard (normal) shopping campaigns
If you have met all the prerequisites, there is nothing to stop you from setting up a shopping campaign!
First, let's look at the most important features of a standard shopping campaign. In these campaigns, you can set a number of things manually. You can already choose a manual CPC in the bidding strategy if you want to have full control over the bidding.
It is essential that offers are associated with products, not keywords. You cannot enter search keywords, but you can enter exclusion keywords. It is very important that you do this at the beginning and keep adding to it later from the search term report - just like with search campaigns.
In addition to manual CPC, you can also choose target ROAS and maximise clicks bidding. You should choose the maximise clicks bid if you have no or minimal conversion history for the products you want to advertise, or if it is more important to be seen, with purchase being secondary - for example, when testing a new product.
ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend) is the targeted return on advertising spend. The target ROAS bidding is a good choice if we know the value of the conversion, i.e. if the e-commerce measurement is set up for the webshop, which also includes the product prices in the data. Based on this, the system calculates whether and by how much our campaigns are paying off.
You can set this target ROAS according to the margin on your products. For example, if the target ROAS is set to 500%, Google Ads will automatically adjust the bids to maximise conversion and maintain the target ROAS. This smart bidding is an advanced level of optimisation, but it's definitely worth trying out for a webshop.
It is also important to have enough prior conversion data. The official Google recommendation is 20 conversions within 45 days.
When do we recommend using a standard shopping campaign?
The standard shopping campaign can be a very profitable choice for your business in the following cases:
- if you have a shortage of products
- if your campaign budget is very calculated
- if you want to see results in the foreseeable future - in about a week
- if you want full control over bids and exclusion keywords
- if you want to modify offers at product level
- if there is a large difference between margins per product
- if you just got started with a brand new Ads account
- if you are advertising on a shopping network for the first time
Smart shopping campaigns
The smart shopping campaign now uses full automation. Here you can't exclude keywords, you can't bid at product level, you have to let the algorithm learn and optimise everything.
What you can choose is the strategy and which products to include in your campaign.
There are two types of bidding available to you, the conversion maximisation and the target ROAS. The former is used when you have less than 15 conversions in the preceding 30 days. The target ROAS bidding is the same as with standard shopping campaigns.
If you have different sales targets for each product group, it is also recommended to organise them into separate campaigns. In addition, special offer products should be placed in separate campaigns so that they can be prioritised higher by the algorithm.
TIP: Put the higher priced products in a separate campaign and add a lower ROAS, allowing them to appear more often and drive to more purchases. This is also a good trick if you want a product to get a lot of exposure.
When is a smart shopping campaign recommended?
We recommend trying out this campaign type in the following cases:
- if you don't mind not having full control over the campaign
- if you don't have time to optimise
- when you have enough conversion data - ideally 100 conversions in the last 30 days
- if you have a lot of products that are difficult to manage manually
- if you can afford not to convert for about 7-14 days, as it will not pay off immediately
- if your budget is not too tight
- if you do not want to change your offer or advertised product in a short time
- if you have already run a standard shopping or general search ad, so you have an idea of what your target audience is looking for
Summary
In this article, we've laid out the key details about the different types of Google shopping campaigns. We've also shared important factors to consider before diving into setting up your first shopping campaign. Keeping these points in mind will pave the way for a successful experience right from the start - as it has already done for our clients!
#promobox#If you find shopping campaigns too complex, leave it to our team!##
