So... you're an Ecommerce business owner and you are running a Google AdWords Shopping campaign. It’s doing well, you've got some sales, revenue is flowing in, but it just feels like you could be doing more volume, and you don't know what to do next. If this sounds like you then perhaps this could help: maybe you need to do a do a deep-dive on your Shopping campaign structure!
Usually, what most new Shopping advertisers do is to create a single Shopping campaign with ad groups for different product types or brands, or even worse, they just create a single campaign with one ad group for all products. Are you guilty of this?
While this setup is fast and easy to do and it will bring you sales and revenue, believe me, this is NOT what you want in your account. If you’ve bundled all of your products together into one bid product group, you can’t control your CPC bids a the product level, which is really bad since every product has a different price, margin, conversion rate, competitors, etc. You need to take all of those things into consideration when setting your bids.
Every product is unique and thus needs its own bid. Your Shopping campaign structure needs to be set up in such a way that you are able to do this. The key ingredient to an optimal Shopping structure? The SPAG!
What's a "SPAG"?
SPAGs are Single Product Ad Groups and are an elegant solution for your Shopping campaign structure. As the name implies, you will have an ad group for each of your products. Depending on how many products you have in your feed, you can either do it manually or use one of the automated tools to do it for you.
If you decide to do it manually, assuming you don’t have too many products in your feed, creating the SPAGs is a pretty straightforward task. You just go into your campaign, create a new ad group, add a single product to it and set everything else to "excluded". Boom, that’s it. Rinse and repeat for each of your products.
Now, if you have hundreds or thousands of products in your feed, it’s a whole different story. Doing it all manually won’t be an option, it'd take an unfeasibly long time to do. Here is where the automated tools come into play. There’s a lot of them out there so I’m only going to mention a few of the well-known ones.
PPC Samurai is an all-round PPC automation tool that gives you the power of Adwords scripts without you having to learn to code. What I like best about the software though is their handy Shopping campaign structure tool. It's pretty easy to connect PPC Samurai to your account. Once it’s connected and synced to your product feed you can quickly build out thousands of SPAGs in just a few clicks. It also comes with some other useful features such as the ability to use Shopping searches to build out your Search campaigns. It starts at $165/month and it offers a 45-day free trial.
Optmyzr's SPAG creation tool works similarly to PPC Samurai, however it allows you to link more than one product feed per account, so if you have several product feeds this might be the better solution for you. To use its Shopping campaign tools, you need to buy the regular package for $224/month. You can, however, try Optmyzr for free for 14 days.
An enterprise-level management platform that offers solutions for smaller advertisers as well. Kenshoo allows you to quickly create SPAGs in bulk. You can get a demo for free, but if you want to use this ongoing expect to pay at least a few bucks!
Next Steps
Now your Shopping campaigns should be all neat and organised, hooray for you! But, before you can kick back and relax you've got one more step to go through, if you want the ideal Shopping campaign structure.
What I'm going to recommend at this point, and the way the we structure all our Shopping campaigns here at Big Flare, is to separate out your brand vs non-brand terms into different campaigns. If someone searches for your brand terms (for example, if you are Nike then your 'brand' terms are any keywords that contain the keyword "Nike" in them) they should only see Shopping ads from your Brand campaign. If the user searches for non-brand terms (example: "buy mens trainers") then you will want the Non-Brand Shopping campaign to show up instead.
This setup is advantageous because brand and non-brand searches perform very differently. When someone searches for your brand, they are not a totally new user, they already know about you and they are just trying to navigate to your site or a specific product. For non-brand searches, these are more likely to be brand new users who may have never heard of you before. Clicks from these people are more valuable and thus you'll expect to pay more for them too. By splitting Brand / Non-Brand into separate campaigns in Shopping, you gain the ability to bid differently based on the different behaviour and value of these two types of searchers.
Separating Brand And Non-Brand Terms
To segment your Shopping search terms like this, you’ll need to use negative keywords and Shopping campaign priority settings.
Let's say you are Ray-Ban and you are advertising your sunglasses. You know that when someone searches for keywords containing the word "Ray-Ban" (e.g. someone has done a "brand search" for your brand) that their conversion rates are crazy high, and thus you just want to bid super high on these search terms to ensure you show up as often as possible. On the other hand, you also know that when someone searches for a non-brand term such as "buy sunglasses", they are less likely to convert on your site. You still want to show up on those searches, but you can't afford to bid super high on these terms, lest you plan to make a loss on those ads.
To separate your brand search terms from your non-brand terms, you need to first create two Shopping campaigns. Your Brand Shopping campaign needs to be set to a medium priority while your Non-Brand Shopping campaign will be set to a high priority.
This is found in your campaign settings screen
After your campaign priorities are all set, be sure to add brand terms as NEGATIVE KEYWORDS to your Non-Brand Shopping campaign.
Now when someone does a search for, say, “Ray-Ban aviators”, your Non-Brand ads will be blocked by the negative brand keyword in that campaign, so Adwords will automatically look for and show the ad from the other campaign, and that is the one from the Brand campaign. If, on the other hand, someone does a search for a non-brand keyword such as "aviator sunglasses", now what happens is that your Non-Brand campaign ads will show, NOT your Brand campaign ads, because your Non-Brand campaign has been set to a higher priority. Pretty neat, huh!?
One Step Further... The Triple Campaign Segmentation
The above Brand/Non-Brand scenarios works really well for smaller stores and/or stores where you own the product brand and you primarily sell your own branded products on a site that matches that brand (e.g. you are Ray-Ban, selling Ray-Ban sunglasses on RayBan.com). A lot of Ecommerce sellers, though, are primarily reselling other peoples' brands, and they are doing it on a store that does not match the product brand (e.g. you are Sun Glass Hut, selling lots of brands of sunglasses, on sunglasshut.com). In cases like this, you probably want to segment your Shopping campaign into three, not two, different campaigns: Brand, Generic and Product.
In this scenario:
- Brand = People searching for a particular brand of product ("ray-ban sunglasses")
- Generic = People searching for products in your category, but without brand or product names attached ("buy sunglasses online")
- Product = People searching for specific products in your niche ("Ray Ban Aviator RB3025 Sunglasses")
For this setup you want to start by following the steps in the section above, and split out a Brand vs Non-Brand campaign. Instead of calling the Non-Brand campaign "Non-Brand", though, call it "Generic". So now you have a Brand campaign on medium priority setting, with no negative keywords, plus a Generic campaign on high priority setting, with your store's brand terms ("Sunglass Hut") added as negative keywords.
Now create one more Shopping campaign and set its priority to low and call it "Product". Then add product-specific keywords as negatives to your Brand AND Generic campaigns. By "product-specific keywords" I'm talking about all the specific product names for the products in your store.
Now what happens is:
- If someone searches for your brand terms ("ray ban sunglasses"), Google will NOT show the Generic ads because this campaign has your brand terms added as negatives. It will also NOT show your Product campaign ads, because this campaign is set to a lower priority than your Brand campaign. The only thing left to show then, is your Brand campaign ads, which is exactly what you want.
- If someone searches for generic terms ("buy sunglasses online"), Google will NOT show the Brand or Product ads because the Generic ads have a higher priority setting than both those campaigns. Google will show the Generic campaign ads, once again this is exactly what we want.
- If someone searches for product terms ("Ray Ban Aviator RB3025 Sunglasses"), Google will NOT show your Brand campaign ads or your Generic ones, because BOTH of those campaigns have that added as negative keywords. Google will thus correctly show the Product campaign ads.
Here's a nice visual representation of how this all works:
With this setup you can set even higher bids for product-specific search terms. These product terms are so specific that they indicate the searcher has a very high chance of converting. To know the exact brand and product name to look for, they must have done their research already, and now they are likely just looking for somewhere to buy their product of choice. That's why it's generally a good, profitable idea to set your highest bids on the Products Shopping campaign.
Conclusion
There you have it, with what you’ve learned from this article you should have a good idea of how to improve your Shopping campaign performance by a significant margin. Don’t be lazy and think one Shopping campaign with a simple structure is good enough, because you might be missing out on a large chunk of sales. So take a few minutes and restructure those Shopping campaigns, trust me, you won’t regret it!