Do you have a Performance Max campaign that’s already driving great results for you and your Ecommerce business? Great! What if I said you could double it…
This is a tactic we use at my agency Big Flare and it’s a bit technical but can take an already high-performing PMax campaign and build on its success even further. I’ve named it the Shopping Dupes method.
Your product titles are the most important item in your Shopping feed when it comes to Google deciding which keywords to show your ads for. With Shopping Dupes, we’re going to duplicate your top selling items then put totally new keyword ideas into those duplicated product titles, allowing us to target 2x as many keywords as you were able to target previously. Make sense? It should get a bit clearer as we work through it together.
Identify Your Top Sellers
Firstly, we need to identify our top sellers. If you’ve got a few months’ worth of activity behind your campaign, this is going to be simple. All you have to do is dive into Google Ads and sort your products in order of conversions. What we’re looking for here is the ‘80/20’: the 20% of products that are driving 80% or so of your sales.
Depending on how many products you have in your feed, you may want to select the top 5 or 10 (or even 20 if you have a particularly large store) - the key is just to make sure you’re covering around 80% of your sales volume regardless of how many products you’ve chosen.
Duplicate these Items in your Feed
The next step is super simple: once you’ve identified the products you want to work with for these, duplicate them in your product feed. The important thing is to make sure you change the Item ID after you’ve duplicated it. This is crucial as once you’ve done this, Google will think it’s looking at a totally different product (even if everything else like the Title and Landing Page are the same)! I’d add a custom label to your dupes at this point so it’s easier to find them later.
Now, we don’t want to just launch the dupes as that wouldn’t really get us anywhere - the magic starts at the next step…
Optimise your Product Titles
Once we have our top-performing dupes, it’s time to start reworking these titles with new and engaging keyword ideas. If you start to run out of ideas, look at user reviews to get some seed keywords, plug them into Keyword Planner and see if it spits out any relevant terms that have some serious search volume behind them.
Once you’ve got these ideas, start to rework the titles of your top-performing products; the more (relevant) keywords you can target, the better. Plus, by doing this and having two versions of the same product with different keywords in the title, you’re more or less doubling the keyword coverage that it has across Google’s network. You’ve essentially just doubled the standard 150 character limit on your Shopping product titles!
Set Up a New Shopping Campaign
Finally, you’ll want to set up a brand-new standard Shopping or PMax campaign to house these dupes. As you set it up, run a filter to make sure it’s only showing the products with the custom label you assigned earlier. Before you kick this off, make sure you jump into your old PMax campaign and exclude the new dupes from there.
Once the new campaign is live, manage it the same way you would any other Shopping or PMax campaign and once it’s getting a decent number of conversions - YOU’VE DONE IT! You should still be seeing all the same success from your old PMax campaign while getting the additional coverage from the new campaign. You can continue to gather learnings and optimise this over time, narrowing down the keywords that are most effective.
Now, this isn’t going to drive game-changing results every single time but when it WORKS. When you’re getting to this stage of your Google Ads journey, it’s a case of trying a bunch of slightly more out there tactics and seeing what works - make sure to stay tuned in with my blog as I’ll be dropping a lot more of these strategies in the next few weeks.