Back in October Google announced the launch of its new shopping campaigns, an alternative to PLAs (Product Listing Ads), and will soon be asking all advertisers to move from the old PLAs to these new shopping campaigns.
In order to set up a Shopping campaign simply log in to AdWords, hit the red +Campaign button and choose ‘Shopping’.
Next you must give your campaign a name, something that distinguishes it from the rest as a shopping campaign, and then select the settings such as location targets, CPC bids, daily campaign budget, delivery method etc. as well as linking it to your Google Merchant centre account and choosing your country of sale.
Then you have to create an ad group and can add an optional ‘Promotion’ message such as free delivery, free returns etc.
Once the campaign has been set up you can then organise the inventory in your product feed into groups and can alter your bids per group of items (these can be created for groups of items or even single items if you would like them to).
You can then subdivide your products into groups based on any of the following attributes; category, brand, item ID, condition, product type, custom labels. You can also use a combination of these (ie. by category then by brand). This is ideal if you would like to silo certain products into groups that you would like to set different bids for and unlike the old PLAs your inventory will not overlap in groups when you subdivide them.
“Custom Labels” is a new attribute that has replaced the old AdWords Groupings and AdWords Labels and can be used within the feed to label items as things such as best sellers, sale items, high margin etc. These should be used to differentiate some products from others and make them easier to split out within the shopping campaign and set customised CPC bids for.
Just like the old PLAs you should always ensure that you optimise your data feed in order to get the most out of shopping campaigns, especially now that Google is enforcing unique product identifiers.
In summary the new shopping campaigns are very easy to set up as long as you follow these three rules:
- Be Granular – subdivide your inventory into as smaller groups as possible in order to set individual CPC bids to each product group.
- Optimise your data feed – ensure that your data feed for Google Merchant centre is as good as it can be.
- Analyse the data and performance – once your campaign has been running for a while and accrued data make sure you look at the results and tweak where necessary in order to optimise the performance of the campaign.
