Google Shopping Ads – Structure & Strategy
This article will run you through Google Shopping Ads in terms of structure and strategy. As far as VEZOLVE MEDIA is concerned, we were able to use this singular strategy and structure to win the hearts of all our clients and we still do use this framework to the day.
Now before we begin, it is important to note that you must have a good and thorough understanding of Google Shopping Ads and how it works. Its also important to know what you can do within the Google Shopping Ads platform. Google shopping ads basically works on the products that you enter into the product field. The product is then entered automatically into the Google Merchant Center system. When entering the product into the system, it is important to note that you do not have control over the keywords used therefore making it important to know which specific products and target markets you want to nail on the head.
Let’s dive in! We have divided the Google Shopping Ads structure into three phases. Phase 01 is Low Hanging Fruit. Phase 02 is Warm Audience Campaigns and Phase 03 is Scaling Campaigns.
Low Hanging Fruit: This is your main target demographic, who is already engaged with your brand and requires less persuasion to convert, i.e. the holy grail for what your company is attempting to achieve.
Warm Audience Campaigns: People that have already connected with your brand are known as warm audiences, also known as remarketing audiences. This earlier interaction with your brand could take place in a variety of ways, such as visiting your website or connecting with your Facebook or Instagram pages.
Scaling Campaigns: Scaling advertisements allows you to get the most out of your best-performing ad campaigns. You may accomplish this by making a few changes. You may, for example, boost your advertising budget, hunt for new high-performing audiences, or improve your creativity.
All Products Campaign
Let’s begin with the all products campaign first. The objective here is to identify all the products that can be sold, identifying the various responses on various products and identifying the CPC and the costing.
Phase 01: Low Hanging Fruit
This phase’s goal is to start with a positive Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). We will target a wide range of Low Fruit Hanging audience members and ensure that the dollars invested in Google provide a positive ROAS. This phase isn’t intended to reach out to any warm or cool audience members.
How Do You Identify The Low Hanging Fruit?
Make a list of the products that have a lower price when compared to the competitors. Use the Google Shopping website and make sure to input the product descriptions into the platform. Be accurate with the product names, serial numbers and product ID’s to make sure you end up with accurate pricing results. Find keywords around these products and create an audience for them. Be sure to create search campaigns for these keywords as well. When you run or start the campaign, identify the products that get sold early, classify them as winner and create campaigns for them. The products that do not have a great reputation can be moved aside for the time being and focused on later.
Phase 02: Warm Audience Campaigns
Targeting the warm audience helps broaden the overall audience reach and, eventually, scale the appropriate campaigns. These advertisements will not be targeting any cold audience members, and in-depth research on warm audience members will be required to ensure that the accuracy is high. Campaigns started in phase one will not be included in this phase, while campaigns started in this phase will be given a medium priority.
Phase 03: Scaling Campaigns
Scaling campaigns here is the overall objective. In this phase we will target all the cold audience members with all the products previously listed. All warm keywords should be eliminated from this phase and maintain a low budget on this phase until we see a bump in sales upon which the budget can be gradually increased.
*Do’s & Do Not’s Of All Phases*
- Do not include product ID’s with clicks and no conversions
- Do not include products with irrelevant search tags
- Do not include warm or cold search categories and terms
- In depth negative keyword research should be conducted before activating campaigns and said keywords should be added into the campaign
- Optimize the respective product titles and product descriptions if necessary
- Check the respective benchmarks, CTC and CTR and optimize the campaigns accordingly
- Check the bounce rates, ATC, IC, returning visitors and average duration per session to understand the quality of the traffic
- Do not keep making changes whilst the campaign is live, wait for significant data to show up before taking any further actions or making any significant changes
- Make sure you have applied the dynamic remarketing campaigns and have enabled them to run from day one. Maintain a low budget and exclude tracking on mobile phones.
*Notes On All Phases*
- Identification of the products within the Low Hanging Fruit category is the key for this campaign. Spend time in time in identifying the aforementioned products.
- When you increase the bids of certain product items, don’t increase it to more than 30% a day. Increasing bids gradually brings about consistency in performance
- Don’t turn to maximizing conversions until you have at least 50 conversions within a seven day period from a particular campaign or product.