Standard Shopping Campaigns

Standard shopping campaigns are the original format of Google Shopping campaigns. Unlike Performance Max campaigns, they give the user multiple options to make adjustments to optimise campaign settings.

Unlike Performance Max shopping campaigns, Standard Shopping campaigns do not include retargeting, which must be set up separately.

Campaign Setup

Campaign name

Enter a name for the campaign. The name can be changed after the campaign is created.

Merchant Centre

Choose the Merchant Center account that has the products you wish to advertise. If you do not view any accounts here, you first need to link your Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts. You cannot change the merchant after you have created the campaign.

Country of sale

Choose the country where your products will be advertised, sold and delivered. Ads will only be displayed to people from the country you specify. To advertise, you will need to ensure that product data in the selected Merchant Centre account is available for the country you choose, else no product will be available to advertise. You cannot change the country of sale after you have created the campaign.

Inventory filter

This setting limits the products used in your campaign. For example, you may wish to limit a campaign to only one brand or category. Only products that match your selected requirements will be added to your campaign. This setting can be updated after campaign creation.

Bidding Strategy

Choose the type of bidding to use in your campaign. You can change this setting after campaign creation. Bidding options for Standard shopping campaigns are:

• Target ROAS
• Manual CPC
• Maximise clicks

Daily budget

Select how much you want to spend on this campaign.

Campaign priority

If you advertise the same product in multiple campaigns for the same country of sale, you should specify which campaign has priority. Campaign priority determines which campaign will be used when products overlap in your campaigns. Priority can be low, medium or high.

Networks

By default, Shopping campaigns adverts show in several places:

• Google Search Network
• Google Search Partners

Selecting all networks can help drive traffic to your products and increase conversions. If you want to control where your ads appear, deselect any networks you want to exclude.

Devices

By default, ads will show on all devices, including desktops, tablets and mobile devices. You can change this setting after campaign creation to limit devices.

Locations

This setting is used to limit your ads to specific locations. You can change this setting after campaign creation.

Local inventory ads

You can use the local inventory ads option to display local availability to Google shopping users if you have a local business. You will need to submit local product data in Merchant Centre to advertise local products. Then, tick the “Enable ads for products sold in local shops” box.

Bid adjustments

Unlike Performance Max Shopping campaigns, Standard Shopping campaigns support bid adjustments in the following areas:

• Devices
• Schedule
• Locations
• Audiences

For more information on the adjustments, please see the targeting section.

Negative keywords

While Shopping campaigns do not use keywords to target ads, negative keywords can be used to prevent your ads from appearing when you do not want them to.

Negative keywords can be an effective tool to avoid showing your products to the wrong shopper. However, adding too many negative keywords may significantly reduce overall or relevant traffic and can often hurt performance unless they are carefully reviewed regularly.

We recommend only using negative keywords to stop your products from showing on completely irrelevant queries. For example, a retailer who only sells dress shoes will not want to show up for a query like ‘trainers’. They can add ‘trainers’ as a negative keyword to their campaign. To optimise your campaigns for specific queries, try using ECPC or target ROAS to show relevant traffic.

Optimising Standard Shopping Campaigns

Use smart bidding

Managing bids manually is time-consuming. Using Smart Bidding (Target ROAS) will automatically optimise your bids using Google’s machine learning technology. The Target Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) bid strategy will adjust your bids for every user search to try and achieve your specified ROAS goal and maximise conversion value. Multiple factors, including device type, user location and product details are evaluated with each bid adjustment. For example, Target ROAS may increase your mobile bids if you have strong mobile device performance.

Use bid adjustment modifiers

Build on strong performance or prioritise segments by increasing bid adjustment modifiers for specific device types, times, locations and audience lists. For example, if you want to focus on driving more mobile traffic, increase the mobile bid adjustment modifier.

Note: The Target ROAS bid strategy optimises bids automatically based on various factors, including device and user location. You will not need to adjust modifiers manually with this solution in place.

Create language-specific campaigns

If you advertise in more than one language for the same target country, you should create separate campaigns for each language using custom labels. For example, if your target country is Switzerland, By submitting a feed using custom labels to specify “German” and French” language products will allow you to set your budget, bids and negative keywords by language.

Use campaign priorities

Use campaign priorities to your advantage. Campaign priorities will not affect your search relevance or influence the likelihood of your product showing for a specific query. Priorities are helpful for setting which products and their corresponding bids are most important to you.

An example use of priorities is in the Search Level Query Bidding. See the campaign structure video for more details.

Exclude unprofitable products and brands

You should frequently visit the Products tab to uncover any issues, such as inactive or underperforming products. You can ensure that your best-performing products are eligible to show by filtering for the highest number of clicks or conversions and viewing the product status columns.

Optimise your product feed

Optimising your product feed is vital to Google Shopping performance. The easier it is for Google to parse your product data, the greater your chances of reaching the right customers.

Do not make drastic changes

It is always tempting to make multiple changes at once. However, this is not the best course of action. Google Shopping campaigns are sensitive, and a slight adjustment of your bid may significantly affect your performance. Except for excluding underperforming products, you should not make drastic changes.

Monitor competitive pricing

Product pricing has a significant impact on click-through rates and on-site conversion. From experience, pricing is the most critical factor affecting online sales. Being the cheapest helps win the top placement and increases sales. 

The above screenshot shows the most prominent position in the Google shopping carousel. Your appearance in this position is reported by Google using its Top Impression Share metric

To monitor your price competitiveness, use the Benchmark Price metric. To become price competitive, you can adjust your prices manually or use a price monitoring tool like Prisync.

Monitor competitive metrics

Keep an eye on your competitive metrics, as these will tell you have you are comparing to the competition. Important metrics to watch are:

• Search impression share. The percentage of eligible searches for which your products are being served. This will tell you the opportunities you are missing out on.
• Benchmark Max CPC and benchmark CTR. These will tell you what the max CPCs and
• CTRs are for advertisers that sell similar products.

Competitive landscape data is a good place to identify opportunities to optimise your campaigns. When looking at your reports, we recommend segmenting by device as the competitive landscape can vary significantly. Try these tools in your Shopping campaigns:

Click share

Clic,k share is the best metric for getting a sense of your position relative to your competitors. A lower click share with a high impression share indicates that you may not be showing in the top results to drive valuable clicks. Look for ways to differentiate your ads and adjust bids accordingly to capture more click share, especially on mobile where limited screen size drives more visibility and traffic to top results. You can download or schedule a report to get click share by device.

Impression share

Impression share can help you ensure that your ads reach as many shoppers as possible. If your impression share is low and you profit from the impressions you get, you may want to increase your bids or optimise your data quality to earn more of those valuable impressions.

Auction insights

Auction insights allow you to compare your performance with other advertisers who are Bidding on the same targets as you. This information can help you make strategic bid and budget decisions by showing where you are succeeding or underperforming.

Benchmark CTR and Benchmark Max

CPC show how your product groups stack against your competitors. If your CTRs and max. CPCs are lagging behind the benchmarks, you will know that you need to improve your product data so that your ads are more relevant or adjust your bids so you will be more competitive. The competitive performance data that you see is aggregated and averaged so that it’s anonymous.

The Bid Simulator can show you your results in the past week if you’d set higher or lower bids. Try using this tool for mobile specifically to understand your missed opportunity with more competitive mobile bids. See more about the Bid Simulator.

Adding seller ratings

Adding seller ratings can help build social proof and make your ad (and store) more attractive.

Add negative keywords

hat: Negative keywords prevent your Shopping Ads from showing up for specific search queries. This allows you to block irrelevant keywords or keywords with a high cost associated with them.

Promotions

Promotions are special offers you can submit for one or more of your products. These can be things like discounts or better delivery options. These can attract customers and increase CTR.

Create a logical campaigns structure

Use a logical structure for your campaigns with an easy-to-use naming convention. Instead of having a monolith Google Shopping campaign, breaking it up into different campaigns for your categories and brands allows you more flexibility concerning budget and bidding strategies.

For more details, see the Shopping campaign structure lecture.