If you have already wasted money by not separating your bids between your audienceâs funnel stage, donât worry - youâre in the right place.
Before we continue, letâs quickly talk about search terms and the likelihood of purchasing. Which one of the following people you think is more ready to buy?
Person 1 - search term: âbest running shoes for a marathonâ
Person 2 - search term: ânew balance marathon running shoesâ
If your answer is Person 2, you might be the right fit for this article as it is based on the premise that someone who includes the brand in their search term, is further down the sales funnel and more likely to buy.
First of all, you need to make sure your product titles are optimised. This means, at a minimum, making sure that:
For example, for the running shoe case, the ideal Title would be Brand + Gender + Product Type + Attributes (colour, size, material):
More information about how to optimise your product titles can be found in this article.
After you have optimised your product titles, go ahead and copy your main Shopping Campaign (and its products) into a new campaign. Name this new campaign with something like âShopping - Brandedâ. Also, rename the original campaign to something like âShopping - Genericâ.
As you might already know from a previous article, in Google Shopping Ads you canât add keywords as you would in Search Campaigns, so instead we have to rely on Negative Keywords.
Specifically, we want to add the brand name as a negative keyword only in the âGenericâ Campaign. By doing so, the products in this campaign wonât show up under branded search terms (e.g. ânew balance marathon running shoesâ). This differentiation will allow us to bid differently based on the search term. More about this is down below.
Tip: If you are selling products from multiple brands I will suggest creating a negative keyword list. Then, apply the list to the âShopping - Genericâ Campaign. This keeps things nice and tidy (and probably will save you time down the road).
Well done! Next is where most people get confused, so please bear with me.
Following the initial principle of this article, for search terms that include a brand name, we want to set a high bid (as they might be more likely to buy). So please go ahead and set a high bid in your âBrandedâ campaign. Similarly, set a lower bid on your âGenericâ campaign, as these searches might belong to people that are not ready to buy yet. So far so good.
However, if you remember, the âBrandedâ campaign doesnât have any Negative Keywords, so - given an âunbrandedâ search term (e.g. âbest running shoes for a marathonâ), how do we avoid the products from the âBrandedâ campaign showing up?
Answer: Campaign priorities.
Yes, this may sound counterintuitive at first, but for this structure to work, you must set the âGenericâ campaign's priority higher than the âBrandedâ Campaignâs.
Donât worry, this will only affect how your internal campaigns behave, yet your âBrandedâ campaignâs high bids will still be telling Google that you are ready to beat your competitors against that juicy branded search term.
In order to stop wasting money on Google Shopping Ads, you should organise your campaigns based on the search termâs likelihood of purchase - being âbrand nameâ the best indicator. To do this, itâs important to first optimise the product titles and then create a campaign structure that separates the branded and generic keywords through the use of negative keywords. Last but not least important, you should set up the bids and priorities so that you bid high on branded search terms and low on generic (or âun-brandedâ) search terms.