With the rise of automation and the Performance Max format, there are several opportunities for professionals to manage shopping campaigns in Google Ads. Sometimes it is worth putting your performance into “PMAX”, other times a classic “PLA” is better. In this article, we’ll show you a few basic strategies - depending on the state of your account, feed or client’s business.
Let’s imagine the situation of a PPC specialist: after acquiring a new e-commerce client, he/she gets to manage an account with already active campaigns that have been running for a few months and investing, say, several hundreds of euros per month. Only one Performance Max campaign is active in the account.
The goal is clear: to manage the account better than the previous specialist or agency, to get more revenue and ideally with a better return.
So first, we’ll look at what variables to consider when setting up campaigns, attempt a basic typology of Google Ads accounts, and finally, we’ll look at a total of 6 types of strategies we use for shopping campaigns. Finally, we’ll discuss in which situations what type of strategy to choose.
This article should not serve as a generalized guide for the reader to follow blindly. Each client is different in some way, each needs a specific approach, variables combine or complement each other in different ways, and there are many factors that go into a performance marketing strategy.
So how should you approach your Google Shopping campaigns? Here are some of the strategies we use most often. As mentioned above, strategies are heavily dependent on the variables described and different approaches can be used (or at least tested) in each account. The described strategies can also be combined with each other.
In what situation can one Performance Max campaign be enough in an account? These are cases when we don’t have a very large budget for campaigns (however, enough for the Performance Max format - activating a Performance Max campaign with a budget of 2 euros/day doesn’t make much sense). At the same time, we have a smaller number of products in the feed, so it doesn’t make sense to categorize the feed into multiple campaigns. On the other hand, we have enough products in the feed for the campaign to test them and get the data needed for an automated strategy.
The ideal solution for medium or larger Google Ads accounts where we have long-standing featured products in the feed that bring in a significant portion of the revenue. In such categorization we should take into account not only the simple number of conversions, but also for example data from the shopping cart or Google Analytics. Pareto’s 80/20 principle can also be useful here. We recommend applying this strategy when there are a larger number of products in the feed, so that even when split into two PMAX campaigns there is enough data for automated strategies.
A strategy suitable for a feed with fewer products, but at the same time an account where there is enough budget for shopping campaigns. The main PMAX campaign should represent the primary performance portion and the secondary PLA campaign should be used to reactivate underperforming or non-appearing products through manual bidding.
The ideal solution from an automation perspective. Do you have a large product feed? Do you find it difficult and time-consuming to regularly define which products are delivering the best results and which products are just spending but not delivering anything? Labelizer will do this categorization for you and will automatically optimize your feed every day.
When engaging this tool, we recommend categorizing Performance Max campaigns into a minimum of 2 campaigns, where one campaign will feature high performing products that meet (or even exceed) the account’s ROAS and the other campaign will feature products that don’t meet the set ROAS. Ideally, then, the campaign on high performing products will spend more of the budget and meet a higher ROAS, while the campaign on lower performing products will spend less and meet a slightly worse ROAS.
This structure can still be supplemented with a Performance Max campaign on the TOP products, where we always want to ensure the highest performance and for some reason don’t want to apply script labeling to them.
Shopping campaigns can also be categorized by product availability. For example, for products in the home furnishings category (sanitaryware, furniture, etc.), many products are only available on demand or are not immediately in stock for some other reason. However, we sometimes also want to display such products in the product ads. For this case, we recommend to divide the products (for example via a custom label in Mergado) into products in stock and products on demand.
Another, but certainly not the last possible approach is to structure campaigns according to the margin of the products. This approach is particularly useful if you have a strict ROI target, where it pays to focus on high-margin products for the client. In this case, the margin (for example, in the form of several levels) usually needs to be implemented in the product feed first.
You need to consider revising your campaign structure and figure out how to optimize the Performance Max campaign. Or decide if this campaign format is even appropriate in the current situation.
After an initial analysis, the specialist finds that the Performance Max campaign only invests around half of the total investment in Shopping ads, with the rest going into underperforming content ad formats. Part of the investment also goes into search, but the ads are mostly displayed on branded search queries and thus do not bring in many new customers who are not yet familiar with the site. They also find that out of a fairly large product feed, only about 10 products actually work and bring in the majority of the revenue. Now what?
Especially when using automation in product categorization - see Labelizer - we strongly recommend to also use a catch all standard shopping campaign in the account. External automated tools are to some extent prone to errors or failures, which can easily cause products to be deactivated in Google Ads and thus the campaigns in Purchases to fail.
For these situations, a catch all campaign serves as an emergency brake that simply alerts you to the automation problem with a significant increase (in impressions, clicks and costs).
At the same time, this campaign will ensure that your products are at least partially displayed. We recommend setting it up with a low budget and low CPC, which will ensure that the campaign is overlooked by the main campaigns. But when the main campaigns drop out for whatever reason, there will be a significant increase in data in this campaign and that will tell you that something is wrong.
We believe the campaign strategies and variables mentioned above will help you better optimize and deliver the best results. These are not bulletproof tactics, rather a few possible insights into Google Shopping campaigns - good luck!
Need help with your performance campaigns? Get in touch, we’d love to help!
