How To Set Up Google Ads Shopping Campaigns .... CORRECTLY 🤑

If you're selling any products online, Google shopping campaigns need to be a core part of your strategy. Unfortunately, many people have not seen success with their Google Ads shopping campaigns. And this purely comes down to poor campaign setup. Because for success with Google Ads shopping campaigns, you need to make sure that you have the correct campaign settings. And this is for two reasons. Firstly, so that you can very quickly see what is working and what isn't working in your Google Ads shopping campaign. And then secondly, if you don't have the correct campaign setup, you actually can't optimize your Google Ads shopping campaign. And one of the contributing factors for that is because many of the Google Ads shopping campaign tutorials purely focus on linking your Google Merchant center to your Google Ads account. And while it is an important step, many of your store management systems such as Shopify or WooCommerce are both very easy products to use so that you can actually create your product feed and also link your store with Google Merchant center and Google Ads. So for that reason, in this video, I'm not going to focus on setting up your Google Merchant account. But what I will do is I'll leave links in the description below so that you can actually see the relevant tutorials if you're using a Shopify or a store. And then I will also include some links for general Google Merchant setup. Because as I said, that is only the first and basic step of this process. Because where you're going to see most value with your Google Ad shopping campaign is making sure that you have the correct campaign structure and settings from the get go. And if you don't have the correct structure and settings from the start, you will just be willingly giving money to Google which they don't need. If we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. And today I'm going to go through the account and campaign settings which I've successfully used use for shopping campaigns for brands like this and this. When we talk about Google shopping campaigns, I want to make it clear that I'm talking about standard shopping campaigns and I'm not talking about smart shopping campaigns or so called smart shopping campaigns. And that is because I much prefer standard shopping campaigns because you are actually able to manually optimize and target your campaigns. But also the second reason why we're not going to be covering smart shopping campaigns because as of late 2022, they're going to be replaced by Google's new performance Max campaigns. Before we start discussing the correct structure and settings for Your Google shopping campaigns. You need to remember how Google displays Google shopping campaigns and the fact that they are very sensitive to price. And what we mean by that is that all of your shopping ads actually include the product price. So if you have a competitor or a reseller who is selling the same or similar product for a lower price, you are unlikely to see any cut through or success with your Google Ads shopping campaign. That is, unless of course you have a very high brand loyalty to your store. Even if someone was to use a very detailed search such as redmen's Nike Air Max 270, all of the ads would clearly show the product price. So any price difference of more than a couple of dollars, they are more likely to go to the competitor's store as opposed to your store. And herein lies the good and the bad of shopping campaigns. And the bad is, is that it is very easy for competitor to undercut your price, meaning that you'll lose the click and the potential sale because a competitor has undercut you by 5 or $10. However, this is also a good thing because if someone does click on your ad, you have already pre qualified them with a price. So there's less chance they're going to click on your go to your website and then not go through the sale because they find your product too expensive. And this is why in shopping campaigns you will usually see a lower click through ratio but a much higher conversion rate than your standard search campaigns. Let's now talk about the biggest mistake that I see with Google shopping campaigns. And it all has to do with the account structure, or should I say lack of account structure. When I'm either taking on an existing shopping campaign or reviewing a shopping campaign. The single biggest issue that I see is that the campaign is set up to have all of the products and in one single ad group. And this means that the account has been set up with no product segmentation. Your shopping campaign should follow the same best practice of structure as your search campaigns in that your shopping campaign should have multiple ad groups with each ad group only targeting one similar group of products. So if you're setting up a Google shopping campaign to sell mobile phone accessories, you should have a campaign structure which looks something similar. Like this we have an ad group which is solely focused on selling iPhone cases and then another ad group which is solely focused on selling Samsung cases. And then you have a separate ad group for selling iPhone charging docs and then another one for Samsung charging docks. And this campaign structure is really, really important. And the reason for that is that it allows you to quickly go through and see which ad groups and product groups are performing well and which ones actually need more time and more optimizations. And this is especially important if you have hundreds or thousands of different products. You need to have clear product groupings so that you can quickly see which product groups are performing well as opposed to trying scroll through hundreds and thousands of different individual products to see which ones need more work. And then further than that when it comes to optimizations, if you have different individual ad groups which only have one product group per ad group, you can then go through and complete optimizations such as search term audits where you add in extra negative keywords, Audience targeting, demographic targeting and device targeting becomes a lot simpler because you can target it for each individual product group. Using our example campaign structure before is that the negative keywords that you would add for iPhone cases may be different to charging docs. So the important take home message with your account structure for a Google shopping campaign is that this should actually mirror out the same account structure that you use for your search campaigns. So just because it's a different format of a campaign, it doesn't mean that we're still not using the basic principles that ensure that you can not only control your costs, but that you can optimize your campaign in the best way possible. So now I want to take you through the step by step process for how you can set up your very own Google shopping campaign. And if you do find these steps going too quick, what I would recommend that you do is that you actually slow down down the YouTube speed to 0.75 or 0.5. So let's start by clicking on this blue new campaign button. And then because we're looking to focus on sales and product sales, we obviously want to choose the sales objective. And then you do want to make sure that once again, because we're focusing on product sales is that you actually have some purchases goals already set up in your account and then you press continue. And once again if you don't have these set up, if you go back to Shopify or WooCommerce, they have easy step by step guides and how you can set up this tracking for your own store. And then we want to go through and select the shopping campaign and this is where you you'll then see your Google Merchant center account linked. And then we want to go down and make sure that you select the standard shopping campaign. Now depending on when you're watching this video, this section may be slightly different because as you can see here, the Smart Shopping campaign is actually being phased out. So just make sure that you're selecting the standard shopping campaign and then press continue. And then from there we enter in our campaign name. And for this example, we're just going to use product sales. Now, when it comes down to bidding, if you don't have any account history, I recommend that you're doing the manual CPC and optimizing for conversions. And what this does is this does turn on some automated bidding from Google so that it can look to actually tailor your bids when there is more traffic. And once you have enough conversion data, you may want to switch this over to conversion value. But as I said, we want to start with optimized for conversions and then we want to go through and set up our daily budget. And remembering our daily budget runs on a monthly average. So if you're wanting to spend $300 a month, you would add in your daily budget at $10 a day. Now, for your campaign priority, you only need to change this if you are running more than one Google shopping campaign. As you can see through here, if you're only wanting run campaign, you can keep it on low. However, if you do multiple shopping campaigns, this is where you would put in either a medium or high. And this lets Google know which campaign they want you to focus on if you have conflicting keyword search terms. So that means if you have multiple campaigns in your account which are promoting the same product, it would then prioritize the campaign with the highest campaign priority to trigger those ads. And then the next option is for your targeting. When it comes down to the search network, I generally unselect this. Now this is not a big one if you do want to keep it selected. But the reason for why I personally unselect this is that I find that I get more data from the Google search network as opposed to the partners. And another reason is is that I've never actually found any additional benefit by including this option. And then we want to go down to our locations. Now you can keep it for your individual country or if you want to add other locations or even smaller parts of a country, you can add it in here. So for example, if we did not want to target all of Australia, but just certain states, we could add these in here. And that is the same for wherever you're based in regards to start and end dates. If you've got an upcoming product launch and you're setting up this campaign beforehand, this is where you can actually through and add in a date, whether it be 7, 10, 14 or more days ahead if you want the campaign to start on a specific date and then you want to go through and add your ad group. Now, when you get to your ad group, Google will give you the recommendation of only adding in one ad group, which is why many people only have one ad group with all of their different products running in it. But as I said, the best practice is to actually have multiple ad groups, all with only one individual product theme running through that ad group. So as we go through the guided steps from Google, we will just add in the first ad group name that we want to target. And then once we we've completed and published the campaign, we can go through and add in extra ad groups. And for this example, we're going to be just adding some simple segmentation for products targeting kids and for products targeting babies. So this first group, I'm just going to write kids. And then we just need to add in our bid. And for this bid, we're just going to start it at $2. This will be different depending on your niche. But what you can do is after you first started your campaign, if you do see that you're not getting any clicks in the first 48 hours, you can come back in and increase this bid. And then we want to go and select create campaign. So as it stands now, we have our basic campaign set up, but now we're coming to the important step where we actually need to go through and add in that individual product segmentation so that we can make sure that we've got individual ad groups which are targeting those different types of products that we have. But before we get to that step, it would be great if you could give me a quick subscribe so that I can continue to produce this free Google Ads training. Thank you so much. So, as it stands right now, we just have our individual campaign with one ad group, and we want to go through and add multiple ad groups so that we've got individual product groups being targeted in those individual ad groups. For this example, I'm just going to add two ad groups, one targeting kids products and one targeting baby products. And that's so I can just show you the process of how this is completed. But in your shopping campaign, you may have 5, 10, or 15 different AD groups, depending on the number of products you're selling and how you want to group those products together. The main point that I would be looking at is thinking about it from a searcher's point of view and what search terms would you use for those individual product groups. So firstly, what we want to do Is we want to go into this kids ad group, which we have, and then we want to go to product groups. And then from here you'll see all products. Now, when we hover over all products, you'll see this little plus sign. It's just a matter of clicking on this and then this will add the subdivision. Depending on whether you're using Shopify or woocommerce and what your product feed looks like, you have a number of different options of how you can filter your different products. The most common one I use is either your brand. But you can see for this example, our brand has thrown all of our products into one group. So then we can go through and try the item id. And then you can see from here we have all of our different multiple products. So we just want to put in a filter for kids. And then we select all of these products which have come up, and then we want to save without editing bids. And then the important step is, is that when you see everything else in all products, you want to select this and actually go exclude. And by excluding all of those other products, this is ensuring that in this ad group, we're only going to be showing products that are related to kids. So the next step is, is that we want to go through and add another ad group. So we go back up into our campaign into ad groups. Select create ad group. We want this one to be targeting our baby products. So we write in baby and then after we've added in our bid, we go through the same process. We look at this. All products, press add subdivision. As you said before, you can either use catego or brand ID or product type. But for this example, we're using the item id and this time we're just typing in baby, which then brings in all of our baby products. We select all and once again, we save without editing bids. And remembering that final last step where we need to actually go through and exclude everything else in the all products section. And now we have our shopping campaign where we've got that product segmentation. So we've got all of our products which are targeting our baby products in one ad group and then all of our products which are targeting kids products in our kids ad group. And what this allows us to do is that once we've had a campaign up and running and we're starting to get some different clicks and impressions, we can go through our keywords and we can add individual negative keywords. So, for example, with our baby products, we know that we don't want kids products. So we could add a negative keyword of kids. And then on our kids ad group we could actually go through and add the negative keyword of baby because we don't want any baby product related searches to appear in our kids products. And as we get more and more information in our campaigns and our ad groups, we can go through then and add some extra audience targeting and device targeting if we know this is going to be beneficial for our individual product groupings. So for this example, straight away when we're looking at our babies, we know that it would be beneficial to add audiences at the ad group level which are going to be targeting parents of infants and baby and children's products. But then for our kids ad group, we want to be going through in the ad group level again and adding audiences which are targeting the kids age bracket. So parents are preschoolers and parents of grade schoolers and then pressing save. So while the campaign setup does take a little bit longer, by adding in those individual ad groups with those individual product groups, it will make your Google Ad shopping campaign much more profitable because then it allows you to create some extra audience and demographic targeting which is best suited to your individual products. It also allows you to properly complete your optimizations at that ad group level. Because if you had all of your products in one individual ad group, you can't add negative keywords. Because if you're adding negative keywords to the whole ad group, you may be blocking out key searches for high selling products. And when it comes to optimizing your Google shopping campaign, what I've actually created for you is my optimization checklist. And this is a checklist which you can use, which lets you know what you need to optimize in your shopping campaign every 72 hours, every week, every month, and every 90 days. And if you want to get your free copy today, all you need to do is follow the link in the description below to get your copy. And if you would like to learn more about how to optimize by audiences, demographics and keywords in Google Ads, why don't you go through and watch this video right here? Once again, it's been a pleasure teaching you and I look forward to seeing you on our next video. See ya.