The First 90 Days of A New Google Ads Shopping Campaign: Here's Exactly What to Do

Okay, you just launched a shopping campaign. Now what the heck do you do? Right? Well, a lot of people screw up, they start getting their dirty fingers in there and making all these changes too quickly. So I've got a roadmap for you for the first 90 days. Now listen, this is going to be different for different businesses with different budgets, right? So if you're, you know, coming at this with a huge budget, this will look differently to you than someone who's coming at it with a small budget, right? And also this will depend on other variables within your business like SKU count and whether or not you even have top selling categories or products yet, etc. So this is kind of a general roadmap that I like to use when I'm training people or my team in regards to how to how you should be like thinking what you should be looking at. Month one, month two and 1 3. But this will vary. But I do have this all roadmap out for you. So let's go ahead and dive right in. Okay, so you just got your campaign launched, right? So we're talking post launch here. By the way, lots of video content on this channel on how to build, you know, shopping campaigns the right way in the beginning. So I'm not going to talk too much there. This is post launch. What do you do month one, what do you do month two and three. Okay, so month one, this is foundation building. At this point, a lot of people like to get their hands in too early and start optimizing way too quickly and they just screw everything up. So all you're doing month one is you're just building the foundation and you have a couple goals. Month one, right? You want a bare minimum of 10 clicks per day. That should be very easy to do for standard shopping. You want to focus on your top sellers. This could be brands, this could be product categories, or it could be individual SKUs. Individual SKUs would have to have an insane amount of volume for me to just try to isolate those in the structure. And I'll talk about that real quick as well. And then goals starting to generate conversions. So just to rewind again, this video is post build. This is. You've already built the shopping campaign, but what could this look like real quick? Because I'm saying top sellers, right? If you're a company who already knows like these are our top brands, categories or even individual SKUs, usually in my trainings you're going to hear me say isolate top sellers from the beginning. A lot of times I'm saying give 80% of the budget, if not more. If you, if you have all of your budget and you can do it, give it all to top sellers, right? But then you've got everything else here as well. And you could exclude, you exclude top sellers from that. These are kind of your unknowns on how they're going to do. And this would be like 20% of your budget right now. Now if you have a small budget and, or you don't really know what's going to work yet, then you can do one campaign. And again, if you know your top sellers, you would segment them by a product ad group here and then everything else would be in here as well. You could even go crazier there. And like if you really have different, let's say you know your brands very well or categories, you would have top sellers. If you have top sellers and then instead of everything else you would, you would lump this or segment this out further. But you could have like a Puma campaign, Adidas campaign, Nike campaign, if somehow you're selling, you know, sporting apparel brands or something like that. So the structure could depend here a little bit depending on what you know in regards to what more than likely going to be top sellers for you if you already know and then what your budget is. And so this is a very consolidated effort. This is usually going to be someone who has like a small budget or maybe, maybe they don't know what's actually going to work right away. And then this type of structure, you know, have a, you're going to have like a decent budget, right. And in a lot of cases $5,000 plus per month minimum in regards to, and that's not like a hard rule, but if you had like 5k plus and you know, kind of some top sellers here and then you have this everything else, then this, you could split 80% budget and then 20% budget here just fine and be okay in that route. Right. Because why you want to focus on top sellers if you know what your top sellers are? And that will get down to the optimizations for month one that I'll talk about here in a. But KPIs to, to monitor, right? It's clicks. Am I actually getting my, my sort of 10 clicks per day? Right? You, you should easily be doing that click through rate. Are you getting like a 0.8 to a 1? This isn't like, don't freak out if you're not. But if you're like super under a 0.8, there's something off there and that will lead to like you needing to look at one of the optimizations for month one, which is just reviewing the search term report. This is benchmark. Don't freak out if you see a 0.8 to a 1. This is actually healthy people, you know, they, they, they're used to seeing search click through rates. Search click through rates are going to be higher, right? Shopping will be lower. 0.8 to 1% click through rate is like a benchmark average. And so, and listen, I, you know, I have clients who, we have high click through rates on shopping too. But those are matured, optimized accounts. Use just this as a benchmark in regards to, you know, oh, if I'm way below point eight, there's something maybe off. Okay, so that's just a KPI to monitor conversions. We want to actually start getting conversions, right? So this is something you have to look out for. Conversion rate, something you want to be looking at. Not as much month one because you might not have enough volume yet to even judge a conversion rate. But you know, these two play together. Conversions, conversion rate, then benchmark cpc. This is going to be a metric what Google shares with you in regards to. Here's what the benchmark is for these products in the auctions, right? So if the benchmark is $1, that means really to be competitive you should be at at least a dollar bid. So if you're bidding like $0.50, okay, and benchmarks one, that's probably and you're not getting a lot of impressions and clicks that bingo, ding, ding, ding. It's probably because like oh my bid is just way too low to be competitive in the auctions right now. So this is a metric to take a look at optimizations, right? You're going to want to be adding negative keywords because you're going to get a lot usually in the beginning you're going to monitor search term report. That's going to help you find negative keywords. And also if your click through rate's pretty bad, this will tell you that. Why? You know, because like I've seen people launch shopping campaigns and it's just like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The traffic you are getting or showing is really bad. And usually that means they just have a bad product feed at that point and they need to go back and actually set up a proper optimized product feed. By the way, lots of videos on shopping campaigns and feeds and all of that. Those videos I'll try to get in the description below. If not, I've got them on the channel on, on all of what I'm talking About here, then monitor conversion tracking. Is your tracking even working right? So if you're getting like a bunch, let's say you get a couple hundred clicks and you have not seen a conversion yet. Like, do we even have conversion tracking set up correctly? So this is something you want to keep an eye on like a hawk. And then proper budget allocation. You should be making sure your top sellers are getting a good portion of your budget. Again, if you know what your top sellers are. Remember, and I've mentioned this before, I've seen people, they like try to give like, oh, here are my top sellers. And it's like two individual products that maybe have had like a couple conversions historically or something, or there's not a lot of massive volume on that and then they don't get anything moving. Don't do that. Like, in regards, like, if that were the case, let's say if you're starting out and you're like, hey, I have these two, I have two SKUs that they claim are top sellers. And I'm like, well, they've got to be like doing an insane amount of volume for your business for me to really try to hone in just on two SKUs right now. Because Google really wants a lot of data. And so I would say, all right, what are those two SKUs? And they would, they could tell me. Let's say it's like going back to like, you know, the Nike Puma Adidas thing. You know, let's say they're like a sporting retailer. And I would say, what are those two SKUs that really do well? And it's like, oh, well, they're, you know, they're actually one of the newer running shoes that have come out. So we've got a Nike running shoe that does really well. Then we have like an Adidas running shoe that does really well. I would say, cool, you can focus on those for sure. But maybe let's just have like in your top sellers campaign where you're spending most of your 80% of budget, you would have Nike running shoes as a product ad group. You would have Adidas running shoes as a product ad group. And then that's those individual two SKUs and you would have a focus on in those. But you're also running your other Nike running shoes and Adidas running shoes, at least in the beginning, because those just two individual SKUs might not actually add. Just a campaign level where you try to basically isolate. Just two SKUs might not take off right away because there's not enough data points there for Google to really want to run with. So think consolidation but you can still isolate your top sellers in that. Now a lot of companies I work with, usually it's like categories or actual brands that we're super focused on in the beginning and then there'll be winners of individual products within there. That's way further down the line. But just try again. We're going back into like build out here. Like you know this is pre the 90 day plan but this is actual the structure of the account stuff. But just don't try to isolate like a couple individual SKUs if that's what you're trying to do. It just usually won't give take off for you. So try to think consolidation but also you can sort of focus and isolate those top sellers within that structural build out. Okay, now month two, right? You just got all the foundation stuff going. Your goal now is to optimize to get 30 plus conversions. And if you don't know your top sellers yet, you want to start identifying those top sellers. KPIs to monitor. It's going to be the same as month one clicks. Click the rate conversions, conversion rate, benchmark cpc. So not much there. Right. Then optimizations. Well it's very similar. You're going to add negative keywords, you're going to monitor search number report and you're going to review budget allocation to make sure you're getting a lot here which hopefully is generating your conversion volume. Right. So what else can you do? Now you can start actually reviewing your bid strategy. Month one. Especially if you watch my training I usually start with manual CPC and in some cases like search and stuff, max clicks. People will argue that. Some people will probably put comments in this video and be like no, you, you should start right away on a T row as bid strategy for shopping or something like I don't do it. And by the way I have like you know, a hundred clients and we get 150 companies that reach out to us a month for consulting. So I get a large sample size of of accounts to look at and so I've got a lot of data there. Can it work? Can you start a brand new campaign off with you know, smart bidding right away out of the gate? Yeah, you, I've seen it work but a lot of times I also see it not work and it suffocates. And then people reach out like hey my campaign's not getting impressions or clicks and I go through everything with them like well you just, you don't have any volume yet and so the smart bidding doesn't quite know what to do. So I generally recommend starting manual cpc usually on this foundation side, right. Of just getting going, do as you please there. You don't have to a hundred percent listen to me and if someone wants to argue this in the comments, I will not respond to it because it's like at this point it's just like this is what I'm recommending. Try whatever you want but. But if you get into that point where it's not working, then go back to trying to test with manual cpc. So with that, if you are, let's say getting conversion volume now and depending on the volume there, you could start looking at adjusting your bid strategy now and moving from manual to like a troas bid strategy. As long as you've got a good amount of conversion volume. And from there I'd want to see within a 30 day period, about 30 plus conversions. So if you're not, not quite there yet and you're still trying to find your way, that's fine and that's normal. But again you could have, if you had a bigger budget and you're getting more data than someone had a smaller budget, you could move there quite quickly. So you're starting to get into an optimization cycle in month two and then month three is where really where you can start trying to scale. Okay. And so here you should hopefully be getting to 30 plus conversions. If you're not there already here you're testing TRO as bid strategy. If you didn't already kind of move there in month two and depending on volume you could actually start testing performance max. Right. And I'll talk about that in a minute. So KPIs to monitor clicks, click through, rate conversions, conversion rate, benchmark cpc, all of that. Is it new? What is new is here ROAS and impression share metrics. Okay, ROAS is like what is my return that I'm actually generating now from this campaign? So here you're trying to start scaling and you're trying to actually eventually start moving into hopefully more of like profitability goals. Right. You'll notice month one and two by I did not talk anything about profit and trying to optimize for profit. You're not there, you're trying to just get volume coming in, you're trying to get heat. But month three in most cases you can have enough heat here where now you're like, all right, what ROAS is am I generating from my campaign or campaigns? Right, Depending on the structure you have with your shopping campaign or campaigns. And can I actually start now? Optimizing towards return on ad spend goals. Okay, I have a full video on how to optimize shopping campaigns. I'll have that below. So I go deeper there as well. Like, like impression share metrics. Impression share metrics. What you're looking here is like am I being competitive now in the marketplace, especially if you have top sellers. So these are two really key metrics to be looking at if you want to know more about those, if those are confusing to you. And what I'm talking about here, I don't want to go into how to optimize a campaign in this because that's a whole other training. Right. So that video on how to optimize shopping campaigns will be below. But these are two key metrics now in month three to be reviewing now optimizations, it's going to be basically the same as what you were doing. Lots of negative keywords, monitoring your search term report, budget allocation, testing T row as bid strategy and, and reviewing top sellers still. Right. Again, you'll notice month one, two and three, really what you're building towards is maximizing those top sellers. That at the end of the day, Google Ads is about like two things. Well, number one, it's about acquiring customers, right? New customers. And then your optimization cycles of what you're like really looking at in your campaigns is like, and it doesn't matter what campaign type it is, but it's like maximize what's doing really well and minimize and try to figure out how to get things to work on the stuff that doesn't do really well. Right? That's the game. It's like maximize what works, minimize what doesn't work or figure out how to make it work. That's the forever ending game you're in. So you're, you've built your way here and hopefully now month three, you're at this 30 plus conversions. You're on smart bidding. And now you could look into, because people ask me this, you could look into moving to performance max testing. Okay. And how I would do that is let's say I have this build now, okay, Where I have a top, I have true top sellers. These are generating, it's going to look really bad, but these are generating 30 plus conversions. Okay, this little highlighter pin is not great, but this is getting me 30 plus conversions in a month. I'm, I'm making really good performance here. I will now take my top sellers and test them in a performance max campaign and see if I can get some amplification there. That is usually though around month three or after, before I'm getting there again, it could be month two just depending on volume of conversions in the data that I'm getting. So that's going to vary client to client. But that is now a scaling strategy you can start moving to. All right, so kind of what does that look like from a flow chart is like again, month one foundation, you're either creating a top seller campaign and creating and everything else you don't have to remember, you don't have to do this. But here you're just trying to get 10 clicks per day and you're trying to get some conversion volume coming in and then you're trying to find the heat, trying to find what products are going to start doing well. Products, product categories of brands. Month two, you're in optimization, right? So you're, you're really here, you're trying to get to 30 plus conversions in time. And so now you're trying to really analyze what's working and what's not, trying to identify top performers if you don't already know here. And then ideally, right, you're really on your way to 30 plus conversions. Then month three is where you start to scale. And this is where we're either testing to bidding strategy if we're not already doing it month two or we're starting to test performance max campaigns now for those top sellers that we have. And again, focus top sellers first. Huge, huge thing right there. Now we can start expanding further. By the way, a lot of this depending on the client and the budget. Like search. If you've already got the budget, I'm probably already doing this month one as well with a specific budget to it. Remarketing. I'm probably already going to be doing that month one and then dynamic search ads again if I'm already launching search because they have the budget, I'm probably already doing that month one now if it's a small account, then I don't even worry about search campaigns until I figure out what works for shopping. Then I take the search query data that works there and build search campaigns from there. Remarketing though is something usually if you get enough volume going and have the audiences already, it just makes sense to implement remarketing. By the way, I have a video on how to set up display remarketing and so that video will be in the description below on that. So one thing to remember though, this is a long term investment. Profitability may take three plus months. Everything I just broke down for you is looking at those months and what to guide you hopefully in regards to KPIs to be looking at and optimizations to be actually doing. Again, a lot of people try to over optimize too quickly. Hopefully this gives you the roadmap on thinking it will vary. Right? If you're coming at this with a very large budget, this may look different from someone who's coming at it from a small budget. But this framework kind of tends to work your time frame of this data period, like moving from month one to three sort of the data and the KPIs. If you're spending a lot and you're getting a lot of data, you're just advancing the timeline a bit there. And so you could be doing like month three optimizations at the end of month one if you're a big spender and getting a lot of data or don't be too scared or afraid if you're like at month three and you still haven't really caught heat yet and you're moving to P Max test and all this other expansion, don't be. That's cool too. Like as long as you finding products that are working and you're starting to get your way into finding some profitability with those like core products that are doing well for you or categories or brands, then it's not like you failed. If you're not exactly here yet too. I mean there are some small budget spenders I've seen. It just takes a little bit more time to get there and then you can start working on hopefully after like sort of month three, you're moving more into scaling and profitability optimizations which then is kind of a whole nother other optimization roadmap. I hope you got some value there. Hopefully that helps guide you a little bit as you've just launched a shopping campaign or campaigns. Hey, if you want to upgrade further with your Google Ads knowledge, you want to learn more, you want to get more direct access from me. I do like a weekly Q and A and even actually video feedback feedback reviews in our group called PPC Copilot. I have course material in there as well and then further ongoing training. The link to that group will be in the description below. I would love to see you inside or let's say you're like ah, I just don't like I don't have the time. I need to get an expert in here to really help me. Then we offer a free audit if you qualify. So the link to go get that free audit will be in the description below as well. My team will do a whole again if you qualify. But my team will do a whole breakdown and review of your account and give you practical recommendations on on how to improve. Then you can take it from there. A lot of people just end up hiring us in that case. So again, that's free if you qualify for the free audit that will be in the description below to get started there. If not, you don't want to do any of that. That's cool too. I'll see you on the next video.