The RIGHT Way to Set Up Google Shopping Campaigns | Step-by-Step Tutorial

Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads and in today's video I am going to show you how to set up a standard shopping campaign. Now, the new shiny thing is Performance Max campaigns. In fact, I have an entire Performance Max course free on our YouTube channel. So if you haven't seen that, I will have that video in the description below. I think it's like two hours long. Incredible amount of content there for you and value. However, standard shopping campaigns still are an excellent campaign type, especially if Performance Max doesn't work. Or we're using a hybrid approach which I teach in the Performance Max course. A lot of times for our clients where we're utilizing Performance Max but we're also still using standard shopping campaigns. So there's still a use case for shopping campaigns. They still work wonderfully. I still love them. So in this video I'm going to show you how to set those up. However, I also have an optimization video coming out on how to optimize standard shopping campaigns. So if you're watching this before that is out, make sure to subscribe and stay tuned because that video will be coming. If you're watching this after the optimization video is out, just know that will be in the description below. So you can go check that out after you watch how to Actually set up a Standard Shopping campaign. Enough about that. Let's dive into how to actually get standard shopping campaign set up the right way. All right, so I'm inside of an account and I am simply going to create a new campaign. The objective you don't really need. You can hit create a campaign without a goals guidance. You don't need this. All this does is limit what you're going to see. So Google kind of funnels you in the right direction if you don't know what you're doing. But in this case you don't even need to do that. So just hit create without goal guidance. Then we're going to hit shopping and boom, we're, we're good. Make sure you're going to need purchases. So you see how it's trying to also optimize for phone calls. I don't really need phone calls. It doesn't matter. So I don't want any conversion tracking on phone calls. I only solely want to go after purchases for the shopping campaign and then here. So add products to this campaign. You're going to need to have a merchant center account and in your merchant center account is housed your product feed. Now I have an entire video on how to optimize a product feed that will be in the description below. I highly recommend you check that out if you haven't yet. Product feeds being optimized really improve shopping ad performance. And I have a real case study inside of that video, so make sure you check that out. But in this case I'm going to link. I already have my Merchant center account linked here. If you didn't have this linked yet, it would ask you to link a merchant center account to that. So you need that set up before you would actually be able to pull your products here. But I already have a Merchant center account so I'm going to click that and we're linked and ready to go. Now Google really is pushing Performance Max. So here they're trying to push you into that. We don't want that for this case. We want standard shopping campaigns. So now I have to come down and click standard shopping. And again they're going to throw this notification switch to Performance Max campaign. You just can ignore that if you're trying to set up the standard shopping campaign. So we're going to hit continue. Okay, now I'm in the campaign settings. So here we're going to make a. Create a name. So I'm just doing shopping and then we'll do sectionals and your. You can do inventory filters. There's no need for that in most cases. So in this case I do not want a filter. I will show you how I'm going to segment by product groupings as I get into the ad group builds. There's a local products thing. This is, I'm doing a national campaign. So this local products doesn't mean anything to me right now. This is something though. If you're marketing in a local area that you can turn on, that's a whole separate rabbit hole to go down. In most cases people are just who are setting shopping campaigns up. They're E commerce companies and they're targeting the United States or whatever country they're in. And so this local products piece we're not going to talk about today. And 90% of cases I don't even need to utilize it. Then we have campaign URL options. I don't have any parameters. I'm setting here. We have auto tagging on. So there's nothing I need to do there. More than likely nothing you are going to need to do as well. Okay. Bidding and budget. So if you are building a brand new account or you're brand new to Google Ads or this is a brand new campaign and you've never ran shopping ads before, so you've never ran a Shopping campaign. You've never ran a Performance Max campaign. You have no historical data on any of these products that you're about to run. What bidding strategy should you do? In most cases, I recommend manual CPC or Maximize Clicks and you can also set a maximum, maximum CPC bid limit if you need to. So you're saying, hey, I don't want to pay more than like $10 a click, whatever. The number would make sense for you. I usually recommend doing manual CPC or Maximize clicks for brand new accounts or brand new campaigns that I've never ran shopping ads before. If you're running an account already and you are just building a shopping campaign for a structural change, then you can go right into a Target ROAS bid strategy that is at the goal or at the roas that you historically have been hitting in your other campaign structures for your shopping ads. Again, this is. Maybe you're. You're moving away from Performance Max back into standard shopping. Then you can go directly in to Target roas bidding. The other thing you can, and you would just have to test this to see if it works for you. Even if you're a brand new account or creating a brand new campaign and you've never ran shopping ads before, you can go to Target roas and if you just set it to like something super small, like 50%, that can trigger it as well to start spending and collecting data on your products. I don't normally do that, but every once in a while I test it. A lot of times I just go straight to Max Clicks or manual cpc. I have also an entire bidding masterclass free on our YouTube channel. I will have the link to that video in the description below. It has everything you need to know about bidding and bid strategies and it's very relevant to what you would need to know in regards to what bid strategy you should be using for your shopping campaigns and when. But just know if you're new, usually start with Max Clicks or manual cpc. If you're just doing a structural change, then you can go directly to Target roas based off the sort of historical performance you've been hitting in those other campaigns. All right, so we're going to just do Max clicks for now. Budget here is just whatever your budget is, if you've ever seen my Performance Max course you'll hear me say I recommend $50 per day minimum for shopping standard shopping campaigns. That's not necessary. You can start with whatever budget you have. What I do recommend though is you're going to want at least to get, you know, 10 plus clicks a day. And then if you have a large inventory, that actually makes makes things a bit harder. But in this case we're going to start at $100 per day now. Campaign priority. I'm only building one shopping campaign right now, so I don't even need to worry about campaign priority. And if you're just building one shopping campaign campaign, you're not going to need to worry about this either. However, there is a play for campaign priorities. If you're doing multiple campaigns or if you're doing a query sculpt structure, I will have more information and dive deeper into that in the optimization video. You don't really need to worry about that right now in the setup video. And even Google has low as your default. And so just keep it set to this. If you're just building one shopping campaign, basically what priority does is if you set it to high and you're running a query sculpt structure or you're running different products and different campaigns, you're just pinging to Google come this is my high priority campaign versus those others for those products. And this also gets used a lot for query sculpting. If you're trying to funnel traffic into different campaigns. Again, it's kind of this advanced structure build out. I will actually talk about that, break it down, show you how to use it in the optimization video. For now, don't even worry too much about that and just keep this set to the default which is low then network. So here they're trying to throw you into the search partner network. I usually turn that off when I'm first starting out. As my shopping campaign evolves and I get it dialed in and it's hitting my performance goals, then I will turn this on for extra ad impressions. But search partners is not the search network. So if you're on the Google search engine, that is not the search partner. Search Partners contains a bunch of other websites that Google is linked with in the search partner network. So it can work and if it works, great. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And so when I'm building a brand new campaign out, I like to remove as many variables as possible that would reduce my chances of success. So here I just start normally without search partners on devices, this is going to show for all I'll show you, you know where you could change that later. And again, I'll talk about this more in the optimization video. Locations. All right, so we're going to be targeting the United States. If you've seen any of my videos on setups of campaigns you're going to know. I make sure you got to hit this location options and it's going to ask for target. So present presence or interest is what they. They're going to default you to. Do not have that on hit presents people in or regularly in your targeted location. Why do you want this? The reason you want that is this is very broad. Google will show and you have to get kind of in the weeds to do it. But. But Google will show, let's say you're targeting the United States. Google will actually show ads to people in Europe or Mexico because they think they might show interest in purchasing. But it doesn't mean anything if you don't ship to Mexico or Europe. And if you're just targeting United States, you just want people who are in the United States. So just make sure to have presence setting on. Then we're going to have start date. That's just going to be the day that you're setting this up. End date keep to none. There's really no reason to even have an end date on. If you need to end a campaign, just pause it out. So I don't know why they've ever set the end dates up. Now ad groups. So it's going to put you in this ad group creation. Usually you can only do one during the campaign setup. So for now I'm going to set it to sectionals. But I'll show you how you actually do product ad group creation. So now I'm going to hit create campaign. Okay, so the campaign has been created and the ad group as well. So you'll see sectionals. Right. But what do we see? We see all products. Okay. So right now Google automatically will do that. They, they don't really allow you to do any segmentation until you are actually built the campaign out and the ad group out. So in this case, I don't want to advertise all of our products. Now this is for a furniture company called Home Reserve. I want to segment. We have sectionals. We have deep seat sectionals and then we also have couches. So those are three different product types for us. And in standard shopping I actually want those tight categories usually segmented out. Gives me better data on them granularly. So I know how is sectionals doing? How is deep seat doing? How is couches doing? I also get the search query data at that product group level when I'm looking at those ad groups. So I am going to come in here and this is just standard sectional. So I'm going to hit save without editing bids, I don't need to edit bids because we're running max clicks anyways right now. So there it has now segmented my standard seat sectionals out. This segmentation that I just did by product type, this all comes from your product feed. So again, video for product feed optimization is in the description below. Your product feed is super, super vital. So all of the segmentation you're to do, including these custom labels which I talk about in the product feed video, all of this is pulled from your feed. And so this standard sectional C, we have that in our feed and that's how I'm able to segment by that. So that's why product feed highly, highly important. Now Google, when I do that split automatically, also said, all right, we'll have everything else in all products in here. You don't want that. In fact, I've done so many audits where I go in there and they, they have ad group split out and I'm like, oh guys, you forgot to exclude the everything else. So this is like running all products in one ad groups right now. All you did was segment the standard seat sectional from a view standpoint, but not from the limiting the products there. So here what you want to do is exclude everything else because if I didn't exclude that, couches would be showing in here, deep seat sectionals would be showing in here and any other products that we may have running in the feed. So now I just have my standard C sectionals broken out. I can also, if I want to go further, I can go by item ID and I can actually individually segment out product IDs that I want to have more control or easier reporting on without needing to go into like more advanced reporting. I can see it right here in this view. And if I was running manual CPC bidding, I could actually bid differently for each of those products. So that's also a way you can segment out by the individual product if you want. So now that that's set up, let me build out another ad group real quick. I'm going to do that for our couches. And again, just spits me right into this. All products, we don't want that. So now I'm going to go to product type. I've got couch, I'm going to hit that. And now I need to make sure I exclude all products. Again, exclude. Now we only have eight couches in this for right now. So I'm actually going to segment all of those out and then that way I have all of that data right there for those individual couches we have I keep the everything else even though there's going to be nothing in there right now. Just in case new couches get added to the feed and I forgot to have them segmented out, I don't want to prevent those from not showing ever. Okay, so now I have sectionals ad group built and set up correctly. I have couches ad group built and set up correctly. Few last things I like to tidy up on a brand new standard shopping build out is is going in to my devices. Normally I don't like running tablets in the beginning. Now again, this is a brand new campaign build, right? If I had historical data, let's say I'm just doing a structural change and so you're already on troas and tablet does okay for you, then don't do this. But if you're building a brand new shopping campaign, which I know many of you are and you don't have any historical data yet, then remove tablets. Once you get the campaign dialed in, then I bring tablets back and I'll test it. Same with Search Partner Network As I talked about earlier in the campaign setting build, why do I exclude tablets? Tablets normally makes up the smallest percent of conversions for just about all of our accounts in our client portfolio. If it works, awesome. However, as I said earlier when it came to like the Search Partner network setting, I like to remove as many variables as possible that would prevent getting to a high performance quickly. Tablets is normally something that doesn't work as well as I know desktop and mobile will. And again it brings in the smallest percent of conversions even if it does work. And so I just like to explain exclude it right away and I'll start off with desktop and mobile and then I review this data again. In my optimization video I will talk more about devices and bid adjustments, but usually on a brand new standard shopping campaign build I just go ahead and exclude tablets and then I'll test that later on once I have performance dialed in. Okay, Negative keywords. I also make sure to come in here and add negative keywords that I want to add. So here we already have lists that have been built out. I have an entire video on negative keywords. That video will be in the description below. But just remember, if you build in a brand new campaign, it doesn't automatically apply negative keywords. So you're going to have to come in here and apply any of your negative keyword lists or add any negative keywords that you would want to add before before ads start firing and you spend money on irrelevant traffic. So make sure on brand new shopping campaign builds. Always add those negative keywords in. There you go. You now know how to set up a standard shopping campaign. I hope you got great value from this. I know I teased the optimization video a lot through this video. Make sure to check that out again. It's not launched yet. It's coming. And if you're seeing this before it's launched, just subscribe so you get Stay tuned. If you're watching this video after I've already launched it, then the how to Optimize a standard Shopping campaign video will be in the description below. So check it out again. Hope you got good value. If you have questions, put them in the comments below. I will do my best to answer those that I can, or if I know the answers to, and I will see you on the next video. Sam.