Automation is slowly but surely taking over the retail and e-commerce world. An indicator of this is Google Ads, Shopping, and Dynamic Search Ads features that cater to blooming e-commerce businesses looking to drive traffic and boost sales.
Beginners guide to Google Shopping Priority
Google shopping campaigns help to advertise and sell your products through Google, using their formats. Often, businesses have one product in more than one campaign but don’t have the budget to promote it in all campaigns. So how do you prioritize? This is where priority campaign bids come in.
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What is Google Shopping Campaign Priority?
Imagine you’re selling a t-shirt that’s part of your basic collection of products. It’s also part of your summer collection, therefore a part of both Shopping Campaigns. But your budget is set only for summer ad campaigns, so when a user uses a search term related to t-shirts, you want the bid to be taken from the summer campaign, not the basics one.
Using Google Shopping Campaign Priority, you can prioritize one campaign over the other so Google Ads knows which one to take a bid from. This feature is only needed when you have one product in multiple shopping campaigns.
By default, every campaign priority is set to Low. You can change this to Medium or High, depending on where you want the bid to be taken from. The campaign with the highest priority always bids first.
you can use campaign priority to
- edit maximum CPC bids, tracking templates, or custom parameters and destination URLs for non-subdivided product groups
- promote certain product groups across all your campaigns
- determine which campaign’s bid to use for a product when the same product is included in multiple campaigns
- subdivide campaign products according to freely-assigned values with custom labels
Why prioritizing shopping campaigns is crucial?
Digital marketing can use a huge chunk of a business’s marketing budget, so you don’t want to waste it on promoting the wrong products. By changing the priority of a campaign, you can promote the right products at the right time and against the right search query.
You may also have a set budget for one campaign and not for the other, so prioritizing campaigns will prevent bids from being taken from another campaign that isn’t ready, has been put on hold, or doesn’t have enough funds.
The bids are put forth for space on the search engine when a user enters a relevant search term. It’s a great way to promote offers, stock clearances, and discounts. If two campaigns share a product, out of which one is a sale campaign, you can set the priority as High so that the chances of conversions are higher.
How does a campaign priority setting determine the bid?
By using these rules: The high-priority campaign will bid.
If one campaign has been set to High priority, and another with the same product to Medium priority, then the bid goes from the first one, regardless of how much the second campaign is set to.
However, if the high-priority campaign runs out of budget, the bid goes from the next lowest one, which might be the Medium or Low campaign, depending on your setting.
If you’ve reserved funds, your budget is spread evenly so your higher priority campaign may not bid even if it has the funds. This is the Standard delivery method- in this case, a lower priority campaign with non-reserved funds may participate in the auction to make up for the ring-fenced budget.
Sometimes, multiple campaigns may have the same priority setting. In this scenario, the campaign with the highest bid is used, if there is a product related to the search term entered by a user.
How to set your Google Shopping priority?
Method # 1. Google’s default way
You’ll need an AdWords account to make use of Google Shopping and campaign priority setting. It’s reasonably easy to change the priority of a campaign:
- Log in to your AdWords account and click ‘Campaigns’ in the page menu.
- Select the campaign you want to edit.
- Click ‘Settings’ on the page menu, then expand ‘Campaign Priority’.
- Change the priority as you wish to Low, Medium, or High, then hit ‘Save’.
Method # 2.AdNabu’s hands-free way
Although setting up might be easy, it takes quite a while to understand the workings of Google Shopping and Google Ads. If your business doesn’t have the time or the resources but desperately needs this feature to promote your product feed, then you can sign up for free on AdNabu to get all the help you need.
You can learn exactly how to leverage Google Ads and all its features to increase conversions by more than 30%. The company creates and monitors multiple ad campaigns catering to your business goals, and can identify the best-performing ones with high ROI.
Best practices to prioritize shopping campaigns
Best Practice # 1. Prioritizing subsets.
Consider splitting products into smaller, more manageable groups that you can monitor during special retail periods. For example, a subgroup for sale items is ideal as you can prioritize this as High and have it promoted towards relevant search terms.
Best Practice # 2. Using negative keywords.
Keywords don’t play too big a role in Google Shopping, which is image-heavy, but negative keywords can improve the efficiency of your shopping ads. These keywords prevent your ads from appearing when you don’t want them to. You can choose from the exact match, phrase match, or broad match negative keywords depending on how narrowed down you want the process to be.
Things to Consider while prioritizing your shopping campaigns
Consideration # 1. What products do you want to prioritize.
Subsets are crucial in an effective shopping campaign. Do you want to promote the sale of products? Then setting the sales campaign priority to High will work. If you’ve set a Standard delivery method, then make sure the next highest bid has the same products and a strong enough budget to support bids.
Consideration # 2.Capturing specific users.
1 in 3 online product searches starts with a Google search. A lot of these are specific search queries from users who know what they want and now want to see where to find it. Instead, prioritize generic searches. By doing this, you can avoid spending crucial ad spend on these specific customers who are already likely to come to your site through special ‘long tails’ keywords.
Conclusion
Campaign priority setting is a crucial Google Ads feature for those with thousands of products and multiple ad campaigns. You can now delegate your ad spend judiciously while also promoting only what you want, and nothing else!
