Maybe you are ready to set up your first shopping campaign or maybe you’re thinking about restructuring your current set up. The way your products are organized into shopping campaigns ultimately plays a big role in how much control you have over your product listings. Let’s be honest, when it comes to Shopping campaigns, we want as much control as we can get!
Whether your product selection is wide or narrow, it often helps to divide products into multiple campaigns for budgeting purposes. Below I’ve highlighted a few ways that you might choose to segment your products into different campaigns, keeping in mind that these structures aren’t always mutually exclusive. You might want to mix and match multiple structures, based upon your strategy and goals.
Brand vs. Non-Brand
As you’d expect, brand-related queries can be much more efficient than non-brand. You might consider setting up your shopping campaigns so that branded queries map to one campaign and non-brand to another. This is great for reporting and analysis and especially helpful in instances where budgets need to be capped. This structure has already had pretty extensive coverage, so I won’t go into too much detail, here. If you’re interested in learning more, you should check out Bethany Bey’s SEJ recent post and Martin Roettgerding’s presentation, which offer a wealth of information for mapping queries to dedicated brand and non-brand shopping campaigns.
By Manufacturer Brand
There are many reasons that you might want to set up your campaigns by the manufacturer brand. This campaign set-up allows you to see which manufacturer brands perform best at a glance and can make reporting easier, if performance by brand is of interest. If there are separate budgets for each manufacturer, this set-up makes it easy to allocate accordingly – this is especially important if there are opportunities to co-op spend or if there are manufacturer sales that would justify incremental budget. Furthermore, depending on your geo-targeting, different brands vary in popularity in different areas. You may very well find that segmenting your campaigns by brand allows you to implement different dayparting and geo-modifiers.
By Product Type
Segmenting by product type allows you to group like products in a campaign. It can make management easier because you can use a lot of campaign level negatives that are applicable across all ad groups. It’s also beneficial for quick and easy reporting and analysis by department. Of course it goes without saying that this set up is imperative if and when departments have different marketing budgets.
By Margin
Grouping your products into campaigns by margin is a way to ensure that your highest margin products are taking priority when it comes to budget. Keep in mind, this assumes that your high margin items also have decent conversion rates. It could be that the stability of a lower margin item could be projected to generate more profit than a higher margin product with a low conversion rate. It is important to think about conversion rates and sales stability before segmenting this way and especially before budgeting. Hopefully your high margin products have high conversion rates and then both of these options are one and the same!
By Top Sellers
Depending on the retailer, “Top Sellers” and “High Margin” items could be one and the same, or they could be polar opposites. These are your tried and true products, your ace(s) in the hole. When budgets are low, you might want to make sure that these take priority because even though they might have low or medium margin but you know you can count on them to sell. As I mentioned in the above section about segmenting products by margin, if you decide to segment in either of these two ways, you should consider which route will generate the highest ROAS at the end of the day. Also, keep in mind that it sometimes makes perfect sense to have a campaign with only one product in it, if you want to give said product a dedicated budget.
As I mentioned before, the above segmentation options don’t have to be independent of each other. You may want to layer them. For instance, if your store sells a brand such as Michael Kors (which sells multiple product types including shoes and purses) as well as a brand such as Candies (which also sells shoes and purses but at a significantly lower price point), you may want to divide products by manufacturer brand and product type. You may even decide to break out top performers or high margin items and siphon searches containing your store brand into a different campaign. That’s just one of many examples where multiple layers of campaign segmentation might be helpful.
Are there any other shopping campaign segmentation tactics you’ve used in the past? We’d love to hear about it in the comments!
