Have you ever wished that Shopping campaigns had keywords to allow you to control your bids for your highest revenue terms? You can’t add keywords for Shopping campaigns, but you can use one simple hack to control how high you bid for terms or groups of terms that are more profitable for you.

The most common use of this strategy is to establish manufacturer-specific Shopping campaigns. For many ecommerce advertisers, searches that include a manufacturer’s brand name produce the strongest return on investment. The following table shows Shopping revenue and conversion performance for the month before and the month after we created manufacturer-specific campaigns. In just 30 days, revenue improved 44%, and return on ad spend (ROAS) improved 35%.

roas graphic

Unfortunately, standard Shopping campaign structure does not allow you to control your bids for specific terms, like you can in Search campaigns. So how do you go about increasing bids on manufacturer terms to maximize impressions without increasing your bids for all search terms?

Get Your Priorities Straight

You probably know that shopping campaigns have three priority levels: Low, Medium and High. Setting your priority level to High means that every search eligible for Shopping ads will first attempt to be served via the bids in that campaign. Low priority campaigns will only show ads on terms that could not be served from any of your High or Medium priority Shopping campaigns. By utilizing multiple campaigns at different priority levels, as well as negative keywords, you can funnel traffic between campaigns. This allows you to control your bids for broad search term categories, including brand names.

shopping settings

Set shopping campaign priority settings to send traffic to the right campaigns.

6 Step Setup (15 minutes)

  1. To get started duplicate a current Shopping campaign and name it Manufacturer Brand: “Brand Name”.
  2. Set the new campaign priority to Low for the Manufacturer Brand campaign, and set the original campaign priority level to High.
    • All terms you were showing ads on previously should still be coming in through that first campaign.
  3. Add the manufacturer’s brand name as a negative broad match keyword to your original campaign.
    • Because our original campaign is now blocked from showing ads for searches containing the manufacturer’s brand name, Google will seek out the next highest level priority Shopping campaign (that is, your new Manufacturer Brand campaign) to show an ad. All searches that don’t contain the Manufacturer’s name will still funnel to your original campaign, and your Manufacturer Brand campaign will now only receive impressions on searches that include the manufacturer’s name.
  4. Increase bids across all targets on your new Manufacturer Brand campaign. Because this campaign will only show ads for those brand name searches, which you already know are much more profitable than the generic searches going to your original campaign, you can afford to bid higher for these search terms. Increasing your bids will result in higher impression share and more clicks to help you drive more sales from these top-performing terms.
  5. Decrease bids in your original Shopping campaign, because those highly profitable brand name terms are no longer matching to this campaign, you can expect that this original campaign will become less profitable, and thus you will want to bid lower.

Setting up a manufacturer Shopping campaign only takes 15 minutes, and can lead to enormous improvements in Shopping revenue and ROAS.

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