October 8, 2021
The Ideal QA Process in Digital Advertising
Recently, Google rolled out the new form of Product Listing Ads (PLA) called Google Shopping. Aside from other impactful additions during the Shopping roll-out (i.e. Benchmark KPIs!), priority settings are a new and exciting area for performance and organizational optimizations in Shopping campaigns. These new priority settings allow you to create multiple campaigns and set each to different levels of priority, like a flowchart for Google to follow when matching Shopping ads to search queries. Now I know what you’re thinking, “what does this mean for me?” Well, it means a lot better functionality. Here are two different use cases in which you would want to use these new priority settings.
1. All Products vs Product Specific
Before: If you have run Shopping campaigns or PLA campaigns, then you have probably dealt with the see-saw that is directing traffic to certain products’ specific ad groups as opposed to the All Products ad group. Don’t worry, you were not alone in this balancing act.
After: When creating (or optimizing) Google Shopping campaigns, you should now create at least two separate campaigns. One of these will be an All Products catch-all campaign, and the others will house specified ad groups (based on product type, manufacturer, etc). Once the campaigns have been created, set the priority of your All Products catch-all campaign to Low and the other, more specific campaigns to Medium:
Now you no longer have to race back and forth when making adjustments to make sure that your product specific group has a higher bid than your catch-all group to filter traffic correctly. This setting instructs Google to match queries to the products in this specified campaign and the bids there. If the product is not found in any specific campaign, then use the All Products catch-all campaign and the bid listed there. This way you can have lower bids for certain lower-performing products, brands, or product categories without worrying that a higher All Products bid will steal away that traffic. This priority setting is found at the campaign-level under Shopping settings (advanced):
2. Brand vs Non-Brand
Before: When you have an ROI or CPA goal that is separated out between Brand and Non-Brand, it might be tempting to count all Shopping conversions as Non-Brand and call it a day. Unfortunately, for more well-known Brands, a quick glance through the Search Query Report (SQR) will disprove this all-in-one process. Previously, trying to separate Brand and Non-Brand in a Shopping campaign consisted of downloading SQRs and manually filtering for spend, conversions, revenue, etc. Fortunately, thanks to the new priority settings, this time-consuming process can be left in the past.
After: It has never been easier to separate out Brand and Non-Brand conversions in Shopping campaigns. First, you should create three separate campaigns. The first you will set to High priority and will be your Non-Brand campaign. Within this campaign, be sure to set phrase match negatives of each/any Brand keywords; this will filter that traffic away from this campaign. The second campaign will be set to Medium and is your Brand campaign. If you set the negatives correctly, this Medium priority campaign should only contain Brand queries, and your High priority Non-Brand campaign will pick up all the other traffic. These two campaigns (Brand and Non-Brand) are where you can break out ad groups around your Shopping specifications (i.e. product type, product ID, etc). The last campaign is your All Products catch-all campaign and that should be set to Low priority. It’s important not to forget about this campaign so you don’t miss any traffic that is not picked up by your other campaigns.
The above are just two examples of how useful these priority settings can be. The key to this new set-up is always more granularity, more control, and better analysis. As you move forward in creating or optimizing Google Shopping campaigns, try out the use of these priority settings. Happy Shopping!
