Implement Google Ads shopping campaigns

Ads in shopping campaigns use data about products in your existing Google Merchant Center product feed, instead of keywords, to decide how and where to show your ads.

Google Ads campaigns can target the Google Shopping Network using the Campaign Type “Shopping Network.” The settings for Google Shopping campaigns include a priority (High, Medium, or Low). You can optionally show your local inventory information in your shopping ads using a campaign-level setting.

You can control which products are shown with your shopping ads by setting up multi-level product groups at the ad group level. Product groups are based on any product attributes (category, product type, brand, condition, product ID, and custom labels), and you can create up to seven levels of product groups to include or exclude from bidding. You can set bids at the lowest level of product groups, using the same bid for all matching products. When the same product is included in more than one campaign, Google Ads uses the campaign-level priority first to determine which campaign (and associated bid) is eligible for the ad auction. When all of the campaigns have the same priority, the campaign with the highest bid is eligible.

Steps to set up Google Ads shopping campaigns

You can set up shopping campaigns by using inventory feed templates for Google Shopping, by using bulksheets, or individually. The following instructions include links to creating individual entities.

  1. Set up your Google Merchant Center account and populate it with product data.

  2. Allow Search, Social, & Commerce to download data from the Google Merchant Center account.

  3. Create a campaign on the shopping network.

  4. Create an ad group within the campaign, and set the default bid for all ads.

    You can override the default bid for individual product groups.

  5. Create product groups for the ad group:

    1. Create an “All Products” product group.

    2. (Optional) Create child product groups.

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    NOTE
    You don’t need to create shopping ads. Even if the ad group doesn’t include ad entities, Google Ads still displays ads for the products.
  6. (Optional) To track clicks on the ad, generate a tracking URL using the Tracking URLs tool, and then add it to the account, campaign, or product group settings.

  7. Monitor performance by generating the AdWords Shopping Performance Report and the Product Group Report.

  8. As necessary:

    1. Edit the campaign settings to adjust the campaign budget.

      If the campaign is part of a portfolio, then the portfolio setting “Auto adjust campaign budget limits” allows Search, Social, & Commerce to optimize the budgets for all campaigns in the portfolio.

    2. Adjust the maximum bid for existing product groups, delete product groups for which you no longer want to create ads, or add a new “all products” product group) or new child product groups to create ads for additional products.

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