I’m a big fan of Google Shopping. As a user, it provides an easy-to-use platform for comparing products and prices at a glance. Instead of clicking through to eight different websites to find the item I want at the right price, I could make my choice before I even leave the search results page.
Shopping campaigns are invaluable for any e-commerce retailer. At my employer (Periscopix, a Merkle Company), we consistently see them outperform generic search in terms of revenue and cost of sales.
Shopping campaigns have taken many shapes over the years, as Google has responded to demand and made improvements. Many of you may remember Product Listing Ad (PLA) campaigns, Shopping’s previous incarnation.
While creating a campaign structure based on your feed was possible, it certainly wasn’t as simple and intuitive as it became when Shopping campaigns were launched in spring 2014. Also, a brand-new feature was the ability to use campaign priority settings in order to preferentially serve particular products over others, without the need to increase bids.
While at first, the more complex options at your disposal with Shopping seemed daunting in comparison to relatively simple PLAs, we soon found that they enabled us to create campaigns that reflected our clients’ needs, were easier to optimize and performed significantly better.
There are a variety of ways you could choose to structure your Shopping campaigns, but how do you know which one is right for you?
With our diverse range of retail clients, we’ve had the chance to try out dozens of different structures and analyze performance. Here, I’ve collected some of the best and hope to provide inspiration for anyone who’s struggling with deciding which structure is right for them.
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