How to Optimize a Google Shopping Campaign

Campaign Tracking

Set up Google Analytics Tracking URLs and track your conversions in Google Analytics.

Negative Keywords

To prevent paying for irrelevant clicks, you can configure negative keywords in your Adwords campaign. In your campaign settings, on the Dimensions tab, select search terms to see the keywords that are coming in. Then, you can start adding the negative keywords on the keywords tab, in the negative keywords section.

Weekly Bid/Budget Adjustment

On a weekly basis, you should review and adjust your bid and daily budget. Small changes in the bid can result in big changes in traffic and conversions. It needs to be maintained at least once per week because the competition is changing all the time.

Scheduling Ads

With Shopping Campaigns, your daily budget could be exhausted before the end of the day. Please contact Adwords and ask them about showing the ads evenly over the day, or scheduling the ads to only appear at certain times of the day.

Bidding by Price Range

We can help you set up your feed so you can set your bids based on the price of the product. This allows you to bid more on higher-priced items, and less on lower-priced items. To learn more, see: Google Shopping Bidding by Price Break.

Product Groups

On the Product Groups tab of your Shopping Campaign Ad Group, you can click the plus icon next to All Products to set up different bids for different groups of products. You will want to bid higher for high price/margin items, and lower for low price/margin items. You can set up a target by the following fields:

Category
Brand
Item ID
Condition
Product Type
Custom Label 0
Custom Label 1
Custom Label 2
Custom Label 3
Custom Label 4

Filtering

If there are items you do not want listed, you can filter these from your feed. You can filter items individually, or by attributes such as price, category, markup, or any other product attribute. For instructions, see our Filtering Techniques and Instructions.

Titles and Descriptions

The first 70 characters of the title and the first 140 characters of the description play a key role in determining the ranking of your items in Google Shopping. Include words that accurately describe the item. Irrelevant information here will lower your ranking. Do not include boilerplate text, shipping terms, availability information, calls to action, block capitals, etc. See our keyword optimization page for more details.

Additional Resources

Google Shopping Best Practices Guide - free: This official Google guide covers optimizing your feed, setting up product targets, bidding strategy, and analytics.
The Google Shopping Guide for Business Owners - free: This guide covers bidding strategy with product targets, and includes examples of how to best use the information from Google Analytics.