Creating Shopping Campaigns (Custom Ad Groups)

How to build Shopping campaigns based on custom ad groups

Updated over a week ago

Your S&O account allows you to customize everything about your Shopping campaign setup, including how to structure your ad groups.

To get started, click Create Campaign from either the Update Bids, Add Products, or Campaigns Tab in Campaign Manager. You'll then need to apply your basic campaign settings:

Campaign Settings

  • Name your campaign

  • Set the status to Enabled

  • Set your Country of Sale (where you are based and ship products from)

Shopping Settings

  • Campaign Priority - When you more than one Shopping campaign active, this tells Google which campaign should serve ads before any others. A High Priority campaign will always serve ads before a Medium Priority. which will always serve ads before a Low Priority. If this is your first or only Shopping campaign, setting this to Medium is generally recommended.

  • Enable Local Ads (Google Only) - You must be eligible for Google's Local Inventory Ads. Generally speaking, leave this as Disable.

  • Include Search Partners (Google Only) - Google search partners are sites in the Search Network that partner with Google to show ads on their search results. Enabling this may cause your Shopping Ads to appear on Search Partners. If you are under budget constraints, we recommend leaving this as No.

Location Settings

From this selection you may choose which Locations (ie country, state) to include and/or exclude in your targeting. Type into either field to prompt a selection drop down list to choose from. Note that Location Inclusion is Required while Exclusion is Optional.

Location Options (Advanced)

These settings can be used for further optimize your location targeting to prevent your ads from showing to less relevant audiences. We typically recommend using the default setting "People in my targeted location."

Proximity Targeting

Also known as Radius Targeting, this allows you to further optimize your targeting to show ads only to those in a specific radius around a select town, city, zip code for example. For the most part, we recommend ignoring this type of targeting for Shopping campaigns.

Bidding Strategy

Campaigns created using Sales & Orders only support a Manual CPC Bidding Strategy, although you also have the option to include Enhanced CPC bidding - however, we highly recommend NOT enabling Enhanced CPC as it can cause you to overspend.

Your Default Bid set here is simply the default Bid set at the Campaign level. In later steps, your S&O account will apply unique bids per product.

Device Settings (Expandable Menu)

From here you can set your Device-Level bid adjustments at the campaign level. These modifiers can be set to either Increase or Decrease. When setting a bid adjustment here, your campaign will automatically increase or decrease bids for your products by a set percentage for any given device.

Budget

Apply your Daily Budget or the total amount you wish to spend in a given day on your Shopping Campaign. It is important to note that Google can spend MORE than your given Daily Budget in a single day, however never more than the average you would spend in a given 30 day period.

Generally, you can ignore the Final URL Suffix setting as channels like Google and Bing support Auto Tagging for URLs.

After completing all required fields, click Create Campaign if you are satisfied.

Now, the app will have created ad groups by default, however you may choose to pause these if you wish to fully customize your ad group structure.

Head over to the Ad Groups tab and look for ad groups associated with your newly created campaign labeled as "GSAPI":

Click Edit and set the ad group to Status: Paused and click Save Ad Group to finish up.

After returning to the Ad Groups main tab, click Create Ad Group to begin setting up your first custom ad group for this campaign:

Be sure to set this as enabled, and S&O Manage to ensure it is tracked properly in your account. Complete all required settings and then click Create Ad Group to finish up.

Rinse and Repeat: If you plan on creating multiple custom ad groups, simply repeat the steps above.

Now, head over to Add Products to start getting your ad groups set up with products. 

Select your campaign, and then we suggest choosing Manual Build so you can hand pick your ad groups as needed:

Keep the default filter for source, but then Edit Applied Filters to create one that will best match the products you wish to only house within this custom ad group, such as filtering for Product Title > Contains:

Scroll down to Modify Bids, and click Add All To Pending based on how you wish to apply initial Max CPC Bids:

IMPORTANT: At this point, if you had created any additional ad groups, you scroll back up and select them ad group by ad group and repeat the above steps to queue up ALL changes before finalizing.

Once you are satisfied with your changes, navigate to Pending and Post All:

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