One major difference between Shopping Ads and Search (Text) Ads is how the different ad types utilize search terms.
With a Search Ad, you're able to target specific keywords and place bids on them. This grants you a high level of control over the search terms that trigger your ads in a search result.
Shopping Ads are a bit different. Rather than bidding on specific keywords, you're bidding on a product or group of products. The information found product data feed helps the search engine to pluck your ads in relevant searches, specifically fields such as product title and description.
This grants less front-end control over the search terms your product ads appear for, as you can't target terms you can only remove yourself from showing for them using negative keywords.
With the help of negative keywords, though, you can create a Shopping campaign structure that funnels the search terms so you can take more control. The simplest form of this is to funnel terms by branded vs. non-branded searches.
Here's how you can do this using the Sales & Orders app:
To get started you'll need create an additional Shopping campaign, and add your all of your products. Here's a quick guide for that.
For this strategy to work properly, you'll have to set the new campaigns' priority setting to HIGH, while leaving the Primary campaign at MEDIUM.
The idea is to funnel the branded search terms into the medium priority campaign where you can optimize your bids to be most competitive with higher intent search terms.
To do this, you'll want to add all of your brand names in the high priority campaign as broad-match negative keywords.
Doing this will ensure that only terms containing the brand names will appear in the medium priority campaign, and that only non-branded terms will appear in the high priority campaign.
Now that you've created this structure, be sure to continue monitoring the data as it comes in.
Keep in mind, the goal of this campaign structure is to reduce wasted ad spend on non-relevant overly broad search terms. If you're seeing too much traffic with low conversions in the non-branded campaign, lower your bids and review search terms for any potential negatives you can add.
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