Are you new to ecommerce PPC and wondering how to go about structuring your Shopping campaigns? Today we’ll discuss Shopping campaign structures for different scenarios and determine the best possible structure for the respective scenario.

Why is it important to use the right campaign structure?

The structure of your Shopping campaigns matters because it allows you to scale your spend on what’s selling and cut back on what is unprofitable for the account and your business. 

If a particular product category or brand makes up for 60% of your sales, you would want to ensure that the product category/brand gets most of your advertising budget. With the right structure, you can focus on what gets the most sales.

Before you start setting up your Shopping campaigns, you should ensure that your product feed is optimized. As an agency, we believe in the 80/20 rule; you should spend 80% of your time on what makes the most impact on your account and 20% of your time on the other tasks.

On Google Shopping, optimizing your product feed leads to the most significant impact on the account. Therefore, your first and foremost priority should be having a well-optimized data feed.

We have written several blogs about optimization of different feed attributes. You can check them out here:

After feed optimization, planning your campaign structure is the next step. 

No two businesses are the exact same so Shopping campaign structure too should be individual to the account. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for every account.

If you have advertised in the past or if your business isn’t new and you have sales data for your products, that makes the planning process easier because it allows you to look at the data and determine the best possible approach.

Where to find sales data?

You can extract sales data from Google Ads if you have run past campaigns and you can also get your overall store data from Google Analytics.

Starting with Google Ads data might prove to be a better option because there are times when a brand does well through other channels like Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok etc but the space might be too competitive on Google Ads which leads to higher CPCs and lower results. In that case, Google Analytics would show that the brand is a top-seller but the Google Ads data would show that the brand might not be profitable if you advertise it through Google Ads. Looking at the data from both platforms is the best possible approach to this problem.

To get the data from Google Analytics, go to Conversions > Ecommerce > Product Performance then, in Primary Dimension, click on Brand:

To get this data from Google Ads, go to Reports > Predefined reports (Dimensions) > Shopping (Brand): 

Make sure you add columns of conv value and conv value/cost by searching at the right side of the screen and clicking on the relevant metrics:

How much data should you look at?

You should pull reports for all-time data and data for the last year. All-time data allows you to see what brands have consistently generated sales so you can identify your top-performers. Last year’s data shows how the current performance of the brands is.

What data to look at?

Conversion metrics like sales, revenue, ROAS, CPA should be taken into consideration. Cost is also important to consider because you might see brands with a high ROAS but when you take a look at the cost that has been spent on the brand, you realize that there was barely any spend.

Campaign Structure

Ecommerce stores with multiple brands and 2,000 – 250,000 SKUs:

For a store like Net-A-Porter or Gear.com, we normally create tiers when deciding how to structure their campaigns. For example, two brands might make up 30% of the overall sales. In such a case, we create two separate campaigns for those two brands – and for the rest of the brands, we divide them based on how much revenue they have generated in the past. The top brands are added to a Tier 1 campaign, the middle-level performance brands are added to Tier 2 campaign, and lower performing brands are added to a Tier 3 campaign.

You don’t have to be limited to just 3 tiers. Depending on the number of brands and products, you could also create additional campaigns to avoid the Invisible SKU Phenomenon. 

This is an example of what your shopping campaign would look like based on the structure mentioned above:

Shopping Campaign Brand X

Shopping Campaign Brand Y

Shopping Campaign Tier 1 Brands

Shopping Campaign Tier 2 Brands

Shopping Campaign Tier 3 Brands

Ad Group/Product Group structure

The first sub-category in your ad group or product group should be brand. Then you can subdivide by product type and use custom labels to add further subdivisions for things like size, color or price range.

Low budget ecommerce store

If you are spending less than $100/day, the simpler you keep your account, the better it usually is for performance. We normally try to create two campaigns in this case; a ‘winners’ campaign with products/brands that have a high margin/high ROAS, and a second campaign targeting low performing products. 

If you are not spending large amounts of money on your campaigns, having a ton of campaigns usually does not make sense. With more and more people opting into smart bidding, people fail to realize that the more conversion data there is in a campaign, the better results it will bring. Consolidating your campaigns ensures that you are giving Google’s smart bidding algorithm a high number of data points to work with.

New brands

The previous two examples require sales data and knowing what has better margins for your brand. What if you don’t have any sales data as a starting point?

In such a case, dividing your campaigns based on product categories makes sense because it allows you to create campaigns based on how people are searching for the products you sell. For example, if you have a home goods store like Bed, Bath & Beyond, you can create campaigns for each category you have on the website, like Kitchen, Dining, Bedroom etc.

DTC

If you run a DTC website, your account structure would look similar to the one just described. Ecommerce stores selling other brands get a large number of brand traffic so it makes sense for them to have separate brand campaigns/tiered campaigns. However a DTC brand will primarily get generic traffic searching for the products they sell.

For example, for a website like Truff, you can create separate campaigns for Hot Sauce, Mayo, Pasta, Oil etc.

Conclusion

When you launch your shopping campaigns, you can run them for a month and then look at the data to decide whether the current campaign structure makes sense or whether you need to restructure/create additional campaigns.

You can also mix and match structures in an account if that helps get the best results. You don’t have to be limited to a brand structure only or a product category structure only. Your campaigns can also look like this:

Shopping Campaign Product Category X

Shopping Campaign Product Category Y

Shopping Campaign Product Category Z

Shopping Campaign Brand A

Shopping Campaign Brand B

You can test multiple structures in your account and see what gets the best results – and most importantly, what structure allows you to easily scale spend on your account.