What Are Shopping Structures And Should I Care About Them?

What Are Shopping Structures?

Google Shopping Structures are ways in which you can segment your shopping campaign in to different categories in order to organise and effectively optimise your shopping ads.

Google Shopping has become an extremely advantageous marketing channel for e-commerce businesses. According to SEMRUSH shopping spend grew by 41% more than text ads from 2018 to the first few months of 2019 and Smart Insights conclude that shopping Ads currently generate 85.3% of all clicks on Adwords and Google Shopping campaigns combined.

Why Is Your Shopping Structure So Important?

Structuring your shopping campaigns in a way which helps you meet your company goals can be super beneficial. Carefully segmenting your products allows you to see your data clearly so that you are easily able to identify which products are under-performing and which are on target. This allows you are to make optimisation changes quickly and efficiently.

This is particularly useful when you have KPI targets you wish you meet. You can then see which products in your inventory are meeting these desired KPIs and which are not. This highlights where you need to switch up your strategy so that you can improve performance.

Segment & Prioritise

Having structures won’t affect your search relevance, but allow you to devote more resources towards certain products or product categories. It allows you to target the correct products which ultimately allows you to manage your wasted spend and ensure your budget is being place behind the products that offer you the highest ROI.

An effective Shopping Structure depends entirely on the individual business. They should reflect the marketing Goals of the business.

Organisation & Optimisation

In order to efficiently optimise your Google Shopping Campaign you need to have an organised structure which allows you to analyse data effectively and easily. This will allow you to optimise you account through making data driven decisions. This can ultimately minimise wasted spend and find new opportunities.

Catch All Campaigns

Catch all campaigns are whereby you target all your product inventory under one ad group. This may work if your inventory is small as it is easy to set up and to manage.

However, it is recommended that you do not reply on catch all campaigns as it is difficult to control search terms when it comes to adding negative keywords. It also means that it is not possible to control search terms at product level and weaker performing products are harder to exclude as well as difficult to manage bids.

Examples Of Shopping Structures:

Product Categories

Segmenting your shopping campaign via product categories is a common shopping structure that most e-commerce clients adopt. It can be valuable to e-commerce businesses. For example if you are a clothing brand you can segment by clothing categories. E.g. t-shirts, dresses, skirts, jeans, coats, jackets.

Price

You can segment your shopping campaigns via pricing groups. For example £10-£50, £51-£100, £101-£150 and £150+.

Best Performing

Naturally every e-commerce business has products that sell more frequently than others. Structuring your campaigns by performance allows you to separate top performers from your weaker performers into two groups. This allows you to spend more of your budget behind the products you know sell well and reduce wasted spend on trying to push products that do not sell.

This strategy can be implement after you have allowed yourself some time to collect data and find your hero products. Fore example you will be able to split products based on historical ROAS, and treat them differently.

Promotion

Products that have go into clearance or sale are great to segment as they often require a different bidding strategy compared to full price items.

Seasonality

Seasonality differs in each industry. For example this could be Christmas edition products, or summer clothing.

By structuring your campaigns in accordance to seasonality you are limiting wasted ad spend. It also becomes much easier to compare performances year-over-year and notice trends.

Understanding Campaign Priorities

Campaign priority is utilised when you run multiple shopping campaigns, it distinguishes to google what products should take priority in an auction, when the query applies to multiple products you advertise.

When managing multiple shopping campaigns it is vital to structure your campaign priority in terms of performance, profit margin and price point.

This is really important for large e-commerce clients.

• High priority should include your hero campaigns, highest ROAS campaigns and campaigns with the biggest profit margins.
• Medium should include strong performers with low spend or/and ‘on target’ campaigns
• Low priority should include underperforming campaigns, low ROAS and low stock campaigns

Final Thoughts

Shopping structures are certainly useful when it comes to getting the best out of your account. Although it is key to note that there is not a one size fits all structure. So you need to figure out what is the best structure that will help you meet your marketing goals.

It is also possible to combine shopping structures, for example a clothing brand may categorise their ad groups via gender, product type and performance. Google allows you to subdivide up to seven levels for each product group in any order that you want. This will help you improve your bidding strategy, for example if one category has better profit margins.

Additionally prioritising ad groups can also be very beneficial as it tells Google what products are most likely to convert. This can help draw the right audience and receive the best profit return on ad spend.

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