Full Screen

Creating and Optimizing Shopping Campaigns

More Free Lessons in

PPC and Paid Search View All →

Get cutting-edge digital marketing skills, know-how and strategy

This micro lesson is from one of our globally recognized digital marketing courses.

Start a FREE Course Preview Start a FREE Course Preview
Global Authority

The Global Authority

12 years delivering excellence

Members

245,000+ Members

Join a global community

Certification

Associate Certification

Globally recognised

Membership

Membership Included

Toolkits, content & more

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Creating a shopping campaign

And just like a search campaign, we have goals. So our goals can be sales leads traffic as always, and it will optimize towards those goals. And we have just have to choose the correct one.

Optimizing your shopping campaign is a little bit different than optimizing a standard search campaign because you don’t have keywords that you choose. The keywords and the searches are driven automatically through the relevance of your feed by Google. So if you have keywords in your product title or lots of keywords in your product description, Google will use those indicators to match them to the searches as people search.

Optimizing shopping campaigns

This is how we optimize our feed essentially for our searches:

  • Include top keyword searches: We need to include top keyword searches in our feed because we can’t include them in our campaigns because there are no keywords in the campaigns.
  • Use high-quality images: We need to use high-quality images from our website in the feed. So when people get served the result back they can see what they’re buying.
  • Add promotional copy: Promotional copy is something we can add so we can maybe put a limited time offer or a discount, and that’s something we can add in the shopping campaigns itself.
  • Set different bids: We can also set different bids for different product categories within a shopping campaign. So a product category would be an automatic creation of an ad group essentially, from your product feed. For example, if you’re a large electronic retailer, you might have a TVs category, you might have a washing machine category, you might have a DVD player category, and so on. This is all defined in your feed and you can say, “I want to bid this much for TVs, this much for radios, this much for washing machines, and so on.” They’re like ad groups, but in shopping campaigns. We call them product categories and then we’re able to set different bits for them.
  • Use dynamic display remarketing: We can build in what’s called dynamic remarketing. And that’s when we use our Google Shopping feed to serve display ads back to people who’ve been on our site with that exact product, with that price, and driving to that landing page. It’s a highly relevant remarketing ad created on the fly from your own product imagery to that person including your own price. When your price changes on your site, it changes in your ad. So that type of remarketing is very powerful for bringing people back into the funnel if they didn’t convert and buy in the first place.

Showcase ads

To widen the reach of your shopping campaigns, we can use things like showcase ads. A showcase ad is a selection of your products that can show up. It allows you to show multiple products that might be of interest to one searcher, such as related searches or related products. You can build that old one out and they can scroll right to left and see is there anything within that showcase that that they would like to click on and buy.

So they require specific showcase ad type which can be created in the campaign. But will require a header image of 1080 X 566. So that’s a consideration. And if we do want to optimize for visuals and our performance, we need to put all the key messaging within the frame because sometimes things get reduced down. So all the key messaging has to be within the 768 to 402 range. Now they’re pixels dimensions, because even though this is search, there is an image aspect to it. It is search because of the triggering.

  • Display: Display is served to people, whether they like it or not, whether they’re looking for something. Display is served to people because they fit an audience type.
  • Search: Search, on the other hand, is triggered. we’ve inputted a particular keyword phrase into Google and we’re giving something back.

That’s why this is search and not display. It’s not about the ad format, it’s about what triggered the ad that determines what type of advertising it is. So even though we’re talking imagery here, it is, essentially, a search-based ad.

Back to Top
Cathal Melinn

Cathal Melinn is a well-known digital marketing director, commercial analyst, and ecommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.

Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specialises in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimisition.  Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.

Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.

Over his career, Cathal has worked client-Side, in digital marketing agencies and media owners with brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.

He can be reached on LinkedIn here.

Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:

DMI Short Course: GDPR

The following pieces of content from the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library have been chosen to offer additional material that you might find interesting or insightful.

You can find more information and content like this on the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library

You will not be assessed on this content in your final exam.

ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

Paid Search
Cathal Melinn
Skills Expert

This module begins with the key concepts of paid search and demonstrates how to set up a Google Ads account and create a paid search campaign. It explains how to manage a paid search campaign budget effectively and outlines the different methods that can be used to optimize your paid search campaign. It also covers how to measure and report on the success of a paid search campaign.