I’m sure you know that Google Shopping doesn’t allow keyword targeting in the traditional way, but it is possible to structure an account so that you have a fairly high level of control over the keywords and most importantly bids.

I’ve tried this method on a few accounts now and it is working a treat. It has been a bit of a process to get to the point I’m at now, but in hindsight there are some more things I could have done from the get go that may have sped things up.

THE PROCESS

A reasonably good Google Shopping campaign would be set up to include an adgroup for each product, or small group of products (perhaps the same items but in different colours grouped together), and with individual bids set for each product. You’ll then exclude everything else from triggering.

This works reasonably well and allows control over what you’re prepared to bid for a product to show.

This issue is that these ads can be triggered by extremely broad search terms which you’d usually bid lower on, as well as very specific terms you’d usually bid higher on.

Here’s what you can do:

Assuming your campaign is set up well as I’ve explained above, you can duplicate the campaign and set one as priority HIGH and one as priority MEDIUM. You can also go as far as adding priority LOW. I will explain.

Campaign priority is updated under campaigns settings

A campaign set to HIGH will be prioritised over MEDIUM and LOW, so Google will try to trigger this campaign first. This campaign will catch everything so will be used to catch all the broad searches you want to bid lower on. So set the bids in the HIGH campaign to be low (even though this sounds weird, trust me).

The MEDIUM campaign is where you’ll catch your really specific targeted keywords you want to bid higher on, so here you’ll set bids higher.

If you have a LOW campaign you can set bids here even higher. This will be used to catch brand keywords.

You’ll then need to add all your really targeted keywords that you want to bid more on to the HIGH priority campaign as negative keywords. This way Google will have to go to the medium campaign to trigger an ad and your bids will be higher so you’ll show up higher for your target keywords.

Exclude any brand keywords from both HIGH and MEDIUM and they’ll get filtered into the LOW campaign.

I’ve found a fairly high amount of negative keyword optimisation required by looking at the SQ report every couple of days. And you’ll need to get ad group specific with your negative keywords to get it perfect.

As you get everything excluded from the right places you’ll feel nothing but satisfaction when looking at your search query report.

The accounts I’ve been running this on for a few months are killing it.