How To Sculpt Shopping Campaigns For Specific Search Terms

When running traditional shopping campaigns on either Google or Microsoft Ads, we’re often asked for our opinions on the best strategy to sculpt traffic so your shopping ads only display for specific search terms, effectively ignoring everything else.

Let’s say you only want to bid for search terms that contain product brand names in the search, or you’re in a very competitive niche and only want to bid on very specific, profitable terms.

Well, it IS possible, and here’s how to do it.

Our 8 step guide to sculpting shopping campaigns for specific search terms.

Step One

• Start by creating two campaigns that are exact duplicates of one another.

Step Two

• Change the priority for one of the campaigns to “High” (High Priority Campaign= HP) and the other “Medium” (Medium Priority Campaign= MP).
• Ultimately the HP campaign will become your filter. It will block the searches you don’t want, so it’s important to name it something that is logical for you and that purpose.
• The MP campaign will ultimately become the one that triggers for the specific searches you nominate.

Step Three

• Create a shared budget and put both campaigns in there

Step Four

• This is where the magic starts! We now need to use negatives to sculpt the traffic we are looking for.
• To do this, add exact or phrase negatives to the HP campaign for all terms you are happy to send through to the MP campaign.

Reminder: These are the specific terms you WANT to be triggering for in your MP shopping campaign.

Step Five

• Set the bid strategy on the HP campaign to ‘Manual’, with all bids to $0.01

Step Six

• Set bids on the MP campaign to whatever you need to get traction.
• I would start with Manual Bidding since you only have restricted traffic coming to this campaign and this means Smart Bidding might take a while to be effective in this account.

Step Seven

• Monitor search terms on the MP campaign to make sure that the sculpting negatives you added to HP are sending the right traffic through to MP.

Important: If searches are coming through that should not be there, you will need to adjust the sculpting negatives sitting in HP rather than adding negatives in MP.

Step Eight

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