Take Your Google Shopping Campaigns to the Next Level: European Search Awards Finalists (2020)
Category: Best Use of Search — Retail/Ecommerce (PPC)
RIFF Digital Marketing (Netherlands) & PPC Samurai
Google Shopping is one of the most utilised online advertising channels in e-commerce, worldwide.
However, since we can’t directly target keywords within shopping campaigns, it’s not as simple to advertise with as much granular control as we can within Search.
To address this challenge, our PPC specialists decided to overhaul the Google Shopping account of our client Klium, with an entirely new strategy. With more than 120,000 products, Klium is the largest MRO (Maintenance, Repair & Operations) webshop in Belgium and the Netherlands, and so we had to consider this in the strategy design and implementation.
The Strategy:
The Google Search and Shopping campaigns for Klium focus on people who are searching online for tools, work clothing, machines, technical and hygiene products. In order to make the campaigns more profitable, the account spend needed to be more strategically allocated with bids and budgets biased towards search terms with high intent versus more general searches.
The Challenge:
Keyword-specific advertising is not possible within a Google Shopping campaign, therefore without using specific strategies it’s impossible to bid higher for better quality search queries. It is, however, possible to use a combination of campaign priorities and negative keywords to push search queries away from one campaign and into another, meaning we can technically push desirable queries from a low bid campaign into a higher bid campaign. The sheer physical amount of negative keywords that would be required to push our desirable queries into that high bid campaign was a huge problem though. We wanted to push all queries that contained a brand term, EAN, MPN or type numbers into the high bid campaign, but with 120,000 products, this would have meant over 500,000 negatives which is well above Google’s campaign or shared list limits.
The Solution:
With the help of ADchieve, we set up a new three-tiered Google Shopping structure that looked like this:
We divided our product catalogue into two — promo and non-promo. The promo products all went into the Medium/High bid campaign, with no sculpting required. The remaining products (everything that was not on promotion) went into two campaigns that were duplicated, so each campaign had exactly the same set-up except for the bid strategy and the campaign priority.
Given the negative keyword list limits imposed by Google, we weren’t able to simply put the EAN, MPN or type number for each product into the high priority, low bid campaign as we would in a traditional sculpting strategy. Therefore, in collaboration with the team behind PPC Samurai, we built a custom workflow for Klium; something they are uniquely able to facilitate for agencies.
We used this custom process to automatically add a negative keyword for a brand, EAN, MPN or type number only once a search query containing that field was spotted in the high priority, low bid campaign. This ensured that we only added negatives that were genuinely being included in searches, meaning the physical number of negatives required was much smaller than the Google limits. Even better — this was done all automatically.
Ultimately, this process helped ensure that we only set higher bids for actual search queries that contain EAN, MPN or type numbers, whilst staying within the Google negative keyword list size limitations.
This strategy worked even better than we’d hoped. It resulted in a significant increase in return on ad spend, but additionally, an increase in revenue for the client. The client outcomes we’ve produced with this strategy have resulted in RIFF Digital Marketing being nominated as finalists for the European Search Awards.
