When a shopper searches for a product using Google, they can be in different stages of their shopping journey. Shoppers use different search terms depending on the stage of their journey, typically using short-tail keywords at the beginning of their journey and changing to more specific, long-tail keywords, when they are ready to buy.
Naturally, there is a higher chance of conversion if the shopper is further along their journey, using specific search terms. With Shopping ads, you bid on products, and it is not possible to bid on search term keywords as with Search ads. What is possible, however, is keyword segmentation. With keyword segmentation you can optimize your bids for search terms.
Campaign priorities
If you want to optimize your Shopping campaigns based on search terms, you first need to build 2 or 3 Shopping campaigns for the same product or product group and select a different campaign priority for each campaign.
There are 3 campaign priorities: high, medium, and low. When you have multiple Shopping campaigns for one product/product group, you can use the campaign priority to determine which campaign should participate in the Google auction first.
The priority settings you choose will act as a funnel. Google lets the campaign with the highest priority level enter the Google auction first.
Why use search term segmentation in this process?
We can use search term campaign segmentation to place higher bids for search queries that have a higher chance of turning into a conversion. Here’s how that works:
Let’s say you sell gloves. The shopper has not decided on the specific pair of gloves they want to buy, but they know they want gloves. You want your campaign to show for these shoppers to raise awareness for your product, but you don’t want to set your bids too high, since the chance of conversion at this shopping stage is low.
When a shopper is getting closer to buying a certain pair of gloves, their search queries become more specific. This means a higher chance of achieving a conversion, so you want to set higher bids for these specific search queries.
There is one way to manipulate the search queries moving through the funnel, and that is by adding negative keywords. Negative keywords prevent your Shopping ads from showing when you don’t want them to.
Segmenting your keywords
To explain the segmentation of keywords, let’s pretend we have a gloves campaign for Karl Lagerfeld leather gloves in the color red.
For the high-priority campaign, use generic, non-brand-related queries (‘gloves’). Add negative keywords like the brand (‘Karl Lagerfeld’) and specific product-based keywords (‘leather, red’). The shopper is usually at the beginning of their journey. The bid for this campaign is low.
For the medium-priority campaign, use long-tail generic brand queries and non-brand queries (‘red leather gloves’, ‘Karl Lagerfeld gloves‘). Add negative keywords like product-based search terms that exactly describe the product (like the two queries above combined). The shopper is getting more aware of the product they want but is not searching for a specific product yet. The bid for this campaign is medium.
For the low-priority campaign, use product-based queries (‘Karl Lagerfeld red leather gloves’). You do not have to add negative keywords. The shopper knows what product they want and is ready to buy. The bid for this campaign is high.
To show Shopping ads, Google searches for the highest priority campaign that is eligible to show for the specific search query. Suppose the shopper is further along in their shopping journey and decides on which brand they want to buy. In that case, the high-priority campaign will reject the search query containing Karl Lagerfeld because Karl Lagerfeld is added as a negative keyword. The search query moves to the medium-priority campaign with the higher bid.
Through this search term segmentation process, you can control your advertising budget and optimize bids on search terms depending on where the shopper is in their shopping journey.
We hope this article has been helpful. If you have any questions or are interested in the many ways Shoparize can help you optimize your campaigns, contact us at css@shoparize.com. Read this article if you want to learn about other ways to adjust and optimize your Shopping campaigns.
