Best Google Shopping Campaign Structure in 2025 | Step by Step Google Ads Shopping Tutorial

hey everyone and welcome to another video today we're going to be talking about my eight favorite Google shopping campaign types I managed over two million in ad spend across shopping campaigns last year so I think I'm a pretty good source for information I'm going to share today some of my favorite campaign types that I think can work really well whether you have a small budget or a large budget the caveat here being that you don't have to do all eight of these though I recommend you test and see which ones work the best for your

account and maybe you can combine a few different ones so I'm going to start off by talking about the first one which is called Product categories this is where you separate your products into different groups you've likely already done this in your catalog and you have your merchant center account set up this way now that being said to set a campaign like this up if you haven't set one up like this before is pretty easy so you'll go and you'll create your shopping campaign as normal and then you create your ad groups what I like

to do is that for each ad group I assign one product category to that ad group so if we click into office chair here and this example I'm pretending that I'm A Chair Company you'll see that I have selected the only product group for the office chair ad Group by product type is called office chair so everything else is excluded we just targeting the office chair product type as we go to the other AD group called gaming chair you'll see we've done the exact same thing here we are only targeting gaming chair everything else is

being excluded so just a quick demo of if you wanted to replicate this on your campaign you'll go and add a new ad group let's call it leather chair save I set a $1 bid but your bids may vary of course and you're going to be presented with this screen in the product grouping level which this is basically your ad level in in so far as a shopping campaign and what you're going to do here is Click add subdivision under all products now here I don't have any product types in my account but for demonstration

purposes I'm going to add the bulk values manually this is ironically the way I would do it even if I did have products because I do a lot of my work outside of Google ads either in sheets or Google ads editor so we're going to pretend that the product type here is called leather chair we're going to add it in confirm and then I'll edit the bid looks good to me and then we're not done yet if you leave it here what'll happen is that you're actually bidding on everything in the entire catalog because you

have the subdivision of leather chair but you also have a subdivision of everything else that is within all products so very important point of order this is very easy to make a mistake on if you're just doing this for the first time go here and press exclude and so this is a campaign type that I like quite a lot another version of this is called a single product campaign or single product category campaign this is sort of like a Scag on the Google ads side where you are grouping one closely knit group of products and

you are forcing the Google algorithm to make it work for that group of products I've seen all versions of this work though my favorite recently due to improvements in the algorithm in 2024 has definitely been the grouped product categories where you have multiple product categories by add group and the reason that I like this the most is because I found that when a campaign has more data flowing through it as opposed to multiple campaigns having segmented data flowing through them the algorithm performs better the learning there essentially for you is I would start with a

more generic product categories campaign where you're breaking out the different ad groups and you can see their their performance if you see that one category is really performing the best maybe you pause some others if you see that one category is getting a lot of volume but it's not performing very well maybe you segment it into its own campaign I I should definitely mention here that these campaigns are in this demonstration going to be set at maximum cost for clip or manual cost per click but in your account if you have enough conversions I highly

recommend just going right out the gate with Target return on investment and that's what I've done across my clients and I've had no problems using Target return on investment as long as I'm being reasonable with my expectations I've had no problem scaling as well I recommend always using a bidding strategy these days that uses Google Al algorithm for purchases especially so let's move on to the second campaign type that I want to talk about today which is called all products 300% plus now 300% is the target return on investment we're looking for in this case

there's a lot of different Target return on ad spends that people are looking for from cold acquisition like shopping but in my experience I've seen that any brand at scale can make a 300% return on investment on cold traffic work quite well for their needs use the numbers that work for your business please so this is a very simple ad group and there's a few different ways that you can organize it on the product grouping side the biggest issue that happens with shopping campaigns and people's understanding of shopping campaigns most of the time in my

experience is that they make it too complicated or they don't know how to organize their products on the back end so if you have an organized merchant center and you're pulling in the pieces of data that you need to pull in all of these groupings will be way more simple for you to handle on the ads end so if you have an organized merchant center you will have an organized Google ads account that is the takeaway um so how do we do this where we essentially want to Target a group of products in our catalog

that have historically given us a 300% or higher return on investment there's a couple of things to look at one is that on your sidebar you're going to have a products page and you'll go to this products page and you'll look at all of your products and you'll organize them by the conversion value over cost for specifically product sales and you'll look at those products that have a 300% or greater return on ad spend over a long period of time let's say at least 90 days and then those will be the products that you'll select

in terms of how you organize them for segmenting the actual product groups out and making the subdivisions there's a couple of different ways you can do it the most frequent way I see this is I'll talk to a sales manager or someone that is really familiar with the product catalog and they'll know by the back of their hand you know it's going to be a product ID this product that it's going to be skew this skew that and they're going to be able to tell me the exact SKS that I can then input and then

I can go back to the subdivision and organize them by item id enter all of my values here 300% product this or the skew this right I add them all in and we're good to go I've got all of the products specifically segmented and then as new winners come to the list I can just add them one by one here or if you know I get a new report that says okay there's 100 products that have been added there's 50 that have been removed I can make all those decisions here and make those saves very

very quickly so I like this type of campaign because it's like combining all of your winners and you're trying to just group them all into this big mass of data that helps you potentially achieve a greater daily scale shopping is really a scale game in my experience if you get enough data going through and enough momentum you'll get served in more placements you're going to be more competitive against other people in your industries and it's really a win more situation as opposed to sometimes in search search is more of an efficiency play a lot of

the time where the search volumes may not be changing that much everybody kind of knows Their audience shopping is really like a completely different beast in that sense it's very much about momentum if you can get further up the charts and make the margins work it can be very powerful I like grouping winners in some cases like this this can be a very powerful campaign type especially if you have a lot of different products that have the potential to give you a high return on investment let's move on to the Third campaign here we're going

with a very similar campaign type which is based on ASP and ASP just means average selling price and so the way that you would find average selling price is just by looking at your product catalog data this is usually for larger companies that are doing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in sales per year especially those that have larger product cataloges where you might sell a $50 product um but you also might sell $3,000 of product or a product that has an average selling price per unit of $800 $900 so there's a huge amount

of variance between someone that's going to spend $50 at your store and $900 and so I like to use this campaign for those types of retailers so if you're a retailer where this is totally making sense to you you're like yeah we got like a 100 products someone might come in spend $10 on this thing but they might also leave the store with a tractor that's $110,000 this is the type of campaign for you um so how you grab this is you find the midpoint of your catalog the item IDs that are above your midpoint

um can I get tagged with a custom label in my case it's custom some label two that's called strong average selling price or maybe it's above a certain value then you group all of them there and you have this product group that essentially is always updated with whatever the products or the item IDs above your average that you don't have to manage much on the actual campaign side once this is set up Sister campaign to this is called ASP below middle so there's a lot of cases where people have the majority of their sales volume

come from products that sell really frequently you might sell ,5 products and you might only sell one $1,000 product every month right that $55,000 is worth a lot to the business it would lead the algorithm to look for different people when you're trying to make a couple of dollars margin versus when you're trying to make $500 or $600 margin that's a completely different type of customer you want to set up the algorithm in order to really react to that and take that into account and so some people make this type of campaign even more stratified

if you have a ton of variants across your catalog it can be beneficial to have a bottom 20% or quartile ASP campaigns but I didn't want to make it too complicated for a video that seems like it's going to go to 30 minutes and hopefully this ends up useful if it is please leave me a comment down below but this this campaign can really be helpful for those high volume maybe lower margin lower selling pric items now we're getting into some of my favorite campaign types first of all I'm going to start with the worst

sellers catalog the worst sellers catalog is based on your own sales data this is essentially the products that you know are just the worst they don't have consistent sales sometimes you wonder why they're even in your catalog if you should even sell them and my favorite thing to do is to only run these products in a worst sellers campaign I absolutely love this campaign type because it forces the Google algorithm which is really good at deprioritizing low performing pieces of your portfolio and it says hey I'm only going to give you the worst stuff and

if you want me to spend money here on a Target row as basis you have to make this work you have to find people that want to buy these products this is one of my favorite campaign types I've had really good results with this because you're essentially taking villains of your portfolio that are usually just the worst part that you're always unhappy about and you're saying you know what I can actually get some value out of this there's some juice to squeeze here and I can help the laggards of my products actually deliver a pretty

strong result the similar version of this is my sixth campaign type which is the shopping side sometimes on the whole a lot of your strongest products generally are also going to be your strongest shopping products but there's also going to be some times where some products that should be performing well just are not performing well on shopping at all and so this is where I'll look at the shopping data and I organize the catalog into poor shopping performers I'll throw the bottom 20% into this campaign and so the way that this looks like in this

case is just a custom label called wor seller shopping but you can also do it um by a specific Item ID with this chair company maybe office chair 79 is a poor performer and we need to make sure Google has only poor performers here and that's our group of the lowest 20% performers by shopping sales so then we just go we save those here we make sure they are included excellent so we've got those included everything else is excluded always make sure you're excluding everything else that you're not targeting and let's move on to the

last group which if you've been looking at my filters here you can see is a best sellers focused campaign so again this the idea here is that just as you want to make sure that the algorithm has all the tools it needs to improve the performance of the worst pieces of your product catalog you also want to make sure that it has the ability to get even greater dividends from the best sellers within your catalog the way you tackle your bid strategies around this can vary depending on your needs sometimes people will say I'm going

to give them my best sellers and I'm going to set an even more defensive return on investment Target if on a blended basis my portfolio is giving me a 3X return on investment from shopping but I know my best sellers on average give a four and a half maybe I'll set my target Ro at a four or maybe they'll say you know what I could sell twice as many best sellers and I would be totally happy if the Blended Raz on that went to a 3.5 and they set their row Target row as to a

three so by setting only the absolute best products on a catalog basis in the same campaign you can deliver really strong scalability and you can essentially find an ASM toote in other words the point at which you have diminishing returns on your spend really effectively with this type of campaign and then the brother or sister campaign to this is just the shopping version and so again your top 10 products in your catalog may be the same as the top 10 products in your shopping campaign or alltime shopping sales but not always and so this is

is always just a campaign worth looking at and assessing is this something I should do or try out but with that that's all eight campaigns that we've looked over today if you need any help with your shopping campaigns or you're really struggling to get your shopping campaigns off the ground I offer two Services one of them is a coaching service and the other one is a done for you ads Management Service that me and my team can help you take everything to the next level whether it's merchant center whether it's your product feed whether at

setting up your product campaigns or or scaling shopping to the next level let me know please if this was helpful leave a comment or subscribe it really helps I'm trying to deliver a lot more value on the channel this year and you guys have been so great so thanks so much and hope you have a great time scaling your shopping campaigns