Google Shopping: Segmenting Brand & Non-Brand Traffic

May 3, 2017

There has always been a “problem” associated with Google Shopping in the fact there are no keyword targeting options, meaning that whether your products appear or not is all dependent on what search terms Google deems relevant to your products.

We look closer at this and at a real-life example: let’s take one of our clients, Barbour. Say we have a product bid set at £1, we could be bidding £1 for the search term “wax jacket” and the same for the search term “Barbour wax jacket”. You may think there is nothing wrong with this, however looking at the bigger picture, the more generic term is typically going to convert less than a branded term, especially in our client’s case and with a normal shopping setup we end up bidding the same for both types of query.

So how would you resolve this?

1. You could exclude the term [wax jacket] if it is not converting – However, what if this is a converting keyword just at a higher CPA than you would like?
2. Bid lower – you are also bidding lower for your high converting brand terms.

A: Query Level Bidding Strategy

In order to take your shopping campaigns to the next level and start boosting ROI, we need to create a shopping campaign setup that lets us bid separately depending on the type of search query. As a rule of thumb, we typically bid higher for branded terms and less for non-branded terms – unless there is a product that performs well from a generic term.

The 3 main components of this structure are:

Priority settings

Priority settings tell shopping campaigns which should be considered first.

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords help to funnel traffic into the correct campaigns.

Shared Budgets

Shared budgets keep both campaigns running under one roof to make sure it doesn’t fall apart.

In our real-life example, this is how each campaign would look:

Non-Brand

Name – Barbour | Men’s Waxed Jackets | NB

Priority – High

Negative Keyword – Barbour

Brand

Name – Barbour | Men’s Waxed Jackets | B

Priority – Low

Negative Keyword – None

With the non-brand campaign set with a higher priority, all generic traffic will be accepted into that campaign. However, all branded traffic will be accepted in the brand campaign due to the negative keywords, therefore, giving us the opportunity to bid differently for each campaign and search query type.

What have we found?

This strategy will not work for everyone and mainly favours a strong brand presence to see the benefits. We also find that this is more a long-term strategy than a “quick fix”.

Due to the fact you are bidding lower for generic terms and pushing more focus on branded terms, most of the time you will find an increase in conversion rate along with ROI – making your spend work a lot harder for you.

This setup also gives you the ability to report on brand/non-brand performance separately a lot easier.

If you’d like to speak to us about how we can help with your marketing strategies, why not contact us here or drop us a Tweet or Comment. We look forward to chatting with you soon!