Prioritize Intent with Google Shopping Ads
With Google Shopping Ads, you are able to set priority levels for each individual campaign ranging from low, medium, and high. Campaigns with higher priority levels will enter the auction first, regardless of bid amount. Should two campaigns be triggered by a single search query because of the same priority level, the higher bid will enter. Once a campaign runs out of budget, the next campaign in line will begin entering the search auction.
This ability to organize campaigns by priority is useful when understanding a customer’s intent when committing a search query.
Unbranded, short-tail search queries typically will have extremely low intent, therefore bids should be low. These search queries are the least likely to result in a sale since the shopper is still at the beginning stages of their search. However, as search queries grow longer in terms, intent typically becomes higher and higher – meaning that these queries are extremely valuable as they are the most likely to result in a sale.
Without priority levels in the above example the keyword “aftermarket car parts” would trigger all of these search queries, but they would all be triggered with the same bid amount. If left unattended, this could waste a hefty portion of your budget on clicks that are less likely to convert, when instead budget could have been better prioritized toward searches that were most likely to convert.
Now that you are informed about priority levels, you may be wondering how to implement them into your own campaigns. First, you would need to determine the values of the different types of search queries that can be made to find your products or services. Generally speaking, the longer, more specific a search query the higher value it may have due to the fact that they are searching with higher levels of intent (https://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog/2019/01/long-tail-keywords/). Note that a high-level of priority does not mean a high level of intent. If we were to make use of the three priority levels to organize our campaigns, it could look like this:
- Linked to your Merchant Center Product Data
- Catches the most traffic due to general search queries (i.e. men’s clothing, computer parts)
- Negative keywords to exclude brand or specific product queries of high intent
- Lowest bids
- Linked to your Merchant Center Product Data
- Negative keywords to exclude brand
- This campaign will catch product specific search queries, a bit more detailed (i.e. men’s basketball shorts, 8gb ram stick)
- Middleground between bid ranges
- Linked to your Merchant Center Product Data
- Will only have negative keywords to exclude unwanted traffic
- This campaign will have the most specific queries (i.e. men’s Nike shorts black, Corsair 8gb ram stick)
- Least traffic
- Highest bids
Once the campaigns are all set up correctly, the last step would be to give these campaigns a shared budget to group them together. This is to prevent overspending, otherwise advertising would continue with the lower priority campaign that has yet to run out of budget.