[AMA] “How do you run BRAND campaigns in Shopping?”

Friend-of-the-list Jochem P. (name shared with permission) asked:

“How do you run BRAND campaigns in Shopping?”

First, let’s start with how not to run a brand campaign in Shopping:

The wrong way to set up a brand campaign in Shopping is to:

1. Create a separate shopping campaign for brand searches
2. Have Google match all your products to a wide set of non-branded searches, and then
3. Use a script to negate all these non-branded searches from your brand shopping campaign in the hope that Google will eventually only show the products for branded searches.

This is the wrong way because:

• You will lose a lot of money on clicks on non-branded searches before all these non-branded searches get negated, and
• You will end up having to negate more searches than the limits of negative keywords and negative keyword lists will allow you to do. This is because Google goes very broad when matching your products to user queries.

A right way to set up a brand campaign in Shopping is to do these:

1. Create a separate low-priority shopping campaign for brand searches.
2. Add the products you want to show for your branded searches to this low-priority brand shopping campaign.
3. Set high manual CPC bids or allow for high CPC bids in your bidding strategy to ensure maximum visibility for all the branded searches that will land in this campaign. 
4. Ensure branded searches will be funneled to this low-priority brand campaign by adding your brand searches to a negative keyword list that is attached to all other non-brand shopping campaigns. 

This will ensure the products in your brand campaign will only be shown for branded searches, and you have tight control over the CPC bids, your impression share, and the exact products you want to show for your branded searches. 

NB: Make sure all the products in your low-priority campaign are also added to non-brand high or medium-priority campaigns, AND that these high and medium priority campaigns never run out of budget before your brand campaign does. Otherwise, non-branded searches might end up being matched by the low-priority brand campaign. Also, make sure ad schedules, audience targeting, device targeting, and location targeting are the same for all campaigns.

– Nils

PS: Wednesday is ‘Ask Me Anything’ day. If you’ve got a question to which my answer would benefit a larger part of the community, send it my way, and I’ll try to answer it 🙂