Google Shopping is one of the most important Google advertising options available to e-commerce business owners. The key to Google Shopping success is building and implementing a good campaign structure from the start. In a nutshell, this means dividing your campaigns into high, medium and low priority campaigns that include different categories or product groupings to ensure you get the most out of your ROI potential. To maximize your success, it's important to understand the Google Shopping structure and how ads and product groups work. As with Google AdWords, each campaign should contain multiple ad groups, and within your Shopping account, you'll want to make sure to group your products. The problem is that many e-commerce advertisers have arguably too many AdWords sections, making them reluctant to spend the extra time and effort setting up, testing, and optimizing granular Google Shopping campaigns to find their winning balance. However, if you want to get ahead of the competition, you're going to have to put in some extra effort and get your hands dirty. In this article, we'll show you 6 beginner and expert strategies for building the best Google Shopping campaign structure to ensure maximum success. On the surface, Google Shopping options may seem limited, but with the right strategy, you can address its perceived limitations to gain more control. But first (in culinary terms) - you can't make a perfect dish without first understanding the ingredients. Here are some basics you need to know: Basic Google Shopping Campaign Structural Elements Google Shopping Campaign Preferences Preferred for Google Shopping campaigns In Google Shopping campaigns, you have access to three campaign priorities: high, medium, and low. For example, some policy options involve priority settings. While we'll cover this in more detail later, here's a rough outline to get you started. Ideally, you should use high-priority campaigns for new arrivals, bestsellers, or clearance items—basically those products you want to sell above anything else. Medium-priority campaigns are best for Shopping campaigns that target product categories or collections or specific regions. Finally, low-priority campaigns will be your catch-all industry mailing list these campaigns cover all of your products or stores in one campaign. Google Shopping Campaign Types Google Shopping Ad Group Just like traditional AdWords, each of your Google Shopping campaigns will contain ad groups. You want to subdivide your group as much as possible, i.e. limit the number of products so you can quickly adjust bids and/or optimize. For example, let's say you're running a Shopping campaign that narrows (using the inventory options listed above) to a single category - footwear. You can then add ad groups for the different types of shoes you offer (such as sneakers, sandals, or heels), each of which is triggered by a different search and can be optimized individually. Google Shopping product group Within each Google Shopping ad group in a Google Shopping campaign, there are product groups or subsets of inventory. An ad group in a Google Shopping campaign can contain up to 20,000 product groups. These are product segments relevant to this ad group, in other words, product groups that will use the same bid. You can have product groups for all products, or subdivide each group into 7 levels for maximum segmentation. The following is a list of filter types Google provides that can be applied to shopping product groups: Product Type: Sort by your inventory Category: Based on your site's category classification or Google product category Item ID: Based on the ID (identifier) ​​of each of your items Custom hashtags: based on up to 5 hashtags you can create Brand: Based on product manufacturer Channels: Sales channels based on selling products Condition: Based on the condition of the product, e.g. new/used, etc. There's plenty of room to get creative - such as creating effective product group (custom label) splits based on profit and pricing. Using the footwear category we mentioned earlier, here's a simple example of all the Google Shopping campaign elements we've discussed. Basic Google Ads Campaign Structure Now that you understand the basics, we can build some campaign strategy options. Basic Google Shopping Campaign Structure Google Shopping Strategy 1: One Campaign and One Ad Group Because of its simplicity, this "beginner" Google Shopping campaign structure is often the first point of call for e-commerce advertisers, involving creating a single campaign with a single ad group. Let's say you're new to AdWords Shopping campaigns and sell one product type: yoga leggings. Since you only sell one product, the product groups in your ad group won't be too technical. Simple Google Shopping campaign structure Pros: Easy to set up and monitor when selling a single product type; best for newcomers to Google Shopping. Cons: Lack of segmentation, direct optimization for best ROI. As mentioned above, the process of creating a campaign using a set of campaigns subdivided into different product groups is great for those who are just starting out with Google Shopping and getting their feet wet. However, this approach is very limited in the long run as you need to identify and exclude underperforming products from thousands of products grouped together. It also makes it hard to see which search queries are driving the most sales, which you will need if you want to deal with more complex structures that involve implementing negative keyword lists to shape your queries. Google Shopping Strategy 2: One campaign with multiple ad groups Next on the list of basic Shopping campaign structures is a simple single campaign with multiple ad groups. Again, let's take the example of the yoga leggings business, which has now expanded into a variety of athletic leggings. You can then create a campaign with various ad groups based on the product type (e.g. yoga leggings, running leggings, leggings, etc.). Or, if you still only sell yoga leggings, you can create groups around product themes such as price, design, popularity, etc. Therefore, this type of structure can give you a clearer picture of which product types are performing better. This also means that you can try adding different negative keywords to different groups.