- Do you want to learn the best bidding strategy
to use when you're starting your Google shopping campaigns
I'm going to walk you through
exactly what I do in this video, so let's go.
(jazz music)
Hey guys, Sam here from KeyCommerce.com.
And today I'm going to show you
the exact bidding strategy that I use when I start
my Google shopping campaigns.
Now let me cut to the chase.
I always start with manual with enhanced CPC.
Always.
I don't start with automated bidding
or any other strategy, except for manual with enhanced CPC.
I've found that manual bidding is the best strategy
for starting shopping campaigns, the quickest way possible
and the cheapest way possible.
There are a couple of reasons
why I start with this strategy.
One, it gives me more control at the start
to act alongside the campaigns and the market.
Two, It lets me be very granular
and focus my bidding on the products that are working.
And three, it stops Google from charging me
obscene amounts per click at the start.
And this is what can happen with automated bidding.
So why don't I use automated bidding strategies
from the very start?
Because Google needs conversion data
for its automated bidding.
If you start your campaigns without this conversion data
and you're using automated bidding
then Google doesn't have a waypoint.
It doesn't know what it's doing
and it's gonna be all over the place.
And you're gonna spend a lot of money
when you could easily just run manual campaigns
and limit that spend and get the same clicks.
I've honestly tried this a lot of different times
and this is what I've seen to work consistently,
manual bidding at the start.
Okay, so let me jump into the account
and show you exactly how I set this up.
All right guys, I'm now in the Google ads account
and let's create our shopping campaign.
And then we're gonna go through
the different bidding strategy that we use.
So gonna create it for sales.
This is all fine.
I'm gonna go to shopping.
It's gonna pull in the feed from merchant center
and we're gonna choose standard shopping campaign.
I'm just gonna put it as test shopping, just so I know
how it'll look later for myself, that doesn't matter.
So you're gonna put in shopping campaign or what have you.
This is the important bit, bidding and budget.
So bidding, we're gonna leave it on manual CPC.
And we're gonna check, this says help increase conversions
with enhanced CPC.
This allows Google to have
a little bit of automated bidding.
They can increase or decrease the bids a little bit
depending on their own data.
I'm okay with that
but I still wanna have full manual CPC.
And maybe one of these is selected by default.
You wanna find this on manual CPC.
Budget, so generally I like to start the campaigns.
You wanna be spending, I say $50-$100 per day.
I'm just gonna put in a $1 right now, just so that
I can illustrate this for you, but yeah,
$50-$100 per day
is what I'd like to start with.
The real thing to be conscious of here is, these campaigns
but they don't generate results straight away.
It takes time to build up the data, to optimize.
If you have a good website and your conversion process
is optimized then it will be much quicker, much faster.
And especially if you have reviews on your site
and you're already getting conversions from Facebook ads.
If you're starting from scratch
it's gonna take a bit of optimization, guys,
it's gonna to take an investment.
And the reason why I recommend $50-$100 per day
is just because if you're only spending
a dollar per day, like I've got here
then you're gonna get one click per day.
And to have any meaningful data,
it's gonna take you three months.
One click per day for three months, that's 90 clicks.
It's just gonna take a long time to get any data.
But if you have $50-$100 per day,
if you're spending 50 cents to $1.50 per click
then it's just gonna be much more quicker.
And the work you do is just gonna get you
to where you need to be more quickly, okay?
So I'm just gonna put that there for illustrative purposes.
Campaign priority, you don't need to worry about this
unless you have multiple campaigns.
Turn off these, so we're not gonna use the search network
or YouTube, Gmail and Discover.
That's really important to concentrate that data
into just the shopping network.
That's all, find locations,
make sure that you choose your locations.
This one's in Australia. Make sure you choose your location.
If it's the US and make sure you check this one,
people in or regularly in your targeted locations.
Very, very important.
I talk about this in a lot of videos,
the short answer here...
The short reason why I do this is
is because your Google's gonna show you for people
outside your target locations and for e-commerce.
If someone's shipping to their house
and they're in Australia, then that's good.
But if they're in another country and they're not
in Australia, then we don't wanna ship to them.
And this allows you to do that.
So I go into more detail in other videos.
I won't do that now, but yeah, that's what you wanna do.
Save and continue.
And now it's going to go to this bit
where we set up the ad groups
where it's gonna do regular product shopping,
single product campaigns.
This is a whole other thing, showcase shopping.
I might make a video on how to do those.
That can be a really awesome strategy.
Put here all products, this is for the ad group,
and then a bid.
I'd like to start off with $1.
Generally, it depends on the niche.
Some niches are more competitive.
You're gonna adjust this anyway.
The important part here is just put something like $1,
maybe $1.50, but I would start with one dollar
and just see how it goes.
Save. It's gonna create the campaigns for us, here it is.
Now here's the really important part,
the important thing guys is we start off
with that manual CPC bidding strategy with enhanced CPC.
What's really important
is that we add this subdivision here.
So go down and select subdivided by item ID,
select all the products and scroll down to the bottom
because it may not select all the products
and make sure you select them all.
Continue to edit bids.
Then click save.
Now what this does, it allows us to now bid individually
for each individual product in that campaign.
This doesn't matter at the start, but over time.
And you'll see, in my other video
the shopping bidding strategy will actually show you
how to manage the bids on an ongoing basis.
This is really, really important guys.
So don't just start with manual CPC and leave it at that.
You wanna split up the campaigns like this
and then depending on the performance, depending
on the return on ad spend conversion value divided by cost.
Depending on the return on ad spend,
you then wanna manage those bids individually.
That's really, really important guys.
So, yeah, so that's how I set things up at the start.
That's how I start things.
I see how each product performs individually and I'll adjust
the bidding for each product individually.
That's why we have manual CPC.
You don't wanna have the one bid for old products
because there's going to be variation between products,
no matter how tight your niches
and how closely aligned your products are.
Google's just gonna have different results per product.
Trust me, that always happens.
It's impossible for it to be the same for every product.
Even if it's a little bit different, a tiny bit of variation
you still wanna manage those on a product basis.
And guys, that's how I start up the campaigns
with the bidding.
How'd that help ?
Awesome.
Okay guys, so when do we actually change
to automated bidding?
I personally like to get the campaign
to 50-100 conversions per month.
Before I swap that, shopping campaign
of an automated bidding strategy.
And the bidding strategy I like to use
is a Target ROAS strategy.
But it does mean that you need to know your
breakeven ROAS to set that in the actual shopping campaign.
And guys, listen to me very carefully.
Don't just use the breakeven ROAS
as the Target ROAS in that campaign.
The breakeven ROAS is what you need to break even
and you don't want your ads to just break even.
You want to make a profit. We want profits people.
So I like to add 10%-50% on top of that breakeven ROAS
as my Target ROAS in the account.
And really, I don't have a fixed rule here.
I like to add it in, leave it for a few weeks
and watch how it performs.
Your goal here guys is to give Google a benchmark
to try and hit.
You're trying to find a balance between profitability
which is how much profit you make per conversion
and the actual volume of conversions.
At the end of the day,
the balance between these two variables is gonna result
in more profit in your bank account at the end of the month.
So you want to get as many sales as possible
at the maximum profit per conversion without decreasing
that volume of sales so much that it decreases
the total volume of profits at the end of the month.
It's a balancing trick and it takes time to master.
Keep in mind and this is really important guys,
don't go changing your bidding strategy every single week.
You need to give it a few weeks.
Even a whole month, leave it, let it cook
let it get all the data, optimize
and then you will start seeing results.
Okay guys, so that's how I start the bidding strategy
for my shopping campaigns.
If you have any questions at all,
leave them in the comments, any feedback,
if I'm doing good stuff here, if you wanna see more content,
what type of content?
Leave it in the comments below.
And guys give it a thumbs up.
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Other than that, thanks so much for watching guys
and I'll see you in the next video.
Bye for now.
(jazz music)