Google Shopping campaign priority is a pretty advanced concept.
It might seem pretty simple and straightforward, but it is not.
I’ve seen many cases where smart business owners have done the hard work to get their campaigns set up correctly, but get this one setting wrong. This causes their campaigns to not run the way they intended, leading to a higher cost per click and higher cost per sale.
In this article, I’ll show you what campaign priority is and how to use it correctly in your Google Shopping campaigns.
Here are the parts we’ll cover:
- What Is Campaign Priority
- The 2 Most Common Mistakes
- Campaign Priority In Practice
- The Importance of Shared Budgets
More of a video person? No worries, I’ve got you covered:
What Exactly Is Campaign Priority?
Every time a search query happens, Google Ads looks through its inventory which advertisers (Search and Shopping Ads) want to appear.
Google then:
- pulls all of these (product) ads together
- calculates quality scores
- checks the max CPCs of each advertiser for that specific search query
- ranks the ads
Campaign priority allows you to impact #3: how much you bid for a specific search query.
Controlling how much you spend for each click is an essential part of optimizing your campaigns. Most advertisers use it to bid differently for branded versus generic search queries.
The campaign priority setting acts as a filter that decides which campaign should serve the ad for a specific search query at the max cost per click defined in that campaign.
To get this filter to work, you’ll also need to add negative keywords to your campaigns.
That covers the basics, let’s dig a little deeper and address some common problems.
The 2 Most Common Mistakes with Campaign Priority
There are two big mistakes that I see when it comes to campaign priority:
- Setting a different priority for campaigns with different products
- Simply using the setting wrong
Here is what Google tells about campaign priority in its support docs:
Campaign priority is useful when you’re advertising the same product, for the same country, in multiple Shopping campaigns.
So if you’re using multiple Google Shopping campaigns where each campaign has different products, campaign priority won’t have any effect.
Example: if you’re using custom labels to split up your products into Bestsellers & Rest. Each of these campaigns will have their own products. So using different campaign priorities between them won’t make a difference.
Campaign Priority Options
Google Ads gives you three options for the campaign priority:
- Low
- Medium
- High
Google Shopping will always try to serve the campaign with the highest priority.
Examples:
- If you have a Low & Medium campaign, it will start with the Medium one.
- If you have a Low, Medium & High campaign, it starts with the High one.
There are two occasions when Google will switch to a lower priority campaign:
- When a negative keyword is preventing that specific campaign from showing a product ad
- When a campaign’s budget has run out
That first one is exactly what we’re trying to do, using a combo of negative keywords and campaign priority to get the right campaign to serve the ad.
When a campaign’s budget runs out, the campaign priorities won’t work as intended, you can use a shared budget to prevent this from happening (check below for more on shared budgets).
This process will repeat itself until Google finally finds which of your campaigns should serve an ad for that specific search query.
Campaign Priority in Practice
Now we finally get to the most important part: which campaign should be set to which campaign priority?
Let me illustrate this with an example.
Instead of running one Shopping campaign to target all search queries, we’ll split it up into two campaigns that have the same products, targeting the same language and the same country.
Their only difference is that one will target branded search queries, while the other one will focus on generic ones:
- Shopping – brand with a max CPC of $0.8
- Shopping – generic with a max CPC of $0.5
Example 1: Both campaigns with the same campaign priority
We add the brand as a negative keyword to the generic campaign and set both campaigns with a campaign priority of Medium.
What will happen now is that Google will see an interesting search query for our products and will check our campaigns which it should pick.
Since both campaigns have the same campaign priority, it will use the product (or product group) with the highest bid. In this example, that’s the “Shopping – brand” campaign with a $0.8 CPC.
Notice that this can be a generic search query since there is nothing preventing Google from using the brand campaign to serve these ads.
Example 2: Both campaigns with a different campaign priority
Now let’s give both campaigns the correct campaign priority:
- Shopping – brand: campaign priority: Low
- Shopping – generic: campaign priority: Medium
Giving a higher priority to the less valuable campaign might seem counterintuitive.
But campaign priority simply means that we tell Google where we want them to start.
We want to pay the least possible for each click. So we tell Google to give priority to try and use the bid from the campaigns that have the lowest bid.
Our more valuable campaigns, in the case with branded keywords with higher bids, should only be used for the keywords we intend it for, branded search queries.
Shared Budgets Add The Final Touch
You might already be using shared budgets between campaigns to keep control over the total spend in your account.
But if you’re working with campaign priorities, it’s an essential piece to have in place.
Because if one of your campaigns runs out of budget, Google will simply ignore that campaign and serve ads from your lower priority, more expensive campaign.
If you put the campaigns that are meant to work together on a shared budget, you won’t have this problem.
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Summary
Hope this article managed to explain what campaign priority is, how to use it with your Shopping campaigns.
Let me know in the comments what your experience with campaign priority is!
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Thanks.
Looking forward your reply.
Hi Dennis,
Like the video and want to try your suggested setup. Have a couple questions on campaign setup. We have over 80K products from over 20 brands so I want to know if any of the following should be subdivided? Brand, ID, etc…
1. Shopping – product: Low 1.00
2. Shopping – Branded: Medium .85
3. Generic Search Queries: High .50
Let me know what you think.
Hi Mike,
You can have 3 campaigns for all of your products, as long as your through with your negative keyword lists.
This can be a good improvement if you’re currently not doing any search query level bidding.
But with 80k products, some of them are going to be more valuable than others. It will also become hard to control which products get most of your budget.
So here are some ideas to improve the 3 campaign set up:
– Split off your top brands and give them their own 3 campaigns (via the inventory filter in the settings)
– Split off your bestsellers into their own 3 campaigns (add a custom label, than use an inventory filter)
Hope this gives you some ideas on how to move forward!
-Dennis
Hi Dennis,
I am about to get started with a high and low priority for branded and non branded searches, but I have one questions first:
Right now I have two shopping campaigns (lets call them campaign A and B) with different products in each (both on low priority). If I copy one of these campaigns (lets say campaign A) and put all my branded keywords as negatives in this campaign (this will be my high priority low bid campaign, lets call this campaign C) will this new campaign C in any way impact campaign B which has not been duplicated and contains different products?
Right now Campaign B does better for me and I want to experiment with using these campaign priority settings with campaign A first, but I want to make sure I don’t effect campaign B in any way.
Hope this is not too confusing. Any thoughts would be helpful.
Thanks
Mike
Hi Mike,
Your thinking was correct. If campaigns contain different products, the campaign priority setting doesn’t have any effect.
So in your example Campaign B will be untouched. While campaign A & C have the same products but target different search queries.
Hope that helps!
Hi Dennis,
Are there not reasons Google will skip the priorities other than just location settings, negative keywords & budgets? I think any instance that disallows the higher priority campaign from showing for a query that the lower priority campaign can show for should allow Google to defy the priority structure, i.e ad schedules, search partners, -100% device bids and audience exclusions.
Good article though, you put it well.
Cheers
Jed
100% correct Jed.
If you’re using multiple campaigns with the same products, they have to be identical.
Thanks for the additional remarks on other settings!
Hi Dennis,
Great article.
Quick question:
For your low priority (brand) campaign- would you include your negative keyword lists from the low and medium campaigns in this one?
Otherwise if it tries the high/generic campaign first, and finds the search term is blocked, it’s going to try to serve the ad in the low priority/high bid campaign, unless we add a negative keyword list, right?
Thanks!
Hi Nicholas,
Glad you found the article useful 👍
You always have to explicitly tell Google (through negative keywords) not to show the ad with the campaign with higher priority. If it’s blocked there, it will move up a level to see if there are other campaigns that aren’t being blocked.
Hope this makes sense!
Hey Dennis,
Awesome article.
I have duplicated my shopping campaign, added negative brand keywords to the high priority campaign, and set my intended brand shopping campaign without these negative keywords.
All settings are the same between the two campaigns, including negative keyword lists. The generic campaign has low bids, the brand has high bids.
Somehow my brand campaign is showing regularly for non-brand terms, do you know why this would be? Can’t seem to get this to work.
Thanks
Hi Dan,
A couple of ideas:
– Have you got one campaign with high priority and the other with medium/low?
– Are the products exactly the same in both campaigns?
– Are there conflicting negative keywords?
– Is the budget of the high priority campaign running out?
– What does your ad group structure look like? Do you have negative keywords on the ad group level?
Hey Dennis,
Really appreciate the reply, see responses below.
– Have you got one campaign with high priority and the other with medium/low? —- yes, generic is high, brand is medium
– Are the products exactly the same in both campaigns? —- yes, identical, all products in both
– Are there conflicting negative keywords? —- the negative keywords are the same per campaign (both using a large negative list), and the generic campaign has the brand name as a negative
– Is the budget of the high priority campaign running out? —- both budgets are not running out
– What does your ad group structure look like? Do you have negative keywords on the ad group level? —- for this test I just did ‘all products’ as the only ad group.
Any other ideas? Thanks again for the reply.
If done correctly does this technique literally provide 100% brand terms in your brand shopping campaign, or do some non-brand terms slip inside?
Thanks
^and no negative keywords at ad group level
Hi Dennis,
GREAT article – thank you for writing this all out! Can I get your thoughts on this campaign structure? There are a few things I can’t quite wrap my head around. Here’s what I have:
1. Non-Brand/Generic : Bestsellers Only : Priority High : Brand Negatives : Medium Bid?
2. Non-Brand/Generic : All Products (Incl Bestsellers) : Priority Medium : Brand Negatives : High Bid?
3. Catchall : All Products (Incl Bestsellers) : Priority Low : Brand Negatives : Low Bid
4. Brand : All Products (Incl Bestsellers) : Priority Low : Generic Negatives : Low Bid (no retailers/third parties/retailers selling my brand’s products)
Let’s say I sell shirts and my goal is to put my bestselling products forward and also allocate the most budget to them.
For my non-brand high priority bestsellers campaign (#1) does it make sense to have a lower bid than my non-brand medium priority all products campaign (#2)? Keeping in mind that products will share the same search terms.
For example, I have a bestselling blue shirt that I want to show for the query “blue shirts”. Would setting a lower bid on that campaign prevent me from performing as well at auction against competitors? For bestsellers in this case, would high priority/high bid be a better option? If so, could you please explain why?
Thanks for your time and thanks again for the article!
– Cat
I really love this concept and I found this article after I was trying to implement the same strategy but I am having a hard time with the negative keyword list but mostly because my products don’t have branded items.
I am in the furniture and home decor industry so people don’t usually look for branded items. What is the best way to go about going down the funnel using negative keywords in order to capture the most valuable keywords? I find most of the words I would target aren’t very long tail.
Thanks for your time!
Hi Dre,
Th general rule of thumb is to organize your campaigns be going after more specific keywords. You might not have super long-tail ones, but I bet there are some searches for your products that are more relevant than just “sofas” for your business. Start there.