26 Google Shopping Optimization Tactics 

 
This PDF is very straightforward. 
 
I share every single tactic that I use to optimize Google Shopping campaigns. 
 
To show you it's not page filler, I’ve included an actual mini case-study for most tactics. 
 
You’ll probably see different results (better or worse), but you can use them to get 
inspiration on what to try next. 
 
Regards, 
Dennis Moons 
Founder, Store Growers 
 
 

1. Exclude Display Network 

What: ​By default, your Shopping campaigns are opted into a part of the Display 
Network. Google calls it “Include YouTube, Gmail, and Discover”. 
 
Result:  
 

 
 
Excluding this campaign from “Include YouTube, Gmail, and Discover” resulted in 0.2% 
save in ad spend ($9.73 on $4,675.42). 
 
I have to admit, this is a very small saving. But I’m not comfortable with that setting 
being on and Google having the permission to start running my Shopping Ads on 
YouTube without any notice. 

2. Add Search Partners 

What​: Google can also serve your Shopping Ads on Partner sites. Walmart.com for 
example serves these ads on their category pages. 
 
Result​: 
 

 
 
By enabling Shopping Ads to show on Search Partners, we were able to pick up 7% extra 
conversions in this campaign. 
 

3. Add Remarketing audiences 

What​: Adding Remarketing audiences to your campaign allows you to adjust your max 
CPC for people that have visited your website before. 
 
Result​: 
 

 
 
Adding an “All visitors” remarketing audience to this campaign, coupled with a 25% bid 
adjustment resulted in 2 extra conversions at a 26% lower cost per conversion. 
 4. Adding negative keywords 
What: Negative keywords prevent your Shopping Ads from showing up for specific 
search queries. This allows you to block irrelevant keywords or keywords that have a 
high cost associated with them. 
 
Result: 

 
 
Monitoring the Search terms Report closely after launching this new campaign resulted 
in excluding 23 keywords. These had spent €11.27, or about 24% of the total cost for 
this campaign. 
 
After, that budget could be used to attract more traffic that’s much more likely to 
convert. 
 5. Splitting a single Shopping campaign into different ones 
What​: Instead of having a monolith Google Shopping campaign, breaking it up into 
different campaigns for your categories and brands allows you more flexibility with 
regards to budget and bidding strategies. 
 
Result​: 
 

 
 
With this advertiser, we went from having one single campaign with all products, to 4 
separate ones with their own budget. 
 
This enabled them to focus the budget on the categories that were doing well (Cat 1 & 
2), while reducing the budget going to Cat 3 & 4. 
 
That resulted in the same budget (around $2,000), generating an additional 20% 
increase in revenue. 

6. Create Multiple ad groups 

What​: With multiple ad groups in Google Shopping, you can control which products 
show up for which search queries with the help of negative keywords. 
 
Result​: 
  
 
Before all 4 products in the screenshot above were part of the same ad group, all 
targeting the same search queries. 
 
But after splitting them, we were able to identify which products were best suited to 
certain search queries. 
 
This resulted in being able to push products that were more likely to convert. 

7. Creating product groups 

What​: You can split out the “All products” product group by variables like brand or item 
ID. That allows you to change bids depending on how valuable a certain brand or 
product is to you. 
 
 

 
 
Result: 
This advertiser was bidding €0.25 for all products. After splitting up the product group, 
she realized that she was underbidding on her top brand, which was raised to €0.5, and 
overbidding on a second brand, which she reduced to €0.15. 
 
This resulted in an increase over €174 in extra revenue (with a similar cost) over the 
span of a week after the change. 

8. 🔥 Search Query Level bidding 🔥 

What: ​Search query level bidding allows keyword targeting in Google Shopping 
campaigns. 
 
That allows you to bid differently on search queries that contain brand or products 
names as compared to more generic searches. 
 
You do this by creating multiple campaigns with the same products, and siphoning off 
the search queries into a particular campaign depending on how valuable that query is 
to your business. 
 
This is probably the tactic that has produced the best results over the years. 
 
 

 
 
 
Result: 
In this account, we went from a single campaign targeting a specific product category, 
to two-tiered campaign structure. 
 
The “top” campaign includes searches that have proven to convert well, while the 
“other” campaign contains all other searches. 
 
In the 30 days following this change, ROAS held steady at 7.8. But​ revenue increased by 
67%​ (from $6722.87 to $11,282.25!) 

9. Product title optimization 

What​: By adjusting your product titles you can increase visibility (show up for new 
keywords) or get a higher CTR. 
 
Result​: 
 

 
 
That’s exactly what happened with this advertiser. Before their products titles were 
structured like PRODUCT NAME + BRAND. 
 
Pulling that brand forward to the beginning of the products title resulted in a 62% 
increase in CTR! 
 10. Monitor competitive pricing 
What​: If you understand how your product price compares to other vendors, you can 
adapt your CPC to that information. 
 
The Benchmark product price difference column will show you that information. 
 
Result​: 

 
 
This advertiser had products ranging from -12.23% +0.24%. After reviewing this pricing 
information, he changed his bidding strategy to the following approach: 
● Be aggressive where his price was > 15% lower 
● Limit spend where he was > 10% more expensive 
● Wait and see for those other products 
 

11. Product image optimization 

What​: Images are an essential part of a Shopping Ad. Making the image more attractive 
can help to increase visibility (impressions) or increase the CTR. 
 
Result​: 
This client had problems getting impressions. 
 
Despite a healthy search volume (2,400 search /mo) for the types of products he was 
selling, he was having a hard time getting impressions. 
 
After checking all the obvious things, I had a look at the image quality for his products. 
Turned out all of his images were 600x600 pixels. That’s well above the Google 
minimum requirements. 
 

 
 
Can you tell when we switched product images? :) 

12. Leveraging the sales price attribute 

What​: Besides the product price you can include the sales_price attribute. This will 
sometimes trigger the “sale” label. It will also show the old price striked through. 
 
 
 
  
Result​: 
 
Both the label and the 2 prices will help your ad stand out and increase your CTR. 

13. Improve product identifiers 

What​: Product identifiers, the fields for brand, gtin and mpn are often the cause for 
trouble during your feed setup. 
 
Google uses these product identifiers to rank your products for similar terms that other 
sellers are ranking for. So if you make sure the information in these fields is accurate, 
you will have better visibility. 
 
Result​: 
 
When I took over the management for one of my clients, he already had a Google 
Shopping campaign up and running. There were about 2500 products in his feed, but 
quite a few had been disapproved.  
 
So we started going through those errors and fixing them. 15 of those products, which 
were disapproved because of incorrect gtins, became part of the top 50 of best selling 
products for this retailer! 
 14. Leveraging free shipping 
What​: If your store offers free shipping, it will sometimes help you stand out from other 
vendors that sell similar products but do not cover shipping. 

15. Use a Comparison Shopping Service provider 

What​: This one is only for online stores selling to EU countries. 
 
Because of EU antitrust laws, Google was forced to allow other marketplaces to use 
Shopping Ads and give them a 20% CPC discount when they enter the ad auction. 
 
As a result, many of these marketplaces, more accurately called Comparison Shopping 
Service (or CSS) providers, will now pass on that 20% CPC discount to their customers. 
 
Result​: 
  
 
For this EU client, we switched from Google to Producthero, a CSS provider. 
 
Reason for that is the discount. 
 
Your CPCs won’t show a 20% lower CPC. Instead, it is a 20% discount going into the ad 
auction. 
 
That leads to more clicks at the same CPC or the same amount of clicks at a lower 
CPC. Usually it is a combination making it even tougher to see the actual impact. 
 

16. Search impression share metrics 

What​: Search impression share metrics show how many times your ads are showing up 
compared to how many times they could show up. 
 
I use these metrics a lot when scaling a campaign as they indicate how much more 
traffic there is. 
 
Result​: 
This client had a new Google Shopping campaign go live which was showing promising 
results, but the impression share was only 53%. This means that their ads were only 
showing up in about half of the searches. 
 
I increased the CPCs and the week after the Search Impression share for this campaign 
was 96.57%. Just by itself this number doesn’t tell you much, but the campaigns were 
still highly profitable. Which led to an increase in overall revenue. 

17. Benchmark metrics 

What​: Benchmark Max CPC and benchmark CTR will tell you what the max CPCs and 
CTRs look like for advertisers that sell similar products.  
 
If you get enough impressions, you might even get benchmark data down to the product 
level. 
 
Result​: 
 
 

 
In this single product Google Shopping campaign For this advertiser, our Max CPC was 
close to the Benchmark max CPC. 
 
But the Benchmark CTR was a lot lower: 0.93% compared to a benchmark of 1.69%. 
 
In and of itself, that number doesn tell you much, just that something is off. So if we 
took a look at the other advertisers and saw that our product title wasn’t as attractive. 
 
After some changes, we managed to get the CTR up to 1.34%. 

18. Showcase shopping ads 

What​: Showcase Shopping ads are a different Google Shopping ad group format. These 
ads mostly show up for generic, mobile searches. 
 
In those cases, regular Shopping Ads don’t show up. So by adding this other ad group 
type, you can get more visibility on generic search queries. 
 

 
 
Result​: 
This advertiser was already running Product Shopping Ads. But adding a Showcase 
Shopping Ads campaign, resulted in 10% additional clicks. 

19. Budget changes 

What​: Sometimes optimizing a Shopping campaign is as easy as increasing the budget. 
 
Result​: 
 
Google was showing the “limited by budget” indicator on a profitable campaign. We 
increased the daily budget from €20/day to €25/day and then later to €35/day. 
 
ROAS held steady at 4.5 which led to a 75% increase in overall revenue! 
 

20. Adding seller ratings 

What​: Adding seller ratings can help build social proof and make your ad (and store) 
more attractive. 
 
Result​: 
 

 
 
Ads with Seller ratings often see an increase in CTR. 
 

21. Switch to a Smart Shopping Campaign 

What​: Smart Shopping campaigns leverage a lot of Google’s automation. It uses an 
automated bidding strategy and will show your ads in the search results and on certain 
display placement.  
 
Result: 
 
After struggling to make a Standard Shopping campaign work for a jewelry retailer, we 
ran a test with a Smart Shopping campaign.  
 
That took the ROAS from 3.5 (which wasn’t profitable) to 9.7. 
 
During that same time our remarketing campaign also took a tip, mostly from sales now 
being attributed to the Smart Shopping campaign. 

22. Switch to Standard Shopping Campaign 

What​: With a Smart Shopping campaign, you don’t have much control over which 
queries you show up for, or how much you’re bidding them. 
 
After switching to a Standard Shopping campaign, a lot of those optimizations do 
become available. 
 
Result​: 
 
When we started working with a new retailer, we transformed his Smart Shopping 
campaign into Standard ones. 
 
That took the ROAS from 2.8 to 3.4 with similar levels of revenue (the biggest 
improvements were the cost savings.). 

23. Switching bidding strategies 

What​: A bidding strategy can be the thing that’s holding a campaign back. By using a 
more appropriate strategy, it can unlock growth. 
 
Sometimes it's appropriate to go from a manual strategy to an automated one. But 
Sometimes it's equally effective to go the other way around. 
 
Result: 
When I started managing the account for one of my clients, he was running a particular 
campaign with a $12 target CPA bidding strategy. That meant that he wanted to pay 
$12 per sale at most. 
 
When I questioned him about this, it turned out that this $12 came out of a calculation 
he had made a couple of years ago. In the meantime, a couple of things had changed: 
● Better converting website 
● Higher average order value 
 
This meant that the $12 target was a little bit too aggressive and limited the amount of 
clicks. We increased it to a $15 target. 
 
In the month after that change, we saw 38% increase in revenue with a slightly lower 
ROAS. 

24. Custom labels 

What​: Custom labels are extra fields that you can add to your product feed to pass 
additional product information like margin or price bracket. 
 
Result​: 
We helped this advertiser add custom labels to his feed to get margin info into Google 
Ads. 

 
 
Then we created 3 different campaigns based on that information: 
● Top products (75% of Shopping budget & aggressive max CPCs) 
● Average products (20% of budget & average CPCs) 
● Rest products (5% of budget & very low CPCs) 
 
This resulted in revenue increasing from $833 to $1,720 in the two weeks following this 
change. Because we focused the majority of the budget on campaigns with higher 
margins, the overall profits also went up. 

25. Bid adjustments 

What​: Bid adjustments are CPC increases or decreases for a specific group of users. 
With Google Shopping you can adjust your CPCs based on things like the user’s device, 
their location or the time of day. 
 
This allows you to save money in the areas where your campaigns are performing less, 
or be more aggressive in the parts where you are seeing good results. 
 
Result​: 
 
With one advertiser we saw that there was a ton of mobile traffic, but it wans’t 
converting high enough to justify the CPC. That’s why we put a bid adjustment in place 
of -30%. 
 

 
 
This led to a lower CPC: $0.75 -> $0.51 which brought the CPA to the same level as the 
one for Computers. 

26. Promotions 
What​: Promotions are special offers that you can submit for one or more of your 
products. These can be things like discounts or better delivery options. 
 
Result​: 
 
  
 
The ad above shows the “special offer” and when clicked, it opens up a pop up with 
more details on the offer, including a promo code. 
 

🔥 Bonus: My Most Effective Tactic 🔥 

In this list, we’ve covered our most effective tactic (it’s #8, Search Query Level Bidding). 
 
Now I’ve created an in-depth video training with templates on how to implement it in 
your account. 
 
Because you’re a loyal reader of the Store Growers blog, you can get it for $29 instead 
of $49. 
 
https://academy.storegrowers.com/search-query-level-bidding-deepdive?coupon=DI1S
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I’m not sure how long this promotion will last, so don’t miss out!