How to structure standard shopping and why you might still use it

Feed-only pMax is dead. As of August 8, 2023 Google removed the feed-only option when it made the announcement that pMax will use product feed images to "unlock" inventory and formats, including YouTube Shorts. Thanks, Google. You really know how to ruin a good thing and take away our smart shopping hack.

With feed-only pMax off the table, that leaves standard shopping holding the bag. While standard shopping typically doesn't get prioritized over pMax, only using standard shopping when you're just starting out isn't necessarily a bad thing for a few reasons:

1. You're saving yourself some inefficient spend in video/display placements if your product feed images aren't high quality.

2. The pMax benefits over standard shopping are creative asset-based benefits anyway (i.e. pMax uses display placements for remarketing).

3. pMax loves to steal credit from other campaigns and other platforms, so actual ROAS for pMax campaigns are skewed.

Here’s how I’d structure standard shopping campaigns if pMax was off the table. First, I’d take a “branded” vs. “non-branded” approach. Now, I know what you’re thinking…branded shopping doesn’t exist. And you’d be right. Technically, branded shopping doesn’t exist. But, like everything, branded shopping can be hacked. Here’s the step by step to create your branded shopping campaign:

1. create a standard shopping campaign

2. name it “Standard Shopping - Brand” (or use whatever nomenclature is in the account)

3. set campaign priority to low

4. use manual CPC bidding with low CPC bids

5. occasionally, non-branded search terms will leak through, so you need to do some hygiene exclusions every week via negative KW lists

6. create a negative KW list in Google Ads for all non-branded search terms

7. use the Campaign Search Term Filter script from Flowboost to automate adding non-branded search terms to the negative KW list for the branded shopping campaign

The non-branded shopping campaign is a bit easier to set up:

1. create a standard shopping campaign

2. name it “Standard Shopping - NB” (or use whatever nomenclature is in the account)

3. set campaign priority to medium

4. use max conversions bidding to start with

5. wait until the campaign hits ~25 conversions then switch bidding over to target ROAS

6. create a negative KW list in Google Ads for all branded KWs and add this list to the campaign

   • create a Google sheet with all branded KWs (including misspellings)

   • for misspellings and typos, use this tool

To reiterate, here are the reasons why you could use standard shopping and not pMax

• You save yourself some inefficient spend in video/display placements.

• You don’t have high quality creative assets to use in pMax campaigns.

• You have more control over your standard shopping campaign budget.

• You are forecasting or seeing less than 50 conversions per month AND you are on a limited budget.

Enjoy standard shopping…while we still have it!