The Gold Pan Technique for Google Shopping Campaigns

Why The Need To Pan For Gold?

Google Shopping campaigns can bring tons of traffic to your products. And a lot of that traffic is dirt. Don’t believe me? Without the proper controls, your Shopping campaigns can be overrun by something called the Mob Effect. Here’s the short version: you can end up spending the bulk of your budget on products and searches that aren’t even selling.

Four products used up half of the Shopping campaign budget while contributing less than a tenth of the revenue.

But there are some serious gold nuggets within that dirt -- gold nuggets that represent profitable Shopping campaigns. More importantly, there’s a system you can use to hone in on these nuggets. It’s called The Gold Pan Technique.

The Problem With Shopping Campaigns

If you’ve had any traction with getting sales from Search campaigns, you probably know that the closer someone’s search matches your product, the more likely you are to get a sale.

For example, let’s say someone walks into your store and you’re hoping to sell them this shoe:

If someone says they just want a pair of “shoes,” it’s a shot in the dark. They may or may not be interested in this specific pair of Jordans.

But when someone else walks in and says they’re looking for a pair of Jordans, there’s a decent chance that they're interested in this pair among the other models you carry.

And if you have a customer who walks in and asks specifically for the Air Jordan 14 Retro in size 11, the sale is basically a done deal, because it’s an exact match to a specific request.

Now, here’s the problem with Shopping campaigns. Shopping campaigns don’t have a built-in way for you to control your search queries. And because the quality of a search query can have a direct effect on the likelihood of a sale, this lack of control also affects your profits.

The Gold Pan Technique gives you that control back.

Why The Gold Pan Technique Will Save Your Shopping Profits

Just like the name sounds, the Gold Pan Technique makes it easier for you to pan through the less profitable search terms and get right to the nuggets: high intent searches that are meant for your products.

The Gold Pan Technique is so effective is because it allows us to do something Shopping campaigns don’t do naturally: segment traffic by generic, branded, and product-specific searches. It's not quite the granularity of keyword-level control, but it's pretty darn close.

The results of this segmentation appear across different types of traffic. Here’s an example of results between branded and non-branded shopping traffic:

Using multiple shopping campaigns in combination with a few advanced settings makes this system even more effective:

You’ll use this multi-campaign setup to funnel your higher-intent searches toward campaigns precisely meant to bring you those gold nuggets. Therefore, you should make sure that your campaigns have a matching ad group and product group structure so you can measure results consistently across campaigns.

How Many Campaigns Do You Need For the Gold Pan Technique?

Because there are such clear distinctions between generic, branded, and product-specific searches (and because of the example above), it’s easy to assume that you should create three campaigns.

But that’s not always the case. And the reason is pretty simple. There are many industries where people simply don’t do enough product-specific searches.

So if you sell devices/appliances, give yourself the advantage of SKU-level segmentation. Otherwise, don’t build an unnecessary campaign layer.

How The Gold Pan Technique Works

To segment your Shopping traffic between the dirt and the nuggets, you’ll need a few key ingredients.

First, depending on your industry, you’ll need either two or three Shopping campaigns.

Then you’ll need to combine these with Shopping campaign priority settings, shared negative keyword lists, different bids across your campaigns, and a shared budget to tie everything together.

Set Up Shopping Campaign Priorities

When you have multiple campaigns that contain products, priorities tell Google which campaign should serve an ad first in the order of High, Medium, and Low:

So, to finish this first step, you’ll set your priorities like this:

Generic Campaign - High Priority
Brand Campaign - Medium Priority
SKU Campaign - Low Priority

Use Shared Negative Keyword Lists To Funnel Your Searches

Now that your priorities are organized, creating shared negative keyword lists can drive your higher-intent traffic to the appropriate campaign. You’ll need a shared negative keyword list for:

Universal negatives (search terms that are never relevant)
Brand negatives that apply to the Generic campaigns and block it from gaining brand traffic
SKU negatives that apply to the Generic and Brand campaigns to block them from taking that traffic

Adjust Your Bids For Profits

Before, you couldn’t bid differently for different kinds of search terms in your Shopping campaigns. But now you can bid differently at the Generic, Brand, and SKU level.

So, your bids across these campaigns will look something like this:

Generic Campaign - Lowest Bid
Brand Campaign - Medium Bid
SKU Campaign - Highest Bid

Tie It Together With A Shared Budget

An interesting aspect is the requirement for a shared budget if you're juggling multiple campaign types.

Gold Pan Technique Recap: Pan Your Way To Shopping Sales

At this point, you should have three (or two) separate shopping campaigns dedicated to receiving Generic, Brand, and SKU traffic. As you collect data, you’ll want to stay mindful of some common pitfalls. Keep an eye on your search terms to ensure each campaign is picking up the right search queries. If you’re seeing generic search terms in Brand or SKU campaigns, make sure that you’ve added a shared budget for all three, and that your bids are distinguished enough across each campaign for the traffic to remain segmented.