Google Ads Shopping Tiers

If you sell products online and use Google Ads, campaign types like standard shopping and Performance Max are essential to get your products shown to shoppers searching across Google's properties.

Standard shopping allows your product listing ads (PLAs) to appear on the Google search results page for relevant queries related to the products you sell. Performance Max campaigns are different by automatically showing your product ads across Google's entire network - Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and more.

But here's the catch with standard shopping campaigns - when you only have one, search terms that trigger your ads can get treated equally in terms of bids and priority. That means high-intent, super relevant searches from potential buyers could be getting the same bids as low-quality, generic browsing searches.

To take control and prioritize your top-performing products and keywords in standard shopping, you'll want to utilize a strategy I call "standard shopping tiers." By creating multiple tiers, you can prioritize your best sellers and keywords at higher bids to get maximum visibility.

Here's exactly how standard shopping tiers work in 4 simple steps:

• Duplicate your existing standard shopping campaign so you have an identical version. Both contain the exact same product feed.
• For one campaign, set the "Campaign Priority" to High. For the other, set it to Low. (Counter-intuitive wording by Google!
• Add negative keywords to the "High Priority" campaign for any terms or phrases you want to kick over to the low priority campaign.
• Assign a higher maximum bid to the "High Priority" campaign.

For example, let's say you sell headphones and notice branded searches like "buy Apple AirPods" and "Beats headphones" convert much higher than generic terms like "cheap earbuds."

You would:

• Set one campaign to High Priority and the other to Low
• Add negative keywords for "Apple" and "Beats" to the High Priority campaign
• Set a higher max bid for the High Priority campaign

This forces the high-intent, branded searches to show ads from the higher bid campaign. The cheap, generic searches stay stuck in the low bid tier! Use this strategy based on your own high vs low performing keywords.

Summary

If you use Google Ads to sell products online with standard shopping campaigns, create "standard shopping tiers" to prioritize your best products and keywords at higher bids. Duplicate your existing standard shopping campaign, set one to "High Priority" and the other to "Low Priority," add negative keywords to the high tier for terms you want in the low tier, then assign a higher max bid to the high tier. This forces high-converting branded searches to the high bid campaign while less relevant generic searches stay in the low bid tier, improving your visibility and results.