Understanding How Your Brand Drives Google Shopping Campaign Traffic

Separating brand from non-brand traffic is not as straightforward in Google Shopping as it is for standard AdWords text ads, but columnist Mark Ballard has a solution.

In my experience, most retailers see segmenting brand and non-brand traffic as a necessity of running a paid search program; however, the rise of Google Shopping Campaigns and the Product Listing Ad (PLA) format has muddied the waters on these efforts.
Searches on a retailer’s own brand name tend to perform very differently from generic searches or searches that include product manufacturer names. Brand search is often purely navigational in nature or reflective of brand equity that has been generated through other channels.
While brand search can produce incremental paid search revenue, it is helpful to assess its performance in that context and separately from non-brand search.
Because text ads are based on an advertiser’s chosen keywords, it is relatively straightforward to channel searches on the advertiser’s brand name to one set of ads and non-brand searches to another.
PLAs, on the other hand, are feed-based and advertisers cannot simply tell Google, “If you see my brand name in a user’s query, run these PLAs. If not, run these.”
The good news is that advertisers can segment brand and non-brand PLA traffic with a little bit of effort, some negative keywords, and by making use of the campaign prioritization options introduced with Shopping Campaigns last year.
We’ll walk through that process below and also examine how important branded queries are to PLAs in general and compared to text ads.

Segmenting Brand From Non-Brand PLAs

Confining brand queries to one set of PLAs and non-brand queries to another, to track, analyze and bid them separately, involves three basic components:

1. Creating at least two separate Google Shopping Campaigns
2. Applying brand terms as negative keywords to one set of Shopping Campaigns
3. Setting the campaign priority higher for the campaign with the brand term negatives

In creating a Google Shopping Campaign designated for brand traffic, an advertiser may choose to duplicate the potentially complex targeting structure of their main Shopping Campaign or they could simply target All Products (more on this question below).
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