What are Google Shopping Campaign Priority Settings?
Google Shopping Campaign Priority Settings
When you have the same product in multiple Shopping campaigns, you can determine which campaign should participate in the auction for that product with campaign priority settings.
Campaign priority is useful when you’re advertising the same product, for the same country, in multiple Shopping campaigns.
Most campaigns already have a “Low” priority – but advertisers can change this priority to “Medium” or “High”. and these priorities will determine the bid for any product that the campaigns share.
Campaign priorities determine bids using the following rules:
The highest priority campaign will bid.
If one campaign has a higher priority than the others, the campaign with the higher priority will bid.
For example, imagine 2 campaigns share the same product. One campaign has a High priority, and the other has a Medium priority. Google will use the bid from the High priority campaign first, even if the bid in the Medium priority campaign is set to a larger amount.
If the highest priority campaign runs out of budget, then Google will pull from the lower priority campaign bid. If the campaign with the highest priority runs out of budget, the next lower priority campaign will place the bid.
Continuing with the previous example, when the budget for the High priority campaign is used up, the bid from the Medium priority campaign will be used.
Pro Tip: When an advertiser sets a campaign to use the Standard delivery method, their budget will be spread evenly throughout the day. So to reserve funds for later in the day, a High priority campaign might not participate in an auction even if the budget is not yet exhausted.
Instead a lower priority campaign that is not reserving funds might participate in the auction.
When multiple campaigns have the same priority, the highest bid is used.
If multiple campaigns all have the same priority, the campaign with the highest bid for that product will participate in the auction.
For example, if 3 campaigns share the same product and have a Low priority, the highest bid from any of the 3 campaigns will be used.
Imagine that you’re starting a new Shopping campaign for the summer. One product in this campaign is sandals. Sandals are also listed in another campaign for footwear. You have a specific budget just for your summer campaign.
So whenever sandals are shown, you want the bid to come from your summer campaign—not from your footwear campaign.
To make sure that the bid comes from the summer campaign, give the summer campaign a High campaign priority and give the footwear campaign a Low priority. If the summer campaign runs out of budget, the bid for sandals will be determined by the footwear campaign.
How to Implement Priority Settings
To use the campaign priority setting, you first need to set up a Shopping campaign.
Pro-Tip: Remember campaign priority is only important if you have multiple Shopping campaigns that promote the same product.
- Instructions
- Sign in to your AdWords account.
- Go to the Settings tab of the campaign you want to edit.
- Select Shopping settings (advanced).
- Next to “Campaign priority,” click Edit.
- Select the priority setting you want: “Low” (this is the default), “Medium,” or “High.”
- Click Save.
How To Leveraging Priority Settings
ISO campaigns leverage priority settings and negative keywords to isolate and allocate more aggressive bids and budget to certain high value searches.
This advanced strategy gives advertisers more control over which search queries their products show up for. It also allows them to isolate and dedicate budget to search queries that historically convert well.
It’s similar to how we think of text ad campaigns. With text ads, we can choose to set up our campaigns based on exact searches and bid higher and with more confidence because we know these are exact searches we want to go after.
With ISO campaigns, although we can’t target keywords directly, we can leverage negative keyword lists in an alternative campaign and then utilize the priority settings so that searches funnel into the right campaign.
For more on how to set up your ISO campaigns, check out our recent blog post here.
Assign Your Google Shopping Campaign Priority Settings
Once you have your two campaigns (Broad Match Campaign and ISO Campaign) built-out, you should assign your priority settings to each.
The priority settings are located in: Settings > All Settings > Shopping Settings (Advanced)
Campaign priority settings are useful when you’re advertising the same product in multiple Shopping campaigns.
If you have the same product(s) in multiple campaigns, the priority setting dictates to Google which campaign it should reference first. The campaign with the higher priority setting will be the one Google will try to serve the impression from first.
Broad Match Campaign
- The Broad Match campaign should have a high priority setting.
- High priority tells Google to reference this campaign first.
- Broad Match keywords have low bids because it’s typically a general search (example: running shoes).
- You don’t want to waste too much budget on terms that historically don’t convert well for your product BUT you also don’t want to completely forfeit this traffic.
- Low bids help to avoid overspending without sacrificing traffic.
ISO Campaigns
- The ISO campaign should have a low priority setting
- Low priority tells Google to reference your campaign last
- ISO campaigns have higher bids because these are typically long tail searches (example: Nike Free RN Flyknit Women’s Running Shoe) or searches that tend to drive conversions at a high rate
- Advertisers are willing to invest more in these searchers because they know that these terms will convert well and / or have converted well historically
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