Running AdWords Shopping Campaigns with the Google Shopping Feed

Shopping campaigns offer a simple and flexible way to organize your Google Merchant Center product inventory within AdWords.

To understand how google campaigns work please follow Setting up shopping campaigns.

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In October 2014 Google converted all Product Listing Ads to Shopping Campaigns; therefore, adwords_labels are deprecated and shouldn't be used any more.

Once your feed is submitted and approved, create an AdWords account and connect it to your Merchant Account under Settings > AdWords. Doing so, your products should become available for shopping campaigns.

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If your products are approved in Merchant Center but they are not visible in AdWords campaigns, you may need to contact a Google representative to help.

The basic product campaign is to bid the same way for all your products, but you can improve your ads by bidding differently on groups of products.

Edit your campaign in AdWords, and go to Product Groups and click the "+" sign to find out how you can group them. Those groups can be defined using the following columns in the feed:

If you want to group your products for use in a Shopping campaign, you'll need to setup custom labels in your feed.

Setting Up Custom Labels

To use custom labels, you'll need the following:

1. Create new product attributes
   We suggest you make these attributes dropdowns, and add the values you intend to use. This will give you one place to manage their values: if you have a typo, instead of editing each product, you just edit the attribute. This will also help staying consistent with Google requirements (see below)

Create new product attributes in Zoey, one for each label. If you already have an attribute, you can use that. If it's not a drop-down, that's ok too, but please be aware of its limits, and make sure it has consistent values, otherwise your grouping won't work. After this is done, you can edit your products and fill in Season values.
2. Add Custom Labels to the feed columns
To include the new attributes in the feed as a custom labels:
a. Go to the feed settings, under Columns Map and add a new column.
b. Name it custom_label_0, and select the new attribute ("season" in our example).
You'll only need to do this once.
3. Save and you're done! The new feed that generates overnight should include the new attribute.

You can do those steps for up to 5 custom_labels. The attributes you set can have any value you'd like to use in AdWords.

Google Requirements

You can create up to five custom labels, numbered 0 through 4, for each item in your feed.
You may submit one value per item for each custom label attribute.
You should assign a specific definition for each of the five custom labels and specify the possible values for each. Then, you use these custom labels consistently across the products in your Merchant Center account, assigning appropriate values to each product according to your definition. Each of the five custom labels can only have one value per product.

Source: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494?hl=en

Limitations

You can only have 5 custom labels
one product can have only one value per label, so in total, a product can only have 5 labels and you cannot group more than 1,000 products with the same labels.

As custom labels are meant to allow grouping of items, only 1,000 unique values are supported for each custom label attribute across the items in your account. Products with a custom label submitted after the limit was exceeded won’t be included in product groups using this custom label. To correct the issue, update your product data to reduce the number of unique values for the custom label to less than 1,000.

Source: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494?hl=en

Setting up Price Buckets

Price buckets is a concept to help target campaign bids by product price ranges. I.e. products with price intervals:

• < $50
• $50 - $100
• $100 - $500
• $500

To set them up, you would need to define a set of rules under AdWords Price Buckets feed setting and insert a new custom_label_0 column and map it to the AdWords Price Buckets directive in the feed Columns Map

To view how this looks, see the AdWords Price Buckets directive instructions.