Create an inventory plan

An inventory plan contains a collection of templates for generating campaigns within a single engine account. For example, you can create an inventory plan that generates one campaign for each product category and outputs long-tail keywords, and another plan that generates one campaign for each brand and outputs brand keywords.

You need to create at least one inventory plan before you can create inventory templates. If you want to generate campaigns in different engine accounts, you need an inventory plan for each engine account.

Best practice: Start small

When you start a new plan, create a filter at the plan level so you're working with only a small subset of the products you eventually want to advertise. Then, when you're ready to go live, remove or change the filter to include all of the products you want.

By focusing on a small set of products, you'll need less time to generate and inspect the output of your templates and formulas. Once you're confident in your templates and formulas, you can open up the filters to generate campaigns for the full set of products.

To create an inventory plan:

1. Navigate to an advertiser.

   Steps for navigating to an advertiser

   1. Click the navigation bar to display navigation options.

   2. In the "Agency" list, click on the agency that contains the advertiser. You can search for an agency by name or scroll through the list.

   3. In the "Advertiser" list, click on the advertiser.

   4. Click Apply or press the Enter key.

   Search Ads 360 displays the advertiser page, which contains data for all of the advertiser’s engine accounts.

2. In the left navigation panel, click Templates.
3. Click the Inventory management tab.
4. Click the + New button which appears above the reporting table.
5. Enter a name for the plan.
   To help you distinguish the plan from other plans, consider including the name of the engine account in the plan name. You can see the plan's name in Search Ads 360 reports. You can also filter on the plan name to see all campaigns and other items generated by the plan.
6. Under Purpose, select Generate campaigns, ads, and more in an engine account if it isn't already selected.
7. From the Engine account list, select an engine account.
   The list contains all supported engine accounts in the advertiser.
8. From the Inventory account list, select the inventory feed that contains the products you want to advertise.
   The list contains all inventory accounts that you have linked to your Search Ads 360 advertiser.

   By default, the plan includes all products in the inventory feed you select.

9. To limit the list of products included in the plan, use attributes from the inventory feed to create a filter. Each attribute in the inventory feed describes some aspect of a product, such as the brand name or category of product. The plan will include only those products that match the filter:
   1. From the Attribute or metric list, select an attribute from the inventory feed.
      The list contains all of the product attributes defined in the inventory feed you selected.
   2. Select an operator, such as Equals or Starts with.
   3. Enter a value to match. Matching is not case sensitive. That is, Shoes matches shoes.

      For example, the filter Category level 2 Equals Shoes matches all products in your inventory feed for which the Google product category attribute includes the word Shoes at level 2, such as 
      Apparel & Accessories > Shoes > Outdoor shoes > Hiking boots & Shoes
      and
      Apparel & Accessories > Shoes > Outdoor shoes > Sneakers

   4. You can specify additional attributes. The campaign will include only those products that match all of the attributes.

      For example, if you add Price Greater than $50 to the filter in the previous step, the campaign will contain only shoes that cost more than $50.

   5. To remove an attribute, click the X that appears at the end of the line.

10. Click the Preview button to see the list of products that match the filter.
11. When you've selected the products you want, click Save.

The new inventory plan appears in the Inventory plans reporting table. Search Ads 360 automatically pauses the plan so it won't attempt to apply the templates you create until you're ready.

Next steps:

Create at least one campaign template for the plan.