Inside a Shopping campaign's ad group, you'll work with your inventory to place bids using product groups instead of keywords. A product group is just a subset of your inventory that you define, and all the products inside it use the same bid.
This article covers how to create product groups, plus how to edit and remove them.
How product groups work
When you get started
When you first create a Shopping campaign, you'll have one ad group with one product group called "All products" that includes your entire inventory. We recommend that you split your inventory into smaller groups with subdivisions to make bidding more specific to your advertising goals.
Use product groups for bidding and reporting
- Bidding: Set and revise bids for each product group as often as you need, or exclude a product group from your campaign.
- Reporting: For Performance Max campaigns, reporting metrics can be different for the Product Groups tab when compared to the Campaign, Ad Group, or Ads tabs. This is because the Product Groups tab can only report on product level data.
- For example, when a Shopping ad shows many products in an individual ad slot, each product collects an impression. However, the campaign, ad group, and ad recognize that only a single ad was showing and will count it as one impression.
How to use product group subdivisions to bid more strategically
You can subdivide up to 7 levels for each product group in any order you want. You can have a product group for all your products and bid the same amount for all of them. In the opposite way, you can also have smaller product groups organized by brand or product category. Keep in mind that you can't set a bid on a product group that has been subdivided--you'll set bids on the product groups without subdivisions. Learn about best practices for Shopping campaigns
Each ad group in a Shopping campaign can have up to 5,000 product groups.
Attributes available for product group subdivisions
Product groups can only be defined by these attributes provided in your product data in Google Merchant Center.
- Item ID: Your identifier (id) for each product. Learn more
- Brand: The name of the manufacturer of a product (Example: Google). The brand should be clearly visible on the front of the product packaging or label. Learn more
- Category: An attribute based on the Google product taxonomy. Example of a category string: Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Dresses. In your product data, the ">" characters define the hierarchical levels in the product category that you'll be able to use for subdividing product groups. If you don't submit the category, we might assign one for you. There may be cases where Google refines the category further after it's been submitted. Though we do our best, some products may be miscategorized. Learn more
- Product type: An attribute that you assign based on your categorization. Example of a product type string: Home & Garden > Kitchen & Dining > Kitchen Appliances > Refrigerators. In your product data, the ">" characters define the hierarchical levels in the product type that you'll be able to use for subdividing product groups. Product types can be subdivided up to five times. Learn more
- Custom labels: You can create up to five custom labels in your product data (Example of label values: seasonal, bestseller). Learn more
- Condition: The state of a product (new, used, and refurbished). Learn more
- Channel: Where your products are sold, either "Local" in a physical store or "Online" through an e-commerce store. Learn more
- Channel exclusivity: Whether your products are sold locally, online, or through both channels. Learn more