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Welcome to the help center for Search Ads 360, a platform for managing search marketing campaigns.  While the help center is available to the public, access to the Search Ads 360 product is available only to subscribing customers who are signed in. To subscribe or find out more, contact our sales team.

Apply a Search Ads 360 bid strategy to Shopping campaigns and product groups

About Search Ads 360 bid strategies, Shopping campaigns, and product groups

Shopping campaigns offer a flexible way to organize your Google Merchant Center product inventory so you can create customized campaigns using retail-centric tools. Shopping campaigns display Shopping ads instead of text ads, and use product groups instead of keywords to identify the products that you want to appear in ads.

To ensure that you’re bidding the optimal amount to reach your goals, apply a Search Ads 360 bid strategy to an entire Shopping campaign, an ad group in the campaign, or to individual product groups. You can use a Search Ads 360 bid strategy with any goal except Position.

No position bidding for Shopping campaigns and product groups

Because position isn't applicable to Shopping ads, Position bid strategies are not available for Shopping campaigns and product groups. Search Ads 360 prevents you from applying a Position bid strategy to Shopping campaigns and product groups.

In addition, if a conversions, revenue, or advanced targeting bid strategy specifies a position range as an additional constraint, Search Ads 360 will ignore the constraint for product groups and only use the constraint for any keywords that you apply the bid strategy to.

Search Ads 360 bid strategies do not set bids in showcase ad groups

Can I apply a Search Ads 360 bid strategy to both product groups and keywords?

If a Search Ads 360 bid strategy has a conversions, revenue, or advanced targeting goal, you can use it to manage bidding for product groups in a Shopping campaign and for keywords in a manual campaign or inventory keyword campaign.

Excluded product groups

If you don’t want the products in a product group to be advertised from a campaign, you can mark the product group as excluded. A Search Ads 360 bid strategy will completely ignore any excluded product group. It will not suggest bids for the product group, nor will it observe the product group's bidding history.

Bid strategy "cold start" behavior for product group impressions

When you apply a Search Ads 360 bid strategy to new product groups without a bidding history, the bid strategy implements a "cold start" behavior in which it will try to maximize impressions at a minimum CPC until the product group has received enough clicks to correctly optimize bids, or until two weeks have passed.

During the data collection period, the cold start behavior:

  • Overrides the bid strategy's primary goal, such as CPA, ERS, ROAS, position, and any monthly spend amount set for the bid strategy.

  • Does not override min/max bids or campaign budgets.

Once Search Ads 360 has enough data about the product group’s performance—or after two weeks have passed—the bid strategy will optimize towards the goal you configured.

Ready to get started?

First, if you haven't already created a bid strategy, create a Search Ads 360 bid strategy with any goal except Position.

Then, you can do any of the following to apply a Search Ads 360 bid strategy to Shopping campaigns and product groups:

After you've applied a bid strategy, you can view performance metrics for product groups in the bid strategy.

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