When running traditional shopping campaigns on either Google or Microsoft Ads, we’re often asked for our opinions on the best strategy to sculpt traffic so your shopping ads only display for specific search terms, effectively ignoring everything else.
Let’s say you only want to bid for search terms that contain product brand names in the search, or you’re in a very competitive niche and only want to bid on very specific, profitable terms.
Well, it IS possible, and here’s how to do it.
Step One
Step Two
Step Three
Step Four
This is where the magic starts! We now need to use negatives to sculpt the traffic we are looking for.
To do this, add exact or phrase negatives to the HP campaign for all terms you are happy to send through to the MP campaign.
Reminder: These are the specific terms you WANT to be triggering for in your MP shopping campaign.
Step Five
Set the bid strategy on the HP campaign to ‘Manual’, with all bids to $0.01
Step Six
Set bids on the MP campaign to whatever you need to get traction.
I would start with Manual Bidding since you only have restricted traffic coming to this campaign and this means Smart Bidding might take a while to be effective in this account.
Step Seven
Important: If searches are coming through that should not be there, you will need to adjust the sculpting negatives sitting in HP rather than adding negatives in MP.
Step Eight
