Scaling Shopping Campaigns with Display and Audience targeting

Picture of Andrey Kisselev

Andrey Kisselev

How to grow (or scale) Shopping campaigns profitably? One method is with Display and audience targeting. This is the topic of this video Hi, this is Andrey. Let's talk about scaling shopping campaigns.
What's in this article?

How to grow (or scale) Shopping campaigns profitably? One method is with Display and audience targeting. This is the topic of this video

Hi, this is Andrey. Let’s talk about scaling shopping campaigns.

Key Terms

Scaling an account means increasing its revenue profitably.

Suppose you have been running a fairly optimized shopping campaign that’s delivering adequate return on ad spend for you, and you want to increase revenue while staying within at least that return on ad spent. That’s what scaling is.

Scaling is done through prospecting. Prospecting is an act of finding new potential customers who have never visited your website or even know about your brand.

And that’s different from remarketing, which is reengaging your previous visitors.

The key word here is Finding. Google’s Display does it with a technology called Audience Targeting.

There are several methods of audience targeting: Similar Audiences, Custom Audiences, Upper Funnel Audiences, and Dynamic Prospecting. Let’s look into each one of them.

Similar Audiences

After you build a remarketing audience or upload a customer list into your account, you will notice similar audiences automatically created.This is an attempt by Google to create the audience of new users with similar characteristics to your remarketing or customer lists.

Custom Audiences

Custom audiences brings the power of keyword search into scaling and reinforce it with additional signals like URLs and apps. It requires you to do additional research to understand those parameters for your ideal customers and add them into the settings.

An example is a running shoe company wants to reach every marathon runners, which is fairly narrow niche of shoe buyers. They decide to use custom audiences. After conducting research, they come up with keywords like “triathlon athlete”, highly specific websites about marathon nutrition, and so on. And similarly with apps. And that’s how custom audience is built.

Upper Funnel Audiences

Upper Funnel audiences is an attempt by Google to categorize all Google searches anonymously and put them into several categories and sub-categories. For example, people with similar habits are put into various Affinity categories. They can be Fashionistas, Foodies or Luxury shoppers.

People who have actively been searching on Google for specific products or services are put into the In-Market categories. Some examples are Haircare Products, SEO and SEM Services. People based on certain facts about their lives are put into the Detailed Demographics audiences like Single Parents or Current College Students. And also people who are in the middle of the important life events or decisions are put into the Life Events categories like Recently Started Business or Purchasing a Home.

Dynamic Prospecting

Shopping campaigns have a display component that uses dynamic Prospecting. Dynamic Prospecting is like Dynamic Remarketing, but better. Imagine your potential customers who’ve never visited your website, doesn’t know about your brand has never even searched your products, but is interested in similar products and they will start seeing your ads with dynamic prospecting. That’s pure scaling. Another beauty of Dynamic Prospecting is that the ads show up on several channels: Display Network, YouTube, Gmail and of course, Search.

Conclusion

There are several methods of scaling Shopping with Display – and that is a good thing. I recommend to test them all and see what works better for you. Several recommendations. Make sure you optimize your campaign before scaling. Don’t start scaling up from day one. At the very minimum, ensure that you have Dynamic Remarketing going. When scaling, test each method side-by-side by putting them into the separate campaigns or ad groups, and then compare and pick the best performers. And also, consider running Smart Shopping campaigns to simplify scaling. If you find this of value – Like, Subscribe, and hit Bell Icon to get notified on new videos. Thank you and have a great day!

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