Configuring ad groups for Google Shopping Ads – Help Center - Channable

This is a helpcenter article of Channable, the tool for product feed management and PPC automation. If you don't have an account yet, create a free trial account now or learn how Channable can help you integrate your webshop with the Google Merchant Center.

Do you want to learn interactively how to set up a basic Shopping Ads generator? Learn how to create a Channacademy account in the Channable app through this Help Center article and start with the Basic Shopping Ads course.

After configuring the Settings, Rules, and Campaigns step for your Shopping Ads generator, you can now set up one or more dynamic shopping ad group generator(s). The Shopping ad group generator overview looks similar to the multiple ad group generators in Text Ads:

For a more detailed explanation on how you can use multiple Shopping ad group generators (including several use cases), see this article.

For each Shopping ad group generator you can configure the Settings, Rules, and Build steps.

Step 1: Settings

In the Settings tab of a Shopping ad group generator, you can configure the name of the Shopping ad group generator.

Step 2: Ad group generator Rules

In the Rules tab of a Shopping ad group generator, you can set up rules that only apply to this Shopping ad group generator. You can use this, for example, to only include a set of products you want in the Shopping ad group generator and exclude other products.

Step 3: Build

The Build step of a Shopping ad group generator is divided into three steps: Ad groups configuration, Product groups, and Negative keywords.

1. Ad groups configuration

In the Ad groups configuration, you can configure the Ad group name and Default Max CPC. You can use either static or dynamic fields for both:

If you choose a dynamic field for the Default Max CPC, you can also select if you want to use the lowest or highest CPC (if you have a range of different CPC values in the field you use).

Note: We only send the CPC the first time an ad group is pushed by the generator (i.e. after activating the generator, or when new ad groups are created by the generator). After that, you can adjust the CPC in Google Ads.

With the Ad group name setting above (Merk - [brand]), your Ad groups will show in Google Ads based on the different brands:

2. Product groups

With Shopping Ads, you can add multiple levels of product groups. You can set up to 4 levels of product groups under the "Product groups" tab. Product groups further divide your ad groups into subgroups. When adding a new level of product groups, you have to select a field from Channable and you have to select which field of your Google Shopping feed this links to.

There are three important things to keep in mind when setting up product groups:

Subdivision fields: Only fields that have been sent through your Google Shopping feed can be used as a subdivision field. Also, make sure the field in your Shopping feed for Google contains the same information as in your Shopping Ads setup.
Unique ID: The product ID code that is used in the Shopping campaign needs to be the same as the ID code used in the Google Shopping feed. If this is not the case, your products in the Shopping campaign can't be linked to the product information in your Merchant Center and the products won't show up in the product group.
Level of subdivisions: The higher the level of subdivisions, the more specific the field should be for the items. The field "ID", which is unique for every item, should therefore always be the highest subdivision if it is used (so level #4 if you make use of all four product group levels).

In the example below, we have chosen 'brand' and 'custom_label_1' as the first two levels of subdivision:

In Google Ads, this will look as follows:

You can see that each brand (level #1) is divided into the values of 'custom_label_1' (level #2). Because the 'Product ID' is the highest level of subdivision (level #3), individual products will then fall within the different values of 'custom_label_1'. Note that if you also configure the Ad group name based on 'brand' (like in the example above), you will only get one 'brand' product group per Ad group.

3. Negative keywords

The last step of configuring your ad group build is adding negative keywords. Adding negative keywords works the same as for a Text Ads configuration. If the keywords you add here are searched for in Google, your ads will not appear. You can choose between the types 'Broad', 'Phrase', and 'Exact':

After configuring your ad groups, you can check the results in the Preview step and activate the generator when you are ready.