eCommerce Google Ads Account Structure

Keep reading if you run an eCommerce brand and have been considering launching Google ads to drive additional sales. In this article, I will run through a full Google ads account structure that you can follow and use for your brand.?

Step 1 - Account Set Up?

Before we look at the account structure let's start from the very start. In order to run ads on Google, you will first need to sign up for a google ads account. Follow the steps provided, set up your billing details and you will be good to go. For eCommerce companies, you will also need to create a Google Merchant Centre account. Merchant centre allows you to link all your products with google and allows you to run image-based shopping listing ads.?

Step 2 - Measure Success?

It is very important we set up conversion tracking so we can measure the success of your campaigns before we start sending traffic to your site. Navigate to Tools and Settings, then Measurment, Conversions. You will want to create a “Purchase” conversion action to track website sales - Follow the steps provided, If you have any issues Youtube will be your best friend!?

Step 3 - Account Structure?

Great, now your account is set up, your conversion tracking is measuring sales, and it's time to start building out your campaigns. Google has 4 main campaign types, Search, Shopping, Display & Youtube. For today I am going to run through the first 3, which is where I would recommend you start.?

To access the Google Ads account structure Lucid Chart click: HERE?

Shopping Campaigns

Shopping campaigns use a product feed from Google merchant centre as mentioned above. Once your feed is set up you will be able to run ads for all your products on Google search results. If you are just starting off, one smart shopping campaign with one catch-all ad group will be a great place to start. Quick tip, Google shopping ads are primarily triggered by search queries matching your product titles in your feed. Try to use all 150 characters available and make the title as relevant as possible. If your product has a fancy made-up product name like “Coral pants” consider updating your shopping title to a more generic high volume term like “white linen pants” for example.?

Search Campaigns

Search ads allow you to show text based ads to a customer who is searching for specific terms which you choose to target. As you can see in the above image and attached Lucid Chart I have broken the search campaigns down in 3 main types of campaigns, Brand, Competitors and Generic.?

Brand?

A brand campaign allows you to place an ad above the organic results for your own brand. This does two things, it allows you to make sure those who are looking for you find your site and it protects your brand against competitors trying to steal your traffic. This is broken into 2 ad groups, Pure brand, example [Nike] or [Nike.com] and brand + generic, example [Nike shoes] or [Nike tshirt] For those searching for your brand send them to your home page or best sellers, for those searching brand + product send them to the most relevant category page.?

Competitor

If you sell very similar products to a number of competitors and you feel you have better USP’s, higher quality or better value there is a very good chance you will be able to steal brand traffic from competitors. For example, if you are Nike you could serve ads against the term “Adidas” or “Puma” with the goal of getting them to your site to buy from Nike instead of the intended competitor they were searching for. Test 3-5 competitors to start and if these are successful scale this strategy to other competitor brands. Use Google keyword planner to get predicted search volume for the terms you want to target.?

Generic?

This will generally be where you see the highest volume of search demand however it can be more challenging to covert this traffic at a profitable ROAS. When people refer to generic search traffic they mean general queries such as coffee machines, furniture and t-shirts, they often do not have a specific search intent. Generally, it's best to start with more specific terms and slowly expand out. If we look at furniture for example the term “desk” is extremely broad and very generic by nature, hence it will be hard to convert as the intent is low. However a search for “wooden home office desk” has much more intent and is much more specific, so if you happen to sell wooden desks for homes then there is a good chance you will be able to convert this customer.?

Display

There are many different types of display targeting, from hyper broad to super niche. Again, we will focus initially on a more niche remarketing structure to help convert people who have already been to your site or even added products to their basket without purchasing. This will be a small proportion of your budget and can be left out of the initial build if you have limited resources.?

This is a very general account structure which can be followed to launch your eCommerce brand on Google ads. There are lots of other components like ad copy, ad extensions, negative keywords, shopping feed optimisation etc which I have left out for simplicity.

To access the Google Ads account structure Lucid Chart click: HERE?

Let me know in the comments if you found this article helpful.