Manage a Shopping campaign with ad groups

Summary

You can use ad groups to structure a Shopping campaign for bidding.

Ad groups let you use features like bid adjustments and negative keywords.

If you include a product in multiple ad groups in the same campaign, the highest bid is used.

You can use Product groups to subdivide and arrange your products under ad groups. See Create product groups for more information.

In Google Shopping, bids are placed on product groups, not keywords. For more information on bidding practices, see Build and optimize Shopping campaigns.

Manual steps

Here are the steps to set up ad groups with the Google Ads UI.

  1. Create a new Shopping campaign.
  2. Create a new ad group and enter a name.

  3. Depending on your campaign type, you can subdivide your ad group into product groups by attributes. Here are some examples:

    • Brand
    • Item ID
    • Custom label
    • Product type
    • Google Product Category

  4. Check your product groups. If you didn't subdivide your ad group, see Manage a Shopping campaign with product groups.

  5. Pause or enable your ad groups.

See Manage a Shopping campaign with ad groups for more information.

Automatic steps

Here are the steps to create ad groups with the Google Ads API.

Make sure you've already linked Merchant Center to Google Ads and created a new campaign.

  1. Select SHOPPING_PRODUCT_ADS or SHOPPING_SMART_ADS as the AdGroupType.

    You can't change the AdGroupType later.

  2. Create an ad.

  3. Use Shopping Listing Groups to organize your products.

See Create ad group for more detail.