Using Custom Labels to Help Manage Your Google Shopping Campaigns Efficiently
As with Google Search campaigns, one of the first challenges that we face is deciding on an efficient strategy, what it is we want to get out of the campaign, and what the best route is to achieve this. Well, shopping is no different – strategy and planning are key if we want to be successful.
With Google Shopping, campaigns can quickly become complicated, unorganised, and hard to manage. Especially when you’re working with a product feed containing thousands of SKUs, various product categories and a huge array of price ranges.
With Shopping campaigns, you can create custom labels, which will allow you to subdivide products in your shopping campaigns using bespoke, pre-defined values that you set.
Some good examples of custom labels are:
- Best Sellers
- Pricing Brackets
- Sale/Clearance
- Margins
- Seasonal
- Special Shipping
Custom labels can be used for various reasons, with the most common segmentation used when indicating that products are seasonal, on clearance or even best sellers. Once these have been defined, you can then use these labels in your shopping campaigns for easy monitoring, reporting, excluding and bidding.
Using custom labels gives you the ability to manipulate shopping campaigns and allow you to quickly bid lower on those “slower” products rather than removing them from the feed entirely.
Best Sellers: Creating a Campaign
Let’s take the “best sellers” as an example. Imagine we are going to create a shopping campaign where the feed contains over 10,000 individual SKUs.
We know that from those 10,000, a 1,000 SKUs have been selling consistently, indicating that these are our best selling items.
We want to make sure that we’re able to quickly monitor and push these items more over the harder-to-shift items, knowing that the best sellers will continue to sell. Mostly, we want to give them as much impression share as possible.
Is isn’t incorrect to create a shopping campaign and then segment by Item ID, but we can create something that’s more manageable. It’s not only inefficient to work by Item ID, but it’s likely to take you a long time, as well as quickly becoming messy and hard to track. It will no doubt become one of your least favourite account optimisations.
Using Custom Labels
We can eliminate the complexity by using a custom label. We know that these best sellers are valuable, they sell and will continue to sell, so we need to group these Item IDs using a custom label.
Once this custom label is created, we can then create the campaign and segment it further – rather than by Item ID, we would select the custom label and segment down.
What we now have is a campaign that we can call “Best Sellers”, which contains a custom label with all 1,000 best selling SKU’s under one product group – making this much more efficient and easy-to-manage.
Segmenting Custom Labels
Once the campaign has been running and we’re able to see the data and analyse its performance, we can segment our custom label even further.
If the campaign has been running for a week, we can identify several SKUs that might have a higher conversion volume, fantastic ROI or low CPA depending on what the account’s goals are.
We can then use the ID segmentation to filter these top performing best sellers out of the custom label, giving you the ability to upweight bids, keeping a closer eye on their performance.
If you notice that there are 500 SKUs in this example that are performing well, we would advise creating a new custom label rather than segmenting the 1,000 SKUs to keep the campaigns running efficiently.
Additional Benefits
Once the label is set and the items have been allocated, if you need to amend anything further down the line, all you need to do is add/eliminate the item from the label within the feed and the campaigns in AdWords will automatically update.
There are five custom labels available (Custom Label 0, 1, 2, 3, 4), however use of these labels is limitless.
Following on from our “best sellers” example, if we create a Custom Label 0 and name it “Best Sellers” but then decided that we needed to segment further, we can. This is shown in the example above. We can still use Custom Label 0 but we just create two elements of Custom Label 0.
Custom Label 0 = “Best Sellers” & “Best Performing Best Sellers”
We could also add another product group under Custom Label 0 called “Low Sellers”, to help us identify the items that are underperforming sales-wise and reduce bids if needed.
In this scenario, we would see all three of these product groups in AdWords when segmenting down on a shopping campaign under the Custom Label 0 attribute.
| Google Custom Label | Your Definition (What You Call Your Label) | Possible Values |
| Custom Label 0 | Selling Rate | Best Sellers, Slow Sellers, Top 10 |
| Custom Label 1 | Clearance | Clearance Items |
| Custom Label 2 | Seasonal | Spring, Summer, Winter, Autumn, Christmas, Easter, Black Friday |
| Custom Label 3 | Profit Margins | High Margin, Low Margin |
| Custom Label 4 | Exclusions | Non-Sellers, Temporary Exclusions |
We can also use custom labels to further enhance our campaign structure and layer custom labels together to maximise our potential ROI.
For example, if we use a custom label for our best sellers, we can then segment that down by high margins only. So, we would then have a campaign pushing only best selling items which have a high-profit margin.
Alternatively, we might feel the need to create a campaign segmenting our custom label for best sellers, but excluding all items which are currently on sale or in clearance, as these products already have a campaign specifically for this. Using this method, we would have a campaign pushing all the best selling items, minus any that are also in clearance.
To create Google Custom Labels for your shopping campaign, the website developer or whoever looks after and manages the Merchant Centre feed is usually the best person to approach. However, it’s possible to create custom labels directly in the Merchant Centre using Feed Rules.
As you can see, there’s a lot of different ways that you can make use of Custom Labels and incorporate them into your shopping strategy. They will not only save you time, but also ensure that you’re effectively and efficiently pushing the products that will yield the best returns.
When deciding on your strategy for Google Shopping, think about your end goals and work backwards from there.