In a shopping campaign, a product group is a collection of products in your inventory feed that match criteria you specify. When a customer search matches a product in one of your product groups, the engine may display a shopping ad. You set bids at the product-group level, so your product groups should contain products that are similar. (It isn't possible to set different bids for products that are in the same product group. Instead, you can subdivide a product group so that it contains specific products, or even just a single product.)
For example, you can group products by Brand, Category, Condition, or even down to the level of individual product IDs. The engine then uses information about each product—along with the bids you specify for each product group—to determine when products appear on a search results page.
Remember:
In a Microsoft Advertising shopping campaign, only products defined in your Microsoft Merchant Center store can be included in a product group. It's recommended that you use a single inventory feed to provide data for both your Microsoft Merchant Center store and your Google Merchant Center account. Learn more about Microsoft Shopping Campaigns in Search Ads 360.
When you first create a shopping campaign, all of the products from your inventory feed are included in a single product group named All products. Because bids are set at the product-group level, all of your products will initially use the same bid. We recommend that you subdivide the All products group into more focused groups based upon your advertising goals, your business structure, and the types of products in the feed. You can use any attribute in your inventory feed to subdivide product groups including category, product type, brand, condition, product ID, and custom labels. You can then set bids for each product group according to your advertising goals.
Product group precedence
A product can be included in only one product group within an ad group, but can be included in multiple ad groups within a single campaign, or in multiple campaigns.
When a product is in:
- More than one ad group in a single campaign, the engine uses the bid from the product group with the highest bid.
- Multiple campaigns, the engine uses the bid from the campaign with the highest priority. If campaigns have the same priority, the engine uses the bid from the product group with the highest bid.
Manual or adaptive shopping campaign
You can organize product groups and set bids manually, or let Search Ads 360 organize and set bids automatically based on the performance of the products in your inventory feed and your advertising goals. As you add products to your inventory feed, Search Ads 360 continually adapts your product-group tree to keep it highly focused. Highly focused product groups help you set the most optimal bid.