Using price breaks to increase your Google Shopping ROI

Overview

Are you bidding the same price for clicks on your $10.00 items as your $200.00 items? If you bid too high, it may be too costly to sell the $10.00 item, and if you bid too low, you may miss sales opportunities on the $200.00 item.

This easy optimization will let you customize your bid by the price range of your products, allowing you to submit your whole catalog of products to Google Shopping. This can significantly lower your conversion cost and improve your return on investment in Google Adwords Shopping Campaigns (previously known as Product Listing Ads (PLA)).

Instructions

Our Google Shopping feeds include a free feature to define price breaks, also known as 'ranges', 'brackets', or 'buckets'. The price break values will be placed in one of the custom_label_X fields. You can use this setting to set up product groups that target different price ranges. In this way, you can set lower bids for lower priced items, and higher bids for higher priced items.

1. Go to My Account
2. Go to Manage Feed > Define Fields for your Google Shopping feed
3. Click Edit for the custom_label_3 field (If that field is in use already, you could select any other custom_label_X field.)
4. Enter your price breaks in the Price Breaks input box. Separate each one with a comma (and optional spaces).

   For example, if you enter 50,200,9999, this will set up three price breaks of 50.00 for products priced between $0.01 and $50.00, 200.00 for products priced between $50.01 and $200.00 and 9999.00 for products priced between $200.01 and $9999.00. NOTE: Any settings for Default Value and Catalog Field will be ignored. Refer to the instructions on the Add or Modify Field page for details.

5. Make sure your highest price break is greater than your highest priced item. Open the Request Price Breaks Setup Form to see the price range for each of your feeds.
6. Go to the Manage Feed page and click the Submit button. (Allow an hour or two for processing.)
7. Log into your Google Adwords account
8. Under your Google Shopping campaign in the left side-bar, select the ad group that you want to customize.
9. Click on the Product groups tab
10. Next to the All products product group, click the plus icon or pencil icon
11. In the gray drop-down box, select the Custom label 3 field
12. Click the bulk add values manually link
13. Enter each price break value, e.g. 50.00, on a separate line. The price break value must have two decimal places, and must not have any double quotes or commas.
14. Click the Add values button
15. Click the Save button.
16. The new product groups will appear in the list. Click the Max. CPC box next to each group, and enter your maximum cost-per-click bid for the price range.
17. If you follow the example above, you will have three new product groups as follows:
    • 50.00
    • 200.00
    • 9999.00
18. Make sure to set an appropriate bid for the Everything else in 'All Products' product group. For example, you can set the bid to $0.01 (or anything less than or equal to the bid on your lowest product group). This is a catch-all rule that ensures all your items remain listed, in case you ever add items with prices outside the ranges that you set up.