About shopping product groups

Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising shopping campaigns only

In shopping campaigns, your product groups — not keywords — determine the products in your merchant center account for which shopping ads are displayed. Each product group is based on a single product attribute (such as category, product type, brand, condition, product ID, or custom labels) and uses the same bid for all matching products. You can include or exclude bids for the products in each group.

You configure product groups at the ad group level to determine which products in your merchant center accounts appear in the shopping ads for the ad group. Even if the ad group doesn’t include ad entities, the ad network still displays ads for the products.

When the same product is included in more than one campaign, the ad network first uses the campaign priority to determine which campaign (and associated bid) is eligible for the ad auction. When all of the campaigns have the same priority, the campaign with the highest bid is eligible.

For more information about Google shopping campaigns and ads, see “Implement Google Ads shopping campaigns” and the Google Ads documentation. For more information about Microsoft shopping campaigns, see “Implement Microsoft® Advertising shopping campaigns” and the Microsoft Advertising documentation.

Product group hierarchy

Before you can create product groups with specific attributes for an ad group, you must first create an all-inclusive product group called “All Products.” From this parent product group, you can create child product groups for subsets of products, and you can create grandchildren from the child product groups. Once you create the first child product group for an ad group, another product group called “Everything Else” is automatically created using the default ad group bid. As you add more product groups, the “Everything Else” group is adjusted accordingly so that it constitutes all products that aren’t in another product group.

Within an ad group, you can create up to seven levels of product groups (not including “All Products”) to include or exclude from bidding, with one or more product groups targeting the same attribute in each level (for example, Brand=Acme for one product group and Brand=AcmePlus for another at the same level). Parent product groups are called subdivisions, and the lowest level of subdivision is known as a unit. You can set bids and tracking templates, or completely exclude bidding, at the unit level. The entire set of active product groups for an ad group is applied hierarchically to determine the eligible products. For example, if you subdivide All Products into Brand=AcmeBasic and Brand=AcmePlus, and then you further subdivide each of those product groups into Condition=New and set bids, then only new products with the AcmeBasic and AcmePlus brands may be advertised or excluded from ads.

The Product Groups view

You can create and edit product groups, and delete product groups and their child product groups, in the Search > Campaigns > Campaigns > Product Groups view.

Tracking and performance data for shopping product groups

(Accounts/campaigns with the “EF Redirect” tracking option) To allow Search, Social, & Commerce to track conversions for product groups, generate tracking URLs for product groups using the Tracking URLs tool, and then do one of the following:

You can view data about product groups in the Product Group Report.