Google Shopping Search Terms

[thetiger2015]

How long do you spend pruning your search terms, to ensure accuracy on your shopping ads?

Our daily budget is set to £30, manual cpc at the moment, not enhanced, as this is a relatively new account but yesterday, Google managed to burn through £88 of the budget and produce absolutely zero relevance? It's taken me over an hour to sift through and exclude absolutely nonsense searches.

I've double checked the feed and everything in the account, it all looks normal, but we're getting some really odd search terms. For example, if we sell kitchen lights, we're getting people searching for 'bakewell slices' or 'sweets b&m'. Even if I exclude 'Bakewell' we're still getting searches for variations of that. I've tried adding these as broad match exclusions, so they shouldn't appear at all and I've created a negative keyword list, to apply to other campaigns, still getting weird variations though.

I normally start with a negative keyword list that has all of the branded searches in, I don't want to appear for competitors, as we sell our own branded goods, we don't sell other peoples. That limits our reach a little but is more accurate and more likely to convert. However, still seem to be appearing for places like Wayfair and Sainsburys....don't know why...they're in the broad match negative list.

Maybe I have to keep pruning for a little longer? I've been doing this every morning for 7 days.

 

[SEO Lady]

Have you tried setting all of your phrases to [exact match]

 

[thetiger2015]

Have you tried setting all of your phrases to [exact match]

This is for our Shopping campaign. So we don't have keywords, just product landing pages but on the search terms report, I take out any rubbish terms and add them to the negative keyword list, so we shouldn't appear for them in future. I sometimes put these as broad match negatives, if it's a competitor for example, because I never want to appear for their search term.

I anticipated spending a few hours a week doing this, until the account accuracy was improved but I'm surprised by the complete lack of accuracy from Google and wondered if others had seen the same recently. We are paying for traffic that has zero relevance to the landing pages, which leads to a high bounce rate and negative impact on quality etc. But that's Googles fault for seemingly not reading the page.

If I reduce the budget to £5 per day, it just doesn't serve anything, so I have to spend a minimum of £20 per day to get the traffic. It's a shame that 90% of it is nonsense that has nothing to do with our website.

 

[Fagin2021]

As you're using negative keywords it's a standard shopping campaign rather than a smart campaign.

Because in your examples the search terms are so different to the products you are selling I'm wondering if you have 'Audiences' set up as a target?

Audience (amongst other things) are people who Google identifies as likely to be interested in your products from previous searches or purchases they have made.

For example, if someone has bought a trail bike and visited outdoor activity sites, Google might identify them as an 'outdoor' type and therefore interested in walking boots, even though they haven't searched on that term or a variant of it.

You can deselect or specify audiences in a standard campaign.