Product groups are used in Shopping campaigns to organize your product inventory from Google Merchant Center. You create and manage product groups within your Google Ads Shopping campaign, using attributes derived from your product data. These groups allow you to set specific bids for different sets of products.
Learn how to Manage a Shopping campaign with product groups .
Features of product group in Shopping campaigns
Shopping campaigns use product groups to determine which items from your Merchant Center account appear on a search results page in a Shopping ad.
When you create a new Shopping campaign, a product group for "All products is created by default, using the default maximum cost-per-click bid (max. CPC)
you set during ad group creation.
You can run your Shopping campaign using just the "All products product group, or subdivide it into as many product groups as you want by using product attributes like Google product category
[google_product_category
]
, product type [product_type
]
, brand [brand
]
, condition [condition]
, ID [id]
, and custom label 0-4 [custom label 0-4
]
. This allows you to target specific collections or exclude certain items. You can also remove product groups as needed. If you've recently added or updated custom labels in Merchant Center, allow 24-48 hours for them to be available for use in Google Ads product groups.Each product can appear in only one biddable product group per ad group. You can also exclude a product from appearing in a product group entirely by using inventory filters or by setting its status to "Excluded within the listing group settings.
If products are marked as "Excluded or "Not eligible and you want them to show, you'll need to change their status to 'Included'. Keep in mind that changes to product inclusion or eligibility can take 24-48 hours to sync between Merchant Center and Google Ads and reflect in your campaign.
If products are marked as "Excluded or "Not eligible and you want them to show, you'll need to change their status to 'Included'. Keep in mind that changes to product inclusion or eligibility can take 24-48 hours to sync between Merchant Center and Google Ads and reflect in your campaign.
For Performance Max campaigns, reporting metrics can be different for the Product Groups tab when compared to the Campaign, Ad Group, or Ads tabs. This is because the Product Groups tab can only report on product level data.
- For example, when a Shopping ad shows many products in an individual ad slot, each product collects an impression. However, the campaign, ad group, and ad recognize that only a single ad was showing and will count it as one impression.
-
Differences in impression counts between Performance Max item-level reports and campaign-level reports are expected. This is because item-level reporting focuses specifically on Shopping inventory and doesn't represent all the channels where a Performance Max campaign can serve.
