As we enter Q4, one of the most critical times for ecommerce businesses, preparing your Microsoft Shopping Campaigns is essential for maximising revenue. The way you structure your shopping campaigns can significantly impact performance, especially as consumer demand spikes. A well-thought-out strategy ensures that your campaigns are efficient, scalable, and responsive to market changes.

In this article, we’ll review best practices for Microsoft Shopping Campaign structures and explore the benefits, the different ways you can set them up, and how they can help you make the most of this crucial period.

1. Segment by Audience

Tailoring your campaigns based on audience is a powerful way to ensure that you’re targeting the right people at the right stage of the customer journey. By creating separate campaigns for different audiences – prospecting (new customers) and retargeting (existing customers) – you can deliver more relevant and effective ads, whilst strategically controlling your investment.

Best Practices for Segmenting by Audience:

• Prospecting Campaigns: Target new customers using In-Market Audiences to reach users who are actively considering products similar to yours.
• Existing Customers: Utilise Remarketing, Custom Audiences, and Product Audiences to re-engage users who have interacted with your brand or made past purchases. Customer Match can be particularly effective in delivering personalised ads to high-value customers.

The Benefits:

• Efficiency: Align your Microsoft Shopping Campaigns with your broader audience strategy, ensuring consistency across shopping, audience, and search campaigns.
• Coverage: Reach users at each step of the conversion funnel, from awareness to conversion.

2. Query Funnelling

Query funnelling is another smart approach for structuring your shopping campaigns. By separating brand and non-brand queries, you can create a more nuanced bidding strategy that targets users based on their search intent.

How to Set It Up:

• Non-brand Campaign: High priority, lower bids, with negative keywords excluding product names and brand terms.
• Brand Campaign: Medium priority with higher bids and negative keywords for generic terms.
• Catch-all Campaign: Low priority with the highest bids and no negative keywords.

The Benefits:

• Consistency: Manage your shopping campaigns similarly to search campaigns by segmenting brand traffic from non-brand traffic.
• Efficiency: Take advantage of typically lower CPCs (cost-per-click) for branded queries while focusing budget where it’s needed most.
• Competitiveness: Bid more aggressively on non-brand queries, increasing your share of the market for generic searches.

3. Segment by Product Category

This structure is ideal for ecommerce businesses with large and diverse product catalogues. By segmenting your campaigns based on your website’s product categories, you can create a structure that mirrors your site navigation and allows for more granular bidding.

Best Practices for Segmenting by Product Category:

• Set higher bids for more granular product groupings as these tend to convert more effectively during the Q4 rush.
• Create separate product groups for each product category, brand, or even SKU level.

The Benefits:

• Consistency: This structure allows for easier troubleshooting and adjustments since it aligns with the way products are categorised on your website.
• Scalability: Works well for businesses of any size and can accommodate small or large product catalogues.
• Detailed Reporting: Enables 1:1 reporting for each product category, making it easier to analyse performance and optimise accordingly.
• Flexibility: Easily expand your structure as new product categories or brands are added to your feed.

4. Segment by Profitability

Profitability-based segmentation is a strategic approach that focuses on grouping products based on their performance metrics, such as Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). This allows you to prioritise investment towards products that generate the most revenue, and likely the most profit.

How to Set It Up:

• Group products by their profitability levels and assign higher bids to more profitable / higher ROAS products, particularly during peak shopping seasons.
• Regularly monitor low-inventory items, and move products between ad groups by adjusting feed labels.

The Benefits:

• Profit Maximisation: Allocate more budget to high-performing products and increase bids for top sellers to maximise profitability.
• Responsiveness: Quickly adjust bids and budgets in real time based on stock levels and sales performance.
• Detailed Analysis: Pull SKU-level reports to see which products are driving the most profit and make informed decisions about bid adjustments.

Differences Between Google & Microsoft Shopping Campaign Structures

When structuring your campaigns, it’s crucial to understand that while granular structures work well on Google Shopping, they may not always be necessary for Microsoft Shopping Campaigns. Microsoft’s lower search volume means that broad categories can be effective, but bids should still be adjusted separately for each platform to account for different CPCs and performance dynamics.

Best Practices for Microsoft Shopping Campaign Structure

As we head into Q4, here are a few general best practices to keep in mind:

• Campaign Priorities: Consider your campaign priority alongside your structural approach, especially when adding new campaigns.
• Bids: Start with bids higher than the minimum (around £0.30 to £1.00), as this will help your ads gain visibility quickly in a competitive environment.
• Monitor Untargeted Offers: Regularly check the Merchant Centre for any untargeted offers and update your campaign structure as needed.

Conclusion

As we move into Q4, the right Microsoft Shopping Campaign structure can make or break your seasonal performance. Remember, a flexible and responsive approach allows for real-time adjustments and ensures that your campaigns remain competitive in an ever-evolving marketplace. With these best practices in mind, your shopping campaigns will be set to capitalise on this crucial period, driving both revenue and long-term business growth.