(and other ways to drive performance for your E-commerce business)
Proper segmentation ensures that campaigns run more efficiently, ROAS is optimized, and your most important products get the attention they deserve. By grouping campaigns, asset groups, and products strategically, you can focus resources where they will have the greatest impact. Here’s how to approach segmentation for your eCommerce campaigns.
Segment by Category / Brand
Managing conversion volumes carefully is key. It’s best to segment only mid- to high-volume categories or brands, while grouping lower-volume products into a “miscellaneous” segment. Aligning segmentation with the website’s category and brand structure helps ensure that our media strategy matches how users explore and shop on the site, providing clearer insights into performance across different product lines.
Asset Group Level Segmentation
When to apply:
Use asset group segmentation when conversion volume is low across the account, there’s no need to prioritize specific categories, and ROAS may vary slightly but the overall campaign goals remain the same.
Benefits:
This approach allows smaller campaigns to use their budgets more efficiently while testing different creatives and targeting separate product groups, without diluting overall campaign data.
Campaign Level Segmentation
When to apply:
Segmenting at the campaign level makes sense when you want to prioritize budgets for seasonal or high-priority product lines, or when ROAS varies significantly across product categories.
Benefits:
Campaign-level segmentation helps allocate budgets and bidding more effectively, allowing seasonal promotions and top-performing products to receive dedicated focus.
Segment by Top Sellers vs Regular Items
Why it matters:
Bestsellers often drive the majority of revenue. Segmenting them separately allows for more aggressive bidding and dedicated budgets to maximize their impact.
Separating bestsellers helps optimize budget and bidding strategies specifically for high-priority products and provides clear visibility into which products are driving performance versus regular catalog items.
Standard Shopping vs Performance Max (PMax)
Standard Shopping
Use Standard Shopping when you need more granular control over your product-level data and budgets. This allows you to set individual bids for each product or category, rather than applying a single strategy across your entire catalog.
Performance Max (PMax)
Consider PMax when you want an automated, holistic approach to optimize bids and budgets across your full product catalog and Google channels without managing bids individually, while leveraging smart bidding to maximize performance. This approach is ideal if you’re looking to increase demand and introduce your products to broader audiences.
Did you know? PMax dynamically selects the best product ads to show each user based on their past behavior, such as the products they engaged with, and remarkets to them across networks like YouTube and Display. This is known as dynamic remarketing, and PMax fully integrates this capability. Unlike standard Shopping campaigns, which require a separate Display campaign for dynamic remarketing, Performance Max lets you run upper-funnel awareness, shopping, and dynamic remarketing all within a single campaign.
Zombie SKU Campaign: A Performance-Based Segmentation Approach
When to use:
This strategy is most relevant for accounts with a large number of SKUs. It involves segmenting products that received $0 in spend or clicks over the past 30 days into their own campaign.
Benefits:
By isolating these SKUs, you can test ways to activate underperforming products or minimize their impact on your core campaigns. Only run a zombie SKU campaign if you have sufficient budget and your top-performing products are already supported in your main campaigns.
How to Start: Historical Data Considerations
Sometimes, segmentation isn’t necessary.
Start grouping all products in one campaign when:
- You have limited data or are unsure which products will perform best.
- You want to gather performance signals before applying a more complex setup.
- You have a small catalog where detailed segmentation wouldn’t significantly impact results.
Start by Segmenting when:
- You have historical data showing which categories, brands, or price points drive results.
- You are managing a large catalog where catch-all campaigns could dilute spend.
- You have specific goals like pushing high-margin products or seasonal items.
- You need greater bidding and budget control from the start.
Feed-Only vs All Assets Approach
Feed-only campaigns
Feed-only campaigns are often used as a strategic workaround for Smart Shopping, but they should be implemented thoughtfully, as they come with certain limitations. Because they rely solely on your product feed, your feed must be highly optimized. Additionally, without creative assets, ad rank may be impacted, but this does not mean the campaign will necessarily deliver lower results.
This approach is ideal when:
- You want to focus specifically on the Shopping network while still benefiting from advanced automation features like Smart Bidding and dynamic remarketing, which Standard Shopping doesn’t support.
- You don’t yet have a strong set of creative assets and need a simplified launch strategy without compromising automation.
All-assets approach
Launching the campaign using all available assets, including your product feed and creative assets such as images, videos, and text, is an effective strategy to capitalize across all Google properties holistically.
(Spoiler Alert: It Doesn’t ALWAYS Have to Be Either/Or)
Another commonly used segmentation strategy is to include both an “all assets” asset group and a feed-only asset group within the same Performance Max campaign.
This allows you to test performance between creative-led and feed-only approaches, while also letting both asset groups contribute shared signals to the campaign. This setup can help the system learn from both types of inputs, optimizing performance across channels.
Other Common Segmentation Tactics
- Segment by Location: Prioritize top-performing regions.
- Top Performers vs Others: Focus budget and strategy on high-performing products.
- New vs Returning Customers: Separate campaigns for acquisition versus retention goals.
Bringing It All Together
The right segmentation strategy isn’t one-size-fits-all—it should evolve with your business goals and data maturity. If you’re just starting out, a broader approach can help you gather the insights you need. As your catalog and performance history expand, layering in advanced segmentation allows you to target smarter, spend more efficiently, and scale results with confidence.
Ready to discover the full potential of your campaigns? Let us build a strategy tailored to your business growth.
