Standard Shopping — The Surgical Tool You Should Master

12 min · video · Intermediate

Standard Shopping is manual control in a world of algorithms. You bid on specific products, exclude low-margin SKUs, adjust for device and time of day. PMax cannot do this. Today we build a Standard Shopping strategy that surgical-strikes your best products.

Standard Shopping: the control channel

Standard Shopping (also called Shopping Ads, or Google Shopping Ads) is where you manually define:

Which products to bid on
How much to bid per product
Which audiences to target (optional)
Which devices to show on
When to show (time of day, day of week)

Google then shows your product in the Shopping tab when someone searches for a matching keyword.

Feed organization: the first lever

Your Merchant Center feed determines which products show. You control this via:

Product-level exclusion: Mark specific products as "excluded" in your feed (e.g., low-margin SKUs, clearance items)
Category filtering: Create a campaign that targets only "Jewelry" or "Kitchen" (exclude others)
Price filters: Bid only on products priced A