by Austin LeClear
on November 10, 2025
If you’re selling products online and running Google Ads, you might be making a critical mistake with your campaign structure. Most e-commerce brands throw everything into one campaign — or worse, they let Performance Max gobble up all their brand traffic without any real control over their budget or bidding strategy.
Here’s the thing: your brand searches deserve their own dedicated brand Shopping campaign. In this post, we’ll show you exactly how to set it up (the right way).
Prefer video? Check out The RIGHT Way to Set Up Brand Shopping Campaigns in Google Ads on YouTube:
Still with us? Good, let’s dive in.
What Is a Brand Shopping Campaign and Why Does It Matter?
A brand Shopping campaign is a campaign that’s been set up to predominately capture brand terms. This is helpful strategically because, when someone searches for your brand name on Google, they’re already at the bottom funnel of the customer journey. They know you. They want you. These branded searches have the lowest CPCs and highest conversion rates of any traffic you’ll get. But if your brand terms are mixed into your standard Shopping campaigns or Performance Max campaigns, you’re basically letting Google spend your budget however it wants.
That’s money you could be controlling.
The biggest advantages of separating your brand into its own Shopping campaign are simple:
- Greater control over your budget
- Better data for optimization
- The ability to protect your brand from competitors who might be bidding on your brand terms in their Shopping ads.
How to Set Up a Brand Shopping Campaign
Here’s where many people running Google Ads get confused. With Search campaigns, you can easily bid on keywords — including your own brand terms. With Shopping campaigns, you can’t target specific keywords. So how do you create a branded campaign that only shows for brand queries?
The answer is campaign priority and negative keywords. Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Negate Your Brand Terms from Other Campaigns
First, you need to set up negative keyword lists for all your other campaigns. Go into your standard Shopping campaigns and add your brand terms as negative keywords.
For example, if your company is called Bob’s Computer Parts, you’d add “Bob’s Computer Parts” and any variations as negative keywords.
Do the same for your non-brand Search campaigns. Your Performance Max campaigns need this too — use the brand exclusions feature in Performance Max to make sure your brand doesn’t trigger those campaigns.
This is critical. If you don’t negate your brand from these campaigns, Google will show your ads wherever it wants, and your whole campaign structure falls apart.
Once this is complete, Google won’t be able to show brand terms in your Shopping or Performance Max campaigns, and will be forced to show brand terms in your brand Shopping campaign instead (as it is the only campaign where brand terms are not negated).
Step 2: Create Your Brand Shopping Campaign
For this to work, you need to create a new Shopping campaign. Pull in your product feed from Merchant Center just like you would for any other Google Shopping campaign. Set up your product groups in a way that makes sense for your business. Some brands use custom labels, others group products based on profit margin or product category.
The key is in your bidding strategy. Here’s the hack: set an insanely high target ROAS (tROAS) goal. We’re talking 1,000% or even 1,500% return on ad spend.
Why such a high priority setting? Because your brand terms naturally have very low CPCs and very high ROAS. When you set that target ROAS at 1,500%, Google won’t show your ads for generic, non-brand search terms, as those searches wouldn’t hit your target. But your brand searches? Those will hit that target easily, so Google will happily show your Shopping ads for those branded queries.
Your other campaigns — whether standard Shopping campaigns, Performance Max, or non-brand Search campaigns — should have much lower target ROAS goals, maybe 200-300%. This means Google will naturally route non-brand traffic to those campaigns based on the priority levels and bid strategies you’ve set up.
What Bid Should You Start With?
When you first create your brand Shopping campaign, don’t just throw a random bid strategy at it. Here’s the best practice we use for clients at our agency:
Go into your existing campaigns (probably Performance Max or your current standard Shopping campaigns) and look at your search term reports. Filter for your brand terms. What’s the average CPC for those branded searches? That’s your starting point.
For example, if your brand searches have an average CPC of $0.96, start with a manual CPC bidding strategy at around that amount. Let it run for a bit, collect some conversion data, then switch over to smart bidding with target ROAS.
This approach gives you more control early on while you’re gathering data for your Merchant Center feed and product groups. Once you have enough data for smart bidding to work effectively, you can make the switch and let Google’s algorithms optimize your bid adjustments.
How This Plays Out: Real Client Example
Here’s an example from an actual account we manage. We have a client where we set up multiple Shopping campaigns using this exact campaign structure:
- Brand search campaign (for Google Search ads)
- Brand shopping campaign (what we’re talking about here)
- Non-brand shopping campaigns (two of them, actually—one for high priority products, one for medium priority)
- Performance Max campaign
- Non-brand search campaigns
The non-brand shopping campaigns are hitting about 2x ROAS. Solid, but nothing crazy. The brand shopping campaign? It’s crushing it at 1,500% ROAS with an average CPC of just 35 cents.
When you look at the search queries for that branded campaign, it’s almost all brand searches. That’s exactly what we want.
Meanwhile, the non-brand campaigns have average CPCs of $0.93-$1.42 because they’re competing for generic product searches. If someone searches “protein shaker bottle” and you sell protein shaker bottles, your non-brand campaign with a 200% target ROAS will compete for that traffic. But your brand campaign with a 1,000% target ROAS won’t even try to show up for that search query — you’re not bidding enough to compete, and that’s by design.
Why This Campaign Priority Setup Works
Think about it from Google’s perspective. When someone searches your brand name, Google looks at all your active campaigns. It can’t show your ad through Performance Max — you excluded your brand. It can’t show through your standard Shopping campaigns — you added brand terms as negative keywords.
The only Shopping campaign where your brand isn’t negated is your brand Shopping campaign. So that’s where Google has to go. And because you’ve set such a high target ROAS (or low bid if you’re using manual CPC), Google knows to only show your ads when the search query is likely to convert at that rate — which means brand queries.
This query sculpting approach is one of the best practices for getting the right campaign structure in Google Ads. It gives you way more control than just letting Performance Max or Smart Shopping handle everything.
FAQs
Won’t non-brand traffic still leak through?
- Yes, a little bit. You’ll probably see a few clicks here and there from non-brand search terms. But because your bid is so low (or your target ROAS is so high), it’s minimal. The vast majority of your traffic will be brand searches, and that’s what matters.
How do I organize my product groups?
- In the way that makes the most sense for your business. You could organize by product category, profit margin, custom labels from your Merchant Center feed — whatever gives you the reporting and control you need. The key is having the right campaign setup and negative keyword list structure, not necessarily how you organize within the campaign.
Final Thoughts
Setting up brand Shopping campaigns isn’t complicated, but most people don’t do it. They let their brand traffic mix with everything else, which skews their data and wastes money on high-value branded searches that should be cheap.
By creating individual campaigns for your brand, negating brand terms from your other campaigns (Performance Max, standard Shopping campaigns, non-brand Search campaigns), and using an aggressive target ROAS or low bid strategy, you force Google to only show your shopping ads for brand queries.
This is a powerful tool for customer acquisition costs and profit margin protection. You’ll see exactly how much you’re spending on brand versus non-brand traffic, you can control your daily budget more effectively across multiple ad groups, and you’ll probably save money since you’re bidding lower on terms where you already have an advantage.
Set this up right, and you’ll wonder how you ever ran Google Shopping without it.
