Google Ads Campaign Structure for Fashion Stores

So, today we look at one of our six-figure fashion brands and we break down in detail why this store is so great, why it's scaling, why [clears throat] other stores are stuck. We look at the exact campaign structure and break it down and why it makes sense, when it makes sense, what you need to do in order to scale, which simple formula you should follow in order to make this sort of scaling happen, and what to avoid. All right, without further ado, let's dive into it. I picked one of our random six-figure stores here completely random. That's not our biggest store at all, not even close, but doesn't matter.

I just picked a random one in a random market for the sake of this video and sharing an example. Doesn't matter though because we look at the underlying principles and they are the same across all these fashion stores, right? Doesn't matter the market, doesn't doesn't matter what's the exact product breakdown. They all have the same same variables, the same features, the same habits, right? That that I got to implement it there. All right, let's look at it. So, first and biggest mistake for a store that's scaling like that, right? I always say when you start you keep it simple. One campaign, it's all about the offer.

You need to develop some winning products and get some sales and some data in first, right? But you don't do that if you want to scale to bigger numbers like

the biggest stores. We'll eventually you can do it. It's possible, right? Of course, if you have like thousands of winning products, you keep them in one campaign, and every product is an absolute hit, of course, you can scale to those numbers, right? But you will eventually leave money on the table if you don't structure it well because at this level there there will be inefficiencies, you know? If you spend thousands a day and you have thousands of products, thousands of variants, you will leave money on the table if you don't structure it well, right? So, that's the first and biggest mistakes. Most stores just throw it in one campaign and keep it there endlessly, right?

You have two type of mistakes. Either you keep it too too you just have one campaign, or you break it down and you have 30 campaigns, right? Both is wrong, both is incorrect, both doesn't help you with your performance. It says dress here because, like I said, this store was mostly focused on dresses, right? That's why it's a bit focused on this in that example, but doesn't matter, right? I'm talking about all products and the store in general. All right, so we know now we need to split it up properly, right? We need to split it up effectively and not randomly. So, the first thing we need to do is to organize our products, right?

We need to categorize it, give them a category, give them a product type, give them a certain label depending on the type of product, right? The performance of the product, the margin of the product, whatever it is. So, you need to be well organized and well structured so you can also like read the data properly, right? If you throw everything in one bucket and everything is kind of the same and you're like, "Oh, hopefully it picks up overall." Great. Now you're gambling, right? You don't have a system. So, you need to structure it because again, you need to understand,

especially in fashion, you have huge catalogs, right? You have different types of product categories, different genders most likely, then you have hundreds of products with dozens of different variants for colors and size, right? There are so many many SKUs on a typical fashion store. Then you might sell in different type of markets, right? So, it's just gigantic, right? You need to be organized, need to structure it well, and especially because the reality of any kind of store is that mostly you have a couple of winners that bring the money, that carry the store, right? Then you will have some products and we will dive into that later in in detail why that matters.

Then you will have some that are decent, then you will have some that honestly they're just just in there, right? They don't get even a lot of clicks. They're basically zombies, which is also something we we want to check out. And then you have products that might be wasting money, right? That that are not even profitable. And that can be a problem as well. It always depends, but yeah, of course, if it's not profitable, that's a problem. All right, let's check it out how it looks like and how we structure it as well. For example, some basic labels of different categories you

can organize this up around is is this, right? This is what we do as well. You have the champions. These are absolutely proven winners, right? They have great volume, great revenue, and great rows. These are the winners. Then very interesting as well, and that's different from a winner are the potentials, right? A lot of people don't think about this difference because they are also great. They have a great rows, great profit margins so far, but they don't have a lot of data yet, right? So, they're not really proven yet. They don't have a lot of volume. But, that's usually, and that's why the name here as well, they have a lot of potential, right?

Because they might they might have like, I don't know, 50 clicks to sales. Ah, you cannot like really say a lot yet, right? But, the potential is there. So, you want to keep an eye on that. You want to have them properly labeled as well, so you can look at that and see how many winners you're developing. And you want to make sure they get enough budget, right? So, that's why these kind of splits become more and more important the further you scale. Then, of course, we want to look at new products. When we add them to the feed, we want to make sure they get enough data, enough budget.

Then very interesting as well, because the reality of these big feeds is that most products don't get a lot of budget, right? So, you might have a hidden gems here who never even got any spend or not enough spend. They just have a couple of clicks. So, you want to label the the zombies or the sleepers, however you want to call it, right? Hidden gems, whatever. So, something like that. And then, obviously, the wasters, products that actually did get a lot of spend, but are not really profitable for you at all, right? What we discussed before. So, that's a basic label structure, a very straightforward one.

Of course, you can have very different ones as well. You can label based on, again, product type, product category, seasonality, margin, right? The sky is the limit. It depends on what makes sense for you and your business. That's a very basic one that kind of is applicable for for all niches, right? All right, then this is how it can look like in practice and how we structure it for a store like that. So, like we said, you always start out with one PMax, right? And that will always remain your main engine. What we're doing very early on is, okay, we have this engine, we have one PMax, we're gathering data, we're scaling up the store, and that's sufficient in the beginning, right?

Like I said, it's all about creating those

winning offers. And if you have an interesting offer that makes sense, everything is properly optimized, you will get the sales in and you're able to scale, right? And again, we will look at that later. But cool, we scale something we implement very early on is excluding the wasters, right? Especially in the beginning, you're still in the learning phase, there will be a lot of spend that's not super efficient yet, right? There will be spend that goes to products that are not selling well. And we want to control it, especially in the beginning if you don't have unlimited budgets yet, we need to control it. So, we have the main engine, basically all the products except the wasters, and they're different, like it again, it always depends, but that's something that definitely works, right?

Across most niches, definitely works for fashion as well. I always like to have like one main campaign like that. It's the engine, and it works well. Because you need to have a lot of data within your own campaign. But again, we isolate the wasters here, we usually use standard shopping for that, you can use PMax as well. The reason why we use standard shopping is because I like it for boosters campaign for the booster campaigns because it's not interfering with the PMax too much. I have more control there as well, so it's perfect for booster, especially if the budget is lower. So, we put it in a standard shopping campaign, all the wasters, so we don't exclude those variants completely yet.

I isolate them in a small campaign with a certain target mostly, where it can still develop, still recover. It's basically like a rehab center, right? Like so we're okay, you suck, you go there, but if you do well, you can go go back in the game, right? And then we see. And that can work really well sometimes. Also for high-volume products that suddenly drop too much in rows,

right? We don't want to like cut them completely yet, so we isolate that in that campaign. And then down the line, that's like a bigger optimization round, we also look, of course, at at the bigger picture, right? And we run waste this report now with our scaling up as well. Our clients also have different tools for that mostly, where it's like, okay, at the bigger picture, looking at the longer time frame, this product is genuinely not profitable, then we cut it completely, right? Out of their feed, out of their campaign structures in total. And then when we scale, we want to have two more booster campaigns, which are super important, especially with, again, scaling budgets, increasing budgets, and yeah, the big feeds and the complexity.

We want to have one booster campaign pushes [clears throat] the champions and potentials with a bigger focus. Sometimes we only do the potentials because bigger focus on the potential, right? These are the interesting products that have the potential, but not a lot of data yet, right? So they need more budget, they need to scale. So we focus mostly on that one. And then the other one that's also super important for high-growth store is to have a booster for the new products, so they get into the game quickly, and the zombie campaigns as well, right? You can basically separate that. I feel like it goes well together in most cases because you don't want to like split it up too much, but that's pretty much it.

So you have one for the winners, for the one with potentials, and then one for the the new products, the dead wood, right? That needs some budget. You might have some hidden gems in there, but it's not fully developed yet, right? And the reason why you do that, if you don't have this type of booster campaign, for example, and you probably know it from your own experience, you will reach a plateau easier, right? You might have one PMax you scale to a certain level and then it's like always stuck at that level for multiple weeks. Why? Because you didn't develop new winners, right? You still have the same winner, you still have the same amount of wasters.

It started to balance itself out and then you're stuck. So, the formula is simple. You want to reduce the amount of wasters and increase the amount of winners and then you can scale further, right? Pretty pretty straightforward. But in order to do that, you need to have a certain budget as well for these products. Because once there are some winners identified, the PMax focuses too much on that, right? And sometimes there's not a lot of budget for for new products. So, that's why we structure it like that. And then you can hit through the plateau, right? Because you control the wasters, you have your winners, cool, but you're not super reliant on them anymore, right?

You produce new winners as well. You test new products as well. Because it's a it's quite dangerous rely on a winner, right? Because it can backfire as well. Okay, let's say you hit the plateau. That's the best case scenario still, right? Well, not the best case scenario, but that's fine. But it can also backfire where a competitor copies the product or has a similar product. He has a better offer, right? Lower price and suddenly your volume drops because someone sniped a product, right? Or there's a change in seasonality and then your product also loses traction. So, you never want to be reliant on only one to winners.

That's very very dangerous game to play. So, the root question also is, okay, when do I split the campaign? >> [clears throat] >> How do I split it then? Like I said, in the beginning you keep it very simple. One campaign, right? And you leave it like that for quite some time. The main rule you want to focus on is like you do

not split when it's just one more box for no reason, right? Sometimes you have the idea, hey, maybe I can do this in a separate campaign or I should build this separate campaign. But there might not be a reason for it yet if everything goes according to plan yet, right? Let's say the PMax, right, has scaled your winning products. It doesn't accumulate a lot of wasters. There's sufficient budget going to new products that are getting tested and developed as well. Let's say that's the case, right? That's the dream scenario. In that case, you don't need another campaign. Why? If everything goes according to plan already, like you don't actually genuinely don't need it.

Does make sense, right? It's like if you have a business that's already super profitable and making you a lot of money, and you can still scale it, right, and make you even more money, and like the the income potential is limited, but you're sitting there and be like, "Ah, let's create a couple of other businesses." Would also be stupid. But people do that as well, right? Because like it feels good to more in the wrong way. Again, if there's no reason, we don't do it yet. Sometimes we scale up to 1 to K a day, and we still keep a very simple structure. The waster split we usually do very early on, but sometimes it's not needed, you know?

You don't want to have so many different campaigns where everything is in the learning phase, it's split up too much, right? You need data consolidation in order to be effective to certain degree. So, you want to split it up, but you don't want to split it up too much. So, when do we split then? When we see, "Hey, there are inefficiencies in the PMax, right?" When we see it accumulates wasters. Boom, we do that. When we see, "Hey, we have some winners, but there's not a lot of budget going to new products." Boom, we set up the booster for that. Right? So, you do it when you see based on the data, "Hey, it actually makes sense." Right?

Not before that, not after that. You do it when the data tells you to do it. Then, another thing we want to look at, and that's the most

important part for you as well to scale to these numbers, right? To scale to six figures and beyond. From a media buying perspective, from a campaign perspective, the main thing for you is to have an optimized product data feed. That includes the product data in in back end, right? You want to have everything optimized. Product title, descriptions, images, product metadata, everything, right? It starts with the labels and their proper categorization as well. And then the title is the most important always for you. The title is what the creative is for for meta ads, right? With shopping ads, you don't optimize, you don't test creative, but the title needs to be top-notch.

And there's a lot of uh misinformation or a lot of misunderstanding as well how to optimize titles. Some say they just keep it like very short and simple and branded. They say, "Oh, that's good. That's fine." And some they want to optimize it, and then they keyword stuff like crazy, right? And it's a title that's that huge with weird words that doesn't make any sense. And it's just stupid. And as always in life, or mostly it's the the case there the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle, right? And I will show you here with a pretty good example actually based on this dress how it can look like.

So, first of all, you start with the main keyword, right? That needs to be at first in the first position. And that's quite simple in that case, women's maxi dress, right? We have the gender, we have what it is. That's it. Don't overcomplicate it. That's the root keyword, right? And then and that's kind of like the the same principle applies to all niches, by the way, not just fashion. Then you want to have like some sort of standout feature, standout USB, whatever is applicable to the product, right? Sometimes you don't have or like here the detail, right? Sometimes you don't have it that much. Then don't do it.

Don't try to like force something and keyword stuff. Keep it simple if it's generally simple, right? But usually you can do something like that. Like here, standout feature that can be something people actually look for, right? Can be a material, if it's like linen, for example, or can be a pattern, if it's like a popular pattern like flower print or like animal print, whatever. Can be the the neckline, can be the fit, right? Whatever it is and makes most sense for your product. You research that when you upload the product. And then a detail like that. If it's more important than the feature, then it should be up front.

If it's less important, then you add it there. And that's it, right? You can use up to 150 characters, but usually we add some other you have like even the variant title after that, right? You have size, colors, so keep it short and simple, up to 70 characters max. Because that's also only what you will see on mobile, right? You don't even see the whole title. So, use up to 150 in the end, but keep in mind there are also like brand attributes, size, color, and all of that that will be will be added as well. And the root keyword, keep something between like 50 70 characters, whatever makes sense.

That's enough. Don't keyword stuff. You see it on on mobile as well and then you're good to go. All right. And that's a big one what I mentioned earlier. We want to look at the product distribution. That's the secret formula to scaling, right? As I said, usually you will have a couple of really strong winners that carry your whole store, right? And then you have the rest of the products, some zombies, some wasters. That's the reality of it. You need to understand that, right?

And the basic formula and I will show you that here and that's super super important to understand. It's very simple, but once you understand that simple concept, you can understand the complexity behind it as well and go more into detail, right? Look at that. So, that's the simple formula of scaling. You need more winners, accumulate more winners that you accumulate in wasted spend and you are scaling, right? Very simple formula. It's like if you earn more money than you spend, your bank account grows, right? If you burn more calories than you eat, you will lose weight. It's the same with the ad account. If you get more winners than wasters, you are scaling.

So, now that we know that, we just need to make sure we develop a lot of winners and reduce the amount of drainers, right? That's not as easy as said sometimes, but that's the formula. You need to understand it in the first place because I can guarantee you like 99% were watching that. 99% of my clients don't understand this formula and how it actually works, right? That's why we also like put a lot of emphasis with with our new features as well to categorize it properly from our side, right? We usually categorize The main three categories are like winners, neutral products were kind of like stable but not really going anywhere.

They have a decent drawers, but it's not really winning. But also not a waste, all right? So, it's kind of like in the middle. And then you have the wasters. And we look at the overall scaling score of that and that's how we categorize product. And based on that, we go deeper, right? Then we look for certain patterns. Do we need to cut something? Like do we have any sort of pattern we see with the wasters or even with the neutral products? Do we have a pattern that we see with the winners, right? where we can double down on that. And based on that, you can shift this balance more into your favor, basically.

So, then what not to do? Just a quick

summary. I think we had most of it already, but yeah. Do not dump every product in one PMax, right? I think I made it very clear during the slide. You have different categories and subcategories. Doesn't make sense to have when you're scaling everything just in one place, right? Do not let the wasters accumulate because simple formula, if there are too many wasters, even if you have winners, you're not scaling, right? So, you need to control the wasters and push the winners. That's why also you need to keep an eye on your champions and most importantly on your potentials to develop more of those. Have booster campaigns for them if it makes sense.

So, split but don't over split, right? It needs to make sense. There needs to be real reason to do that, otherwise it doesn't make sense. And then last but not least, I sometimes see this as well. Do not focus too much on a new product you're getting excited about before it generally proves itself, right? Sometimes I see clients, they they come to me like, "Oh, I uploaded this product. I think it has a lot of potential. Let's put it in a separate campaign, right?" If you would do that every time, you would have like 30-40 campaigns, and we're back to what we do not want, right?

And sometimes they get like one sale and a couple of clicks, and they get super excited. They write, "Okay, we need to push this." Right? But then when you push it, suddenly it's not as good anymore. So, don't get overly excited. Like it needs a certain level of data, right? Otherwise, it's just a potential, but not a winner yet, not a champion yet. But then of course, besides PMax and brand, what we always do as well is having at least one search brand campaign. Catch your brand traffic, right? It's super cheap. You can control it, but you can make sure that others are not bidding on your brand, which yeah, it takes sales away from you.

If you don't protect yourself, they will do it. Again, it doesn't cost much, right? You might think, "Hey, I'm ranking organically already." But you always want to double it. You want to have the shopping ads, the search brand, and the organic ranking, right? To make sure you're genuinely protected. Costs a couple of bucks. The ROAS is super high on that. The return on investment is high on that. It makes sense. Your brand is protected. So, always do that. Don't forget about it. It's very uh very simple, very straightforward. We have a separate video as well on how to set up a brand campaign. So, check it out as well.

Not rocket science, very easy to do. And yeah, to summarize it real quick, what we basically discussed the whole video, you need to be well organized, right? You need to be well structured in order to actually work with a system, in order to actually read your data correctly. So, you need to sort everything first. You need to understand what's going on exactly on this level, right? And again, on on a the bigger picture, it's quite simple, right? More winners, less wasters. But then you need to have it properly structured in order to even read the data, right? So, don't over complicate it, but also don't just dump and that's how most people do it, right?

They dump everything in the one campaign, they give it to one media buyer and they are like, "Oh, let's kill it." And if it doesn't scale, they are like, "Oh, I will try another agency or another media buyer." Fair enough, you know, sometimes like the media buyer genuinely sucks and we had a lot of stores like that as well. Where with the media buying alone we could fix it, right? But in 90% of the cases that's not case. Like if it doesn't work and you try another agency and still doesn't work, you try another agency, right? Like the foundation is probably stuck. And after watching this video, I can guarantee again 90% of you guys never understood this stuff in the first place, right?

Data needs to be broken down properly, then you need to sort it properly, then you can analyze the data and then you can scale to that level, right? Otherwise, it's just gambling. You might hit those numbers and there are a lot of people out there that actually hit those numbers, but it's pure luck, right? They cannot replicate it. They don't have a system behind it. If they're lucky and they have this amount of winners and not that many wasters because they somehow hit a sweet spot, great, right? They will hit those numbers, but they don't actually understand why. And that's very funny as well, but that's actually how it works for a lot of people in that game.

So, yeah, that's basically what you want to do, right? You want to push the winners, you want to control the wasters, you want to make sure you have sufficient budget for the new products and test it properly. And then you can scale to the big numbers. That's about it. >> [music]