Create a Shopping campaign

  • Shopping campaigns, featuring product details like images and prices, can be created after linking your Merchant Center and Google Ads accounts.

  • You can manually create Shopping campaigns through the Google Ads UI by selecting a campaign goal, Merchant Center account, and configuring settings like bidding and budget.

  • Alternatively, automate Shopping campaign creation using the Google Ads API by defining campaign settings such as channel type, merchant ID, and sales country.

  • Ensure your Merchant Center products are uploaded for the designated country to ensure they appear in your Google Ads campaigns.

  • Detailed steps and code samples for both manual and automatic Shopping campaign creation are available in the provided documentation links.

Summary

After you've successfully linked a Merchant Center account to your Google Ads account, you can create Shopping campaigns.

Shopping campaigns serve ads with an image, title, price, store name, and more. You can create a Shopping campaign in the Google Ads UI or automatically with the Google Ads API.

This page explains how you can create a new Shopping campaign with products from a linked merchant account.

Manual steps

  1. Link Merchant Center to Google Ads.
  2. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
  3. Click + NEW CAMPAIGN.
  4. Select a campaign goal and the type of campaign you want to run (Shopping or Performance Max).

  5. Select your Merchant Center account and the country where your products are sold, then click CONTINUE.

    You can't change the Merchant Center account or country later—you'll have to create a new campaign with different settings for a different account or country.

  6. Select a campaign subtype, for example, Smart Shopping.

  7. Enter a name for your campaign and configure other settings, like your bidding strategy, budget, and campaign priority.

  8. Click SAVE & CONTINUE.

  9. Choose a product group to use for your campaign.

  10. Upload asset information for responsive display ads. This step is required in the Merchant Center UI.

If you don't see all your Merchant Center products in Google Ads, make sure you've uploaded them to the feed for the same Country of Sale you selected in Google Ads.

Automatic steps

  1. Link Merchant Center to Google Ads.
  2. Set the AdvertisingChannelType to SHOPPING.
  3. Set the campaign's advertising_channel_sub_type to SHOPPING_SMART_ADS.

  4. Create a ShoppingSetting object with the following required fields:

    • merchant_id
    • sales_country

    You can't change the merchant_id or sales_country for your campaign later. You need to create a new campaign with different settings for a different account or country.

  5. Add the ShoppingSetting to your campaign.

  6. Set a campaign-level bid strategy.

  7. Create a new campaign budget (only non-shared budgets).

See the Shopping campaign sample and Create a new Shopping Campaign for more information.