We currently have very limited historical data on Google Ads. Should we begin with a campaign covering all products (~1,000 SKUs) to gather insights, and then create separate campaigns for the top-performing items? Alternatively, would it be better to start with a focus on a few core products to test, considering our small budget?
Hello Cory, great question.
If you have a small budget, and you already know what is performing well. Yes, create a campaign, such as a performance max campaign with top performing products.
Either submit a feed, with just your top performing.
Or if you want to submit all products, assign a custom label to the top performing products so that you can target them in your campaign: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxoOVFGlGKs
If you need more control with what search terms you want to show ads for, you can setup a standard shopping campaign with layers, explained here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiRIDzRrHno
But I would recommend starting with Performance max, as you never know it would work well.
Then once you have some data, or even before you have data, make sure that you improve your data feed quality, by following the recommendations and requirements here: https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/7052112?hl=en