Google Product Listing Ads (PLA's) and Google Shopping are crucial parts of any e-commerce PPC campaign.
Product Listing Ads, as shown below, are ads that display in Google's search results when someone looks for a particular product or for a keyword that Google deems to relate to a specific product.
An image of the product and its price appear in the ad.
Advertisers do not bid on keywords.
Instead advertisers submit their product feed to Google via the Google Merchant Centre interface which is in turn linked to AdWords. An automated feed from the advertiser's inventory to the Merchant Centre and then to AdWords ensures that only the products that the advertiser has in stock will be eligible to show in PLA's. Google relies on the information contained in the product feed to decide when a product is relevant to a user's search. Therefore having an optimised product feed is vital.
Because setting up Product Listing Ads (PLA's) requires effort, expense and ongoing management, many companies don't have them set up. As a result, competition is far less than in regular AdWords which can be set up literally in minutes. The lower competition manifests itself in lower costs per click and so increased ROI if managed well.
Savvy online shoppers are always looking for the best deal and Google Shopping is often used by such people to locate the products that they want at the best possible prices. E-tailers that do not sell on Google Shopping exclude themselves from a huge potential market.
If you sell products online, we will work closely with you to ensure that your product feed adheres to Google's documented criteria. Once an accurate and optimized feed is created for selling on Google, we will schedule for it to be updated every 24 hours to make sure that only those products that you have in stock show in PLA's and Google Shopping with the most recent pricing.
We will structure your Product Listing Ad account into logical AdGroups based around brand, price range, category or any other appropriate segmentation. On a regular basis, we carefully monitor the clicks received and actively manage bids to ensure that ROI is maximized. Data gathered from PLA campaigns can in turn be fed into your standard AdWords campaign. In addition, we can use your feed to set up dynamic product remarketing; for more on this, see our "Dynamic Product Remarketing" page.
