How to run Product Listing Ads

The first thing you need to understand about Product Listing Ads is bidding and Keywords.  First, you cannot directly choose the keywords that you want your ads to run for with Product Listing Ads.  Google uses the titles of your products, along with the descriptions, to determine which keywords are relevant to your products.

Once Google has established what keywords you are relevant for, they then look at your Max CPC bid and determine what keywords you can compete for based on their price.  Essentially, Google is using CPC bids to put you in pools of keywords that they believe are relevant to your products, and how much you are willing to pay. Your Bid will determine what keywords you can compete for, how many keywords you can compete for, and the competitiveness of the keywords for which you are competing.  The key thing to note is, just because you are bidding higher, you are eligible for a larger number of keywords and you are advertising for more competitive keywords, it does not mean that you are going to see the best performance.   The more competitive/expensive a keyword, the more likely it will get clicked, which will eat up your daily budget faster, get fewer impressions, and prevent your ads from running as long.  This could potentially take away from better/less competitive keywords.  The most competitive/expensive keywords are not always the best, especially with product listing ads, because you tend to get lots of clicks.

 *When launching a PLA campaign, DO NOT start your CPC bids too high.  It is always better to start low.  If your max CPC bid is too low, you will get low or no impressions/clicks, but that is ok, because you can always incrementally raise your bids.

Things you must have set up in order for your Product Listing Ads to run effectively

1. You must make sure that your customers have descriptive titles and product descriptions.  If the titles and product descriptions do not explain the product with at least a name, a brand, demographic or something that would tell a robot what it is about then Google will have no idea what keywords you are relevant for.  Google’s algorithm for interpreting your products and descriptions works just like their SEO algorithm.

2. You must set up and upload your products into a Google Merchant center account; this is how your products get into Google Shopping.  You can then sync your merchant center feed with Adwords in order to run paid Product listing Ads.

3. You must make sure that Google approves your product feed in the merchant center.

   *NOTE:  Always double-check the feed in Adwords, and in the actual merchant center that you set up, to ensure that the feed has been approved.

4. When setting up a New Product Listing Ad campaign in Adwords you must first create the campaign, then one or more adgroups, depending on how you want to structure your campaign.  Lastly, you must set up one or more AUTOTARGETS for each adgroup.   You have the option to set up an autotarget for all products, specific brands, product types, product IDs, conditions, adwords labels or adwords grouping.   In general, your first autotarget is going to be set for all products.

   I. Set up Campaign and Adgroup

   II. Set up Autotargets

   III. Create promotional ads to run with your PLA

Optimize your website for conversions

Setting up and driving traffic through your Product Listing Ads is crucial to the success of any e-commerce marketing campaign; however, driving traffic is only a piece of the puzzle.  You must also focus on optimizing your website for conversions, so that you can capture as many visitors into your business as possible.