Best Practices for Getting the Most Out of PLAs

By Udayan Bose

Q: "When PLAs were free, our company was king. Now that they're paid, we can't figure out how to crack the code and get PLA visibility. Any best practices around getting the most out of PLAs?" — Jackie Eldridge, director of social media and affiliate  marketing, DollarDays.com

A: Since their launch in July 2012, Product Listing Ads (PLAs) have become a great way to capture more attention for your products. With Google renewing its emphasis on monetizing search, PLAs now appear right at the top of the search engine results page — above paid ads and organic results. Here are five methods that can be used to maximize your PLA results:

1. Optimize product titles. Crafting specific titles that capture all your essential product information will increase your clickthrough rate.

2. Have a high-quality data feed. Scrub your data feed daily to upload new products and images, update prices for every product in your feed, and remove out-of-stock items.

3. Leverage the power of product-level hypertargeting. Hypertarget your best-selling products. Make small bid increments for category- level product targets, and increase them based upon granularity. Place the maximum bid on your best-selling products.

4. Highlight special offers. Merchant Promotions is a Google feature that allows you to enhance your PLAs by highlighting any special product offers right when consumers are ready to buy.

5. Become a Google Trusted Store. Google grants this badge to retailers that prove they're fast and reliable shippers with a record of positive customer feedback. Google Trusted Stores instill confidence in consumers and help differentiate your product.

Udayan Bose is CEO and founder of NetElixir, a company that applies mathematical models to drive search marketing results. Udayan can be reached at udayan@netelixir.com.