Best Practices for Using Product Listing Ads

Product Listing Ads (PLAs) are an exciting online marketing campaign that continues to evolve. These image-based search ads have proven to deliver strong clickthrough and conversion rates by capturing users’ attention with product-specific images and pricing information. They allow advertisers to promote individual items within their feed quickly and efficiently, and require less hands-on management than search and display campaigns. Retailers can see performance metrics for each individual product target, and they appear on long-tailed search queries that you may not have previously bid on with your search campaigns.

When paired with search ads and optimized organic results, PLAs give advertisers the ability to take up more real estate on the page, therefore increasing their share of search results and opportunity for users to click on their site or ad. Consider implementing the following best practices for using PLAs:

1. Optimize your data feed. Be sure to include descriptive titles and vivid descriptions. Instead of using keywords, like search and display campaigns do, PLA campaigns use product names and a description of each item to decide which ads to serve.

If you're a smaller retailer or if your product feed only has a few hundred items, go in and rewrite the titles and descriptions yourself. If you know anyone with some search engine optimization expertise, even better! Ask them to help you build up the feed.

Next, set up campaigns that target your entire feed to help you reveal what products perform well. Keyword terms that have converted could also be used for search campaigns.

Pay close attention to errors and warnings shown on the "Data Quality" tab in the Merchant Center. Address these issues as quickly and efficiently as possible to minimize any lost traffic and/or revenue. Also, check to see how your PLA is performing against your competitors.

2. Get granular. Make sure that your feed is classified into very precise groups. An easy way to do this is to create AdWords groupings or AdWords labels within your feed. These columns can help you group your products into seasonal merchandise or help you catalog items into different price brackets.

Next, make sure your ad groups are as granular as possible. Search queries are mapped to individual PLA ad groups and targets in AdWords. For this reason, you want to make sure that you have product-specific ad groups for each item in your Merchant Center feed.

Take the example below:

Ad group: Fans

Target>product_type=ceiling fan

Target>product_type=floor fan AND adwords_labels=$25-$55

Target>product_type=pedestal fan AND brand=honeywell AND adwords_labels=$25-$55

Deep segmentation will allow you to choose specific fields (e.g., product type, condition, SKU, etc.) when setting up your PLAs, which will in turn give you more control over your budget, bidding, ad copy and targeting.

Bidding efficiently at your most granular target level(s) is the best way to maximize your product feed's potential.

3. Always have a "catch all" target. Since you can't bid on specific keywords for PLAs, and search queries are matched by the unique product titles and descriptions, it's important to have a "catch all" or "all products" target in your campaign. By neglecting to do so you run the risk of missing traffic to relevant products in your feed.

Always set this target to the lowest bid in your group. Bidding is one of the most important components in PLA campaigns. Having your "All Products" target set at a higher bid than others in your groups would potentially cause a much higher cost per click than you might have otherwise paid.

Shannon Greene is a search analyst at Elite SEM, a search engine marketing firm. Shannon can be reached at Shannon@elitesem.com.