Part 1:
Setting Up Your Data Feed
Part 2: How to Set Up Your PLA Campaign
Part 3:
How To Optimize Your PLA Campaign In Your Data Feed
Part 4:
How to optimize your PLA campaign in AdWords
Part 5:
Targeting Strategies
Part 6:
Using Google Analytics To Measure Performance
Part 2: How to set up your PLA campaign
Once you have all of the requirements for Product Listing Ads such as
the Google Merchant Center account and an error-free data feed, you can
focus on setting up a Product Listing Ads campaign in your Google
AdWords account. But how do you start?
Link Your Accounts
Before you can begin using product listing ads in your account, you
need to link your AdWords and Google Merchant Center accounts. To do
this, log into your
Merchant Center
account, then click on “settings” in the left navigation and AdWords
from the menu that pops up after clicking on settings. On the AdWords
page, just enter your AdWords customer ID (looks like a phone number and
can be found at the top of the page when logged into AdWords). It is
possible to connect one Merchant Center account to multiple AdWords
accounts if necessary.
Create a New Campaign
Once your AdWords and Merchant Center accounts are linked, you can
begin to create a new campaign within AdWords to specifically target
Product Listing Ads. Just as a reminder, the Product Listing Ads (PLAs)
should be in a separate campaign from all other search and display
network campaigns in the account. This enables you to establish
different settings and budgets for PLAs and track PLA performance
metrics. As when adding any other new campaign, go to the campaign
overview tab of your AdWords account, select new campaign and choose
Search Network only.
Continue with naming the campaign on the next screen and make sure to
choose Product Listing Ads under the Type section of the campaign
setup. The campaign also needs to target Google Search at a minimum but
it is recommended to include Search Partners as well. Keep in mind that
product listing ads are not shown on the display network.
Follow the set up process by choosing your location, location
options, languages and bidding and budget options as well as your
preferred delivery method. When you get to the Ad Extensions section,
make sure that the box next to Extend my ads with relevant product
details from Google Merchant Center is checked (which automatically
should be the case). The Merchant Center account you connected to your
AdWords account should appear below the box. However, don’t take it as a
given and double check the account name as there might also be another
account linked to your AdWords account that you are not aware of.
Moreover, when purposefully linking two Merchant Center accounts to
AdWords, confirm which of the accounts you want to use for this
campaign. Don’t worry, you can always come back to this on the Ad
Extensions tab within the campaign in case it needs to be changed.
Create Ad Groups
With your campaign all set up, you can start to focus on creating ad groups on the next screen:
Name your ad group, taking care to be descriptive as it helps with
the management of the whole campaign as with any other of your
campaigns. PLAs don’t use ads in the way you are used to. You don’t need
to write an ad, as Google creates the ad based on the data in your
feed. However, it is recommended that you test special promotional text,
even though it is optional.
An “All Products” product target is created by default when initially
creating the campaign but also when adding new ad groups to the
campaign. Since this will be your first ad group, you can leave the All
products checkbox checked. It is best practice to set up an All Products
product target as it targets all of the products in the Merchant Center
product feed and can feature any products on Google Search and/or
Google Shopping that are not covered by any of the product specific ad
groups. Start with a safe minimum bid. Judge this based on what you are
comfortable paying in your Search campaigns. If the average
cost-per-click is $0.75 in your Search campaigns, start with that as
your default bid. It is suggested to set the “All Products” ad group bid
lower than the product specific ad group bids in the PLA campaign. This
is to ensure that product specific ad groups will be shown rather than
the all products ad group. Once you click Save ad group, your first ad
group is live.
The process of adding separate ad groups for product
groups/categories follows the same principles as with any other
campaign. Go to the Ad groups tab in your account, click new ad group
and follow the same set up process again as shown above. One thing to
remember is to uncheck the product targets All products checkbox. After
hitting Save ad group, you will be directed to the Auto targets tab to
define the product target of this new ad group. AdWords gives you the
following option of attributes to segment your products by:
These categories help you to define your products in a unique way and
come in handy to organize your campaigns with any of these attributes
or any combination of thereof.
Targeting Strategies
There are many strategies you can employ for this Google AdWords
product. Picking the proper strategy, as with anything, will depend
entirely upon many factors such as the vertical of your company,
existing company goals, etc.
Targeting options
The most important thing is to target by the difference that
makes performance change. For instance, if you find performance is about
the same for each brand of dog food you sell, but each brand name is
different from all of your other brand names, then you should target by
this attribute.
I’ll go through some of the more successful and most commonly useful
targeting strategies to begin with, and hopefully you’ll find one that
matches your needs or could be altered slightly to match them.
If you sell items that have different brands, and you see different
performance by brand, this is a great option for you. You will want to
set up an ad group for each brand, and within that ad group, set up a
target for each brand.
- Set up targets by product type.
If you sell many different product types, and you see different
performance based on these product types, this is an excellent choice
for you. The set up is the same as the targeting by brand: set up ad
groups based on product types. Within those ad groups, you should set up
targets based on product types. When I say product types, I am
referring to the Google product categories.
- Set up targets by custom defined attributes.
AdWords labels targeting and AdWords groupings targeting allows you
to target by category/product grouping that you decide fits your
business best. This would allow you to group products/product lines by
season, for instance. You could have labels for “fall line” and “summer
line”. You could even include a designer’s name: “Gucci Fall Line”. The
possibilities are endless here. The key to utilizing this targeting
method most effectively is to find the biggest cause of performance
change in your account. You need to analyze your data in AdWords and any
Analytics package you use to find what attribute you can separate your
products by that causes performance changes, but everything within each
attribute has similar performance. So, while these targeting choices are
the most appealing because they allow the most customization, they also
require the most work and intelligent analysis to utilize properly.
There are a few differences to these targeting methods you should
consider before picking on. You must use the cost-per-click pricing
model with the AdWords labels target, but you can target up to 10 labels
at a time. Whereas with the AdWords grouping target, you can only
target one grouping at a time, but you can use it for whatever bidding
method you prefer.
- Set up targets by SKU or product id.
This is a targeting method that seems favored by many advertisers.
This allows you to know exactly what product you are targeting. Instead
of grouping several or many products into one target, you can be sure
the performance of each target is directly tied to an individual
product.
This strategy could be advantageous to any website with a small
inventory or with a handful of top performing products. For example, if
you sell a small line of supplements, it may benefit you to manage each
product separately in your Product Listing Ad campaign.
As to the organization of this targeting method, you could either
have an ad group for each target, which would be beneficial if you’re
doing cost-per-acquisition bidding at the ad group level. You could also
think of some other way to organize your products, perhaps an ad group
for each product type, and then have the individual product targets
housed within each ad group. This would be best for cost-per-click
bidding.
Summary
Try to be creative with your ad group organization so it gives you
the most value when reviewing performance metrics. However, be careful
to not make your ad groups so granular that the data becomes
meaningless. Also, while a promotion for Product Listing Ads is
optional, use it to advertise a coupon code or other specials that you
are running for your products. With this being said, it is important
that the promotional message is true for all the products in an ad group
and that it is updated on a regular basis as promotions tend to change
over time. Another, often neglected, tip is to add negative keywords to
your campaign before it goes live. Although you do not need to enter
keywords for PLA campaigns as Google uses your product feed to match
your products to appropriate search queries, negatives can improve
campaign targeting from the start. One last piece of advise for setting
up a PLA campaign in AdWords, only select product targets that exactly
match what is in your feed or your PLA won’t show.
This is it! Now you have successfully set up your first Product
Listing Ads campaign. Watch out for Part 3 of The Total Guide to Product
Listing Ads, when we discuss: How to optimize your PLA campaign in
AdWords.
The common thread with the above types of ad targeting is data, not whether or not they are technically considered “retargeting.”.jpeg)
