Tag Archives: Product Listing Ads

Seize holiday shopping moments with new tools and insights

This holiday season, shoppers are acting more quickly and more purposefully than ever before, with 7% less time spent in each mobile shopping session.1 Yet those same shoppers are making 64% more mobile purchases than last year in the retail category, according to Google Analytics data.2 Intent-filled shopping micro-moments will replace shopping marathons this season, and we’re rolling out three new features to help retailers act on these critical moments.

Optimize your shopping bids with remarketing lists

We’re excited to extend remarketing capabilities to both shopping ads (PLAs) and local inventory ads (LIAs) with shopping remarketing lists. Now you can optimize your shopping bids to re-engage high-value customers the next time they shop on Google.com. For example, when those who’ve abandoned their carts on your sites or your loyal customers shop again on Google on desktop or mobile, you can use remarketing lists to tailor your shopping bids and reconnect with them at a more cost-efficient ROI.

Early adopters are seeing great success with shopping remarketing lists:

“Shopping remarketing lists have proven incredibly successful for Magazines.com. We're able to strategically target consumers who did not convert in previous visits, driving 285% higher mobile and desktop conversion rates with 68% lower CPAs, making it one of the most effective features we’ve ever tested."
- Yuly Gonzalez, Sr. SEM Specialist, Rakuten Search

“With Shopping remarketing lists, our client Cruiser Customizing increased their conversion rate by 78% and their ROAS by 66%. We don’t want to have a single Shopping campaign now without shopping remarketing lists attached.”
- Jeremy Brown, Chief Marketing Officer, Metric Theory

Get better insights into the products in high demand online and near your stores

To help you make better decisions about which products to merchandise and promote in your stores, online, and via your Google shopping data feed, we recently rolled out two new tools:

First, with the new Shopping Insights tool, you can identify the products people are actively looking for online and around your stores.* Based on aggregated and indexed data from April to September of 2015, the tool lets you explore the most popular shopping product terms on Google, measure their significance over time, filter for cities, and compare how consumers search for products differently on mobile or desktop.

The Assortment Report uses your existing Google Merchant Center data feed to identify gaps in your product assortment based on the popular products shoppers are clicking on, in real-time, by product category. For example, if you offer toys, you might learn that you’re not yet stocking the Sphero BB-8 App-Enabled Droid from Star Wars, one of the hottest toys right now on Google. This report also provides benchmark selling prices for each of those missing products to help you with sourcing and pricing decisions.

Posted by Archana Kannan, Product Manager, Google Shopping
1 Google Analytics internal data, September 2015
2 Google Analytics internal data, September 2015
* Available in the US, across all devices

Source: Inside AdWords


Win the Digital Shelf with Our New Guide to Shopping Campaigns

Cross-posted from the Inside Adwords blog

We introduced Shopping campaigns in February to make it easier for you to manage your Product Listing Ads (PLAs). In late August, Shopping campaigns will be the default
campaign type for all PLA advertisers.

To help retailers make the most of their Shopping campaigns, we’re excited to introduce a new best practices guide, “Shape Up Your Shopping Campaigns.” It addresses important questions like:
  • How should you structure your campaigns: by product line, performance, or both? 
  • Which feed attributes have the best chance of improving CTR?
  • Are you adjusting bids quickly enough during peak seasons?
Download the “Shape Up Your Shopping Campaigns” guide now to ensure you’re making the most of your PLAs and data feeds.

 For additional help, here are a few resources:
Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

New upgrade option for Shopping campaigns

Earlier this month, we shared a few success stories on Shopping campaigns, our new campaign type for Product Listing Ads (PLAs), and that the regular PLA campaign type will retire in late August 2014.

To upgrade to Shopping campaigns, we encourage you to create a Shopping campaign from scratch and then customize your product groups and bids from there. That way, you can choose how granular you’d like to get and ensure all your inventory is included in your Shopping campaign.

However, if you would like to base your Shopping campaign on a regular PLA campaign, we’re introducing an option today to help you upgrade.


After setting up your Shopping campaign, you’ll be taken to a new page to create ad groups. Here, you’ll see two options: the ability to start fresh with one ad group or create one or many ad groups based on a regular PLA campaign.

Note that some parts of a regular PLA campaigns aren’t transferable to a Shopping campaign, like product targets that use AdWords labels or groupings. If none of your PLA campaigns are transferrable, you might not see this option.

Keep in mind
With Shopping campaigns, you no longer need to create separate ad groups or product targets to track your impressions, clicks and cost. You can analyze and report on your PLA performance by product attribute or by individual items in the Dimensions tab, regardless of your campaign structure.

As a reminder, all PLA advertisers will need to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining regular PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll continue to share more information and tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale.

To learn more about Shopping campaigns and how to upgrade, here are a few resources:

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

What’s next for Shopping campaigns and retailers

In February, we made Shopping campaigns available to all Product Listing Ad (PLA) advertisers and, in March, we released AdWords API support to help you manage your campaigns at scale. Shopping campaigns offer the ability to browse your inventory directly in AdWords, report on your performance down to the product-level, and bid competitively with new metrics like benchmark data and impression share. We’ve received great feedback from you so far and are excited to share what’s next:


  • Size your opportunity with Bid Simulator To provide more actionable insight into your PLAs, we’ve been rolling out a Bid Simulator that’s now available in all Shopping campaigns. With a Bid Simulator, you can now estimate how bid changes could impact your impressions, clicks or costs.
  • Options to create a Shopping campaign
In the coming days, we’ll be adding some options to help you get started. You would be able to create a Shopping campaign from scratch or, for many of you, use one of your regular PLA campaigns to create similar product targets, negative keywords or promotional text.
  • Multiple ad groups for advanced retailers
    While many of you will be happy with your Shopping campaign as is, we’ve heard from advanced retailers that they’d like to create multiple ad groups. It’s now possible to do this within a Shopping campaign.

Continued Retailer Success
Since we made Shopping campaigns available to all PLA advertisers, we continue to hear many examples of how it helps you manage PLAs and effectively grow your business. Here are a few:

JumpFly
“The benefits of Shopping campaigns can’t be overstated – the ease of setup, the transparency of data, the ability to group products into logical categories and manage to the product level make it a must. All of these contribute to our clients’ ROI almost tripling, and there’s still room to improve.”
Exclusive Concepts
“The new Shopping campaigns allowed us to achieve a much higher-level of profitability, cutting costs by 13% and increasing return on ad spend by about 22% on average. Not only that, the new campaign type trims about 2 hours of setup time.”
Wiggle
“We used the product-level data from our Shopping campaign to fine-tune our bidding strategy, focusing on the products that acquired the most traffic & lowered the ones that are less important. This helped us increase visits 25% & ROI by 16%.”
White Shark Media
“Shopping campaigns effectively reduced the time spent setting up product-specific bids and optimizing in half. We can now invest even more time into each client, and the results we’ve seen have been no less than amazing. A client selling home accessories saw a 301% increase in revenue after only one month. As a result, we are now changing our agency standards within PLAs to only use Shopping campaigns.”

Future of Shopping campaigns and retirement of regular PLA campaigns
Shopping campaigns offer a truly retail-centric and seamless approach to PLAs. We're very excited by the positive feedback we've heard so far and will continue to build tools and features into this new campaign type. Thus, we'll be retiring the regular PLA campaign type and asking all PLA advertisers to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014, at which time all remaining PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded. Over the next few months, we’ll share more information and release more tools to help you upgrade your campaigns and manage them at scale. We encourage you to start planning your upgrade to Shopping campaigns today to take full advantage of the new features as soon as possible.

For additional help, here are a few resources:


Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

Introducing Shopping campaigns: a better way to promote your products on Google

Everyday, people search on Google for the best products from retailers large and small. With Product Listing Ads (PLA) on Google Shopping, people can browse a wide selection of products, finding high-quality imagery and relevant product information like brand and price.

To make it easier for you to connect with these consumers and promote your products on Google, we’re introducing Shopping campaigns, a new campaign type for PLAs. Shopping campaigns streamline how you manage and bid on your products, report on your performance, and find opportunities to grow your traffic from Google.
Key benefits

1. Retail-centric way to manage your products

Shopping campaigns allow you to browse your product inventory directly in AdWords and create product groupsfor the items you want to bid on. For example, if you’re a fashion retailer, you’ll see what types of shoes are in your data feed and how many boots you can promote. You use the product attributes derived from your data feed such as Google product category, product type, brand, condition, item id and custom labels to organize your inventory into product groups. Custom labels are a new, structured way to tag your products in your data feed with attributes that matter to you, such as ‘margin’ to separate your high- and low-margin products. To see all the items you can bid on, the Products tab will show you a full list of your approved products and their product attributes.





2. Advanced reporting to measure product performance

Regardless of how you choose to structure your product groups, Shopping campaigns offer the unprecedented ability to view your performance data by product or product attribute. Since performance metrics are associated with the item and not the product group, you can filter and segment data by your product attributes. This includes Google product category, product type, brand, condition, item id and custom labels. For example, you’ll see which Apparel & Accessories categories drive the most clicks, without having to break out your clothing category into a separate product group.



3. Competitive data to size your opportunity

To help you optimize and scale your PLAs, Shopping campaigns provide insights into your competitive landscape. In the Product Groups tab, you can add benchmark columns to see the estimated average CTR and Max CPC for other advertisers with similar products. The competitive performance data you see is aggregated and averaged, so all performance data is anonymous. Coming soon, you’ll have impression share columns to help you understand the opportunity lost due to insufficient bids and budgets, and a bid simulator will help you estimate the amount of impressions you’ll receive as you adjust your bids.





How to get started

Shopping campaigns are currently available to a limited number of advertisers. It will be rolling out gradually in the US, with full global availability by early next year. API support will come in 2014 as well.

You can learn more about Shopping campaigns at some upcoming events. Join us at our Learn With Google webinar for Shopping campaigns on November 20, 2013, and find us at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago on November 6, 2013.

We've built Shopping campaigns with retailers in mind, and if you'd like to be an early adopter to share your feedback, you can express your interest here. We'd love to hear from you!

Posted by Sameer Samat, Vice President of Product Management, Google Shopping