Google Product Listing Ads: Top Ways To Master Them

Google Product Listing Ads (PLA) is a great avenue to promote your inventory by allowing it to be easily searched by a potential customer on www.google.com and www.google.com/shopping. The user can see your company’s name as well as product price and image. Once they click your ad, they will be directed to your website where they can proceed to make a purchase. Sounds good? Google PLA can be even better when you master some of the best practices. Find out how!

Follow These Guidelines First

• Kickstart your Google Product Listing Ads creation journey by connecting your Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, Google AdWords and Google Merchant Center accounts.
• Set up your product feeds with product-specific details, downtime, etc.
• Connect the feeds to your Google Merchant Center
• Optimize your products feeds with the correct details (more details on this step will be explained later)
• You can consider adding custom labels (optional)
• Create Google Product Listing Ads and campaigns in AdWords
• Group your products in appropriate subcategories for bidding purposes
• Set up your bids and optimize your advertisements
• Track and measure your results with Google Analytics and AdWords conversion tracking
• You can improve performance and save time by using AdWords tools like bid simulator and bulk editor
• Track Impression Share, Benchmark Max CPC and CTR
• Take your Product Listing Ads to the next level by using third-party plugins

Understand What Google Shopping Is

Google offers a program called Google Shopping, and it allows you to add product feeds into your Merchant Center (GMC) account. The feeds are designed to appear along with Google’s organic search results as well as the usual PPC ads. This form of advertising has three sections which are the product’s price, image and landing page. Ensure that you have accounts for both Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

Next, proceed to create an account on GMC and AdWords. When you want to upload a product feed, you can either use a schedule with your clothing shopping cart or do it manually by logging in to your account periodically. After Google approves your feeds, you can continue creating Shopping campaigns in your newly created AdWords account.

Optimizing the Feeds in Your Product Listing Ads Campaigns

When you write your product’s title, be sure to make it good as it is one of first things that people read when they look at your ad. Try to keep it within the 70-character limit. Also, you must put your brand name at the end of the title of your ad. While product descriptions don’t usually come up in search results, you should still include it as it tells Google more about your product.

For starters, write a short description (in a sentence or so) that best describes of your product. Google allows up to a thousand characters, however, only approximately 70 characters will be displayed for users to see. It is pertinent to note that a product description is NOT a sales pitch, so avoid using promotional language.

When it comes to Google Product Category, the more specific you are, the better it is for you. You will make it easier for Google to know what type of product you are planning to add. Remember that this is different from Product Type and it is the specific category that you select from a predefined list that is shown by Google. Also, you will manually provide the value for a Product Type. If a product happens to fall into one or more category, you can enter more than one value.

Discover what else you need to know to become proficient at creating Google Product Listing Ads that truly work. Of course, if you have a company who is highly experienced in PPC to aid you, you do not have to worry about this!