Product Listing Ads for Beginners By Elizabeth Marsten www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners

Legal, Notes and Other Stuff

© 2013, The Written Word, Inc. d/b/a Portent, Inc. and Elizabeth Marsten. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncom- mercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. * * * Who is this book for? Click here to read the license.

Those new to Product Listings Ads and/or the world of product feeds and Shopping in general. That’s a fancy way of saying: please don’t steal from me. It’s not cool. Especially those who are looking for some step by step If you like this book, you might want to check out Elizabeth’s posts at the and best practice guidance. Portent www.portent.com. * * * If you want to talk to Elizabeth, you can reach her on Twitter @ebkendo or by email at [email protected]

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Table of Contents

4 What are PLAs?

8 What You Need

9 Getting Started

» AdWords » Merchant Center » Webmaster Tools »

42 Tracking Progress

46 Troubleshooting

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What are PLAs?

How do they work, where do they show?

Google rolled out Product Listing Ads (PLAs) in early 2011. PLAs show paid ads with images, price and sometimes promotional text in 3-6 ad blocks depending on the query and available results on both a typical SERP and on SERPs. Prior to October 2012, results on the main page of a Google Shopping SERP were organic (and free) generated by prod- uct feeds submitted by merchants through Google Merchant Center and through crawls performed by during regular web crawls of sites in the Google index. This is no longer the case.

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Google Merchant Center is where feeds are uploaded (manually or via API) and managed. Feeds submitted here show in Google Shopping (formerly Froogle and Google Base.) Google Base was originally just a database, but only the URL of google.com/base to access Merchant Center remains.

Now all listings that appear on shopping.google.com (Google Shopping) and those with thumbnail images on google.com search results are paid PLAs.

* * * Now all listings that appear on shopping. google.com (Google Shopping) and those with thumbnail images on google.com search results are paid PLAs.

* * *

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As of the fourth quarter of 2012, PLAs drove 28% of non-brand clicks (RimmKaufman) and there’s no sign of slowing down with a 600% increase in PLA-specific budgets by advertisers in the fourth quarter of 2012 Marin( ).

But, as with any marketing tactic, PLAs are not for everyone. Some things to consider before deciding on whether or not you want to take PLAs for a spin:

• PLAs aren’t keyword-based. Google decides which vendors and products to show based on the information you provide in your * * * feed, historical data in your account and the user’s query. PLAs aren’t keyword-based. • PLAs may or may not be less competitive than anything else you’ve tried before. * * * • The average CPC could be cheaper than your average search CPC. In the fourth quarter of 2012, PLA CPCs were 26% lower than CPCs for competitive text ads ( Land). • Feed management without automation is very time consuming. If you’ve got fewer than 100 products, you might be able to swing it, but depending on your verticals, like apparel, for example, you might need to shell out for some help. • There are still a lot of questions about PLAs out there. Remember, this “launched” as a standalone product October 22, 2012, but with far less support from Google than the AdWords product.

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• PLAs can be very frustrating and confusing because there are so many other Google products and extraneous factors that influence set up and continued management. • PLAs are different than Product Extension Ads (PEs). PEs are still pulled from the Merchant Center feed as before. PEs show with the standard text ad and require additional action such as the expan- sion of the plus box (this is why they were originally called “plus box ads.”).

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What You Need

• (could be with any email, doesn’t have to be @ . This just needs to be an email that you’re going to be com- fortable using a LOT) • Google AdWords account (with Google Account from above) • Google Merchant Center account (with Google Account from above) • Product feed (Excel) • * (with Google Account from above) • Plugin, extension or app to create/submit/edit product feeds *

* = May Be Optional

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Getting Started: AdWords

If you already have an AdWords account, great! If you don’t, you’ll need to set one up. Follow these quick-start instructions, as we’re going to set up this account based on the assumption that it will only be for PLAs. If you want to run search or display ads as well, I recommend checking out Portent’s free PPC e-book on Getting Started in PPC: Fast! * * * If you’re new to PPC, I recommend 1. Go to adwords.google.com checking out Portent’s free PPC e-book 2. Click the “sign up” link on Getting Started in PPC: Fast! 3. Enter in your Google account information 4. The system will then start walking you through a basic SEARCH set * * * up. You want to skip this, choose “later” or “skip” for all options until you’re able to exit the wizard. 5. Move on to the next section, where we’ll walk through setting up just a PLA campaign 6. Enter in billing information last, after you’ve gotten Merchant Cen- ter and your feed squared away.

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Ready to create a PLA campaign?

1. Click on the “Campaigns” tab in the top navigation 2. Click the green “+New Campaign” button 3. Select “Search Network Only” 4. Check the “PLA” checkbox

5. Name your campaign “Product Listing Ads” or a variation of, but make sure that “Product Listing Ads” is in there 6. Choose devices (by default mobile phones are enabled) 7. Choose location setting (by default USA and Canada are enabled) 8. Leave your bidding option at “I’ll manually set my bids for clicks” 9. Enter in a “Default bid” ($1 is a good place to start for right now) 10. Enter in a “Daily budget” (something that if it were all spent in one day, you won’t have a heart attack)

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11. Under “Ad extensions,” disable “Product” for now (this is for prod- uct extension ads, we’re only doing PLAs right now) 12. Save and continue

Now you’re going to be asked to set up your ad group and auto targets. For this section, we’re going to simplify and come back to ad group set up once we have all the other Google products in place.

1. Name your ad group. “PLAs” is okay for now. 2. Skip the promotion for now. 3. UNCHECK the “All Products” box under “Auto Targets.” An “error” message will pop up, but that’s okay, we’re going to come back and set specific auto targets rather than let Google have free run of the product feed.

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4. Save ad group

* Note what your Client ID number is, you’ll need it to link your Merchant Center account. The Client ID is a 10-digit number that you can find in the upper right hand corner of your account when logged in. We’re going to need that to link your AdWords account with your Merchant Center ac- count later on.

* * * Creating additional ad groups in your PLA campaign You can have more than one PLA cam- paign, just as you can have more than You can have more than one PLA campaign, just as you can have more than one ad group in a PLA campaign. It’s best to start simple with one one ad group in a PLA campaign. PLA campaign and have a few (less than 10) ad groups in that campaign. * * * How many ad groups to have and what they should contain will be based upon your feed and what you’re planning on targeting. We’ll go into this in more detail after getting through all the account set up information.

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Getting Started: Merchant Center

This assumes that you do not already have a Merchant Center account set up. If you do, great, skim ahead. I do urge you to pay attention to the setting area here in the checklist, though, and make sure your Merchant Center account is set up optimally.

1. Go to google.com/base and click the big blue “Sign into Merchant Center” button while signed into the same Google account you used for AdWords, Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools. 2. Select your location from the drop down, click “Continue.” 3. Review and accept the Terms of Service. 4. Begin the “Configure your account” section – it’s lengthy but NEC- ESSARY. Fill it out in full. 5. Write an accurate description of your business using keywords and stay away from sales-y language. 6. You’ll now be taken to your account Dashboard.

Now we need to link up your AdWords account.

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1. Click on the “Settings” link in the left navigation to get it to expand and then click on AdWords. 2. If you’re using the same Google account for Merchant Center as AdWords, you might already see your AdWords Client ID number linked up. If so, verify that the Client ID number is correct. 3. If the number is correct and the blue link next to it says “Deactive” that means you are actively linked already and there is nothing else you have to do here. 4. If it is NOT correct or if you are using a different Google Account, type the Client ID number into the “Link AdWords Account” box and click “Link Account.”

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Now we’ll need to verify the URL of the website you are going to show products for in Merchant Center. This can be done though Google Web- master Tools (WMT). See the next section for details on installing Web- master Tools for site verification.

Once you’ve got WMT up and verified, you’ll return back to the “Settings” area of your Merchant Center account and click on “General.”

1. Click the blue “Verify this URL” link under the “Website URL” box. 2. If all has gone according to plan, you should get a green checkmark with “verified and claimed.”

If things did not go according to plan, you’ll need to troubleshoot your WMT installation.

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Getting Started: Webmaster Tools

If you don’t have Google Webmaster Tools (WMT) set up, you can’t verify your URL in Merchant Center. Unfortunately, this does mean you’re adding yet another Google product to your lineup for getting PLAs off the ground. But it’s okay, because Google WMT is a very helpful thing to have set up * * * and review once in a while. WMT gives you insights into how Google’s If you don’t have Google Webmaster crawler (googlebot) is viewing your site, what it’s finding in terms of errors Tools (WMT) set up, you can’t verify your or issues, site speed, search queries, submit and how many pages URL in Merchant Center. you have indexed by Google and available to appear in search results. * * *

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So if you’ve never signed in before to WMT, go here: www.google.com/ webmasters/tools while signed into your Google Account.

1. Click the red “Add a Site” button. 2. Type in your site URL, WITH the “www” included. 3. Download the HTML file that Google generates and follow the in- structions from there, placing the file in the root directory of your website and leaving it there, even after verification.

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Here is the full Google Help Center article.

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If you’re unable to do the HTML file method, there are alternate methods, the easiest being Google Analytics if you already have an account and are an administrator with the same Google account you logged into WMT with.

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Getting Started: Product Feed

Product feeds can be created by hand or generated by a plugin, extension or feature in your shopping cart. Ideally, you’d like generated feeds as it’s a huge time saver over entering each product one by one. Feeds run on attri- butes or columns that tell the search engine information about that specif- ic product. Google Shopping has a list of required attributes that you must * * * provide in order to get your ads to show at all. Not only should you make sure you have all these in place, but consider utilizing additional available The more information you can give attributes provided by Google. The more information you can give Google, Google, the better decisions it can make the better decisions it can make on when to show your product and for on when to show your product and for what queries. Check out Google’s monster list of attributes here. what queries. There is an option when you log in to Merchant Center to create a PLA * * * campaign from there. Don’t do it. Please follow the steps in the AdWords section of this e-book to avoid setup snafus later.

If you need to create a feed by hand, here’s how:

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1. Download the feed template from Google. 2. Open in Excel. 3. Start filling in the columns, line by line for the attributes. Note that the attributes are all lower case, don’t use capitalization when cre- ating your feed in the header attribute columns. • id: This can be an arbitrary number, it’s so you can differen- tiate, but it also makes it so you can bid for a singular prod- uct in AdWords. It can be as simple as “1,” “2” etc. • title: Use keywords and be direct. Up to 70 characters. • description: Use keywords and be succinct up to 1000 char- acters but only 130 will show. (10,000 is the max). • link: The individual product page. • image_link: The image of the product (not the product page again but the URL for when you click on the photo of the item). • brand: The manufacturer (you or someone else). • price: Don’t use currency symbols. • availability: In stock (available for order, out of stock and pre-order are the other options). • condition: New or used. • tax*: See #5 in “Considerations.” • shipping*: See #5 in “Considerations.” • google_product_type: Use the Google taxonomy to decide what the product type is and use “>” caret separators per the taxonomy chart.

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• product_type: Your categorization of the product (see #4 in “Considerations”).

If you’re an apparel merchant, you’ll have another set of required attribu- tions like color, size, gender and each variation will require its own line in the feed. For example a line of t-shirts that come in 3 sizes and 5 colors wouldn’t be a singular product. It would actually be 15 products.

This is something to consider if you’re trying to build the feed by hand and why most merchants prefer automation, as it can be a lot of work, par- ticularly for apparel sites!

4. Save the finished file as a .TXT (as well as a .CSV on your desktop for good measure) with a file name like “product-feed.txt.” 5. Click on “All Data Feeds” in left navigation of your Merchant Center account and click the “New ” button. 6. Choose the target country (USA by default). 7. Leave the format as “googlebase” (the other options are for if you are uploading a feed from another source like Shopzilla or Shop- ).

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8. Enter the file name and save changes. 9. You’ll then be taken to the “Data feeds” screen, click “Manual Up- load” and “Choose File.”

10. Choose your feed file and click “Upload and process this file.” 11. You’ll need to wait up to 48 hours before seeing whether or not the full feed has uploaded or if there are issues with your upload. 12. Your submission will be good for 30 days, after which it will expire unless you upload again before that 30-day mark. Uploading any time before that will reset the 30-day timer.

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If you happen to have a cart like Magento Community, Volusion, Yahoo Stores, NetReady or WP eCommerce, you should be able to find a plugin or extension to help you generate the feed. When searching for one to down- load or pay for, make sure that it is specifically for AdWords/Google Shop- ping (or has the ability to be edited for additional custom fields).

Did it work?

Next time you log in, you should see something like this on your dashboard:

In this case, green = good. This means that your items/feed were processed and you can now start digging around and see if there are any errors or is- sues with the feed or individual products.

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Considerations: Things you want to think about before submitting a feed:

1. Does the title/name of the product make sense? Is it too long? A title needs to be 70 characters or less and if you’re starting each title with your brand and it’s cutting off the name of the product, you may want to reverse the way your titles are being displayed. 2. Is the description descriptive? Yeah, I have to ask that. “Good for snow” is a terrible description. “Clamp-on shoe treads are great for * * * snow, ice and strolling through the park” Is much better. Is the google_product_type 3. Is the google_product_type categorized appropriately? Did you go as deep into the taxonomy as you could? For example: categorized appropriately?

* * * You sell false eyelashes. Did you categorize them as: Health & Beauty?

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Or did you go as deep as you could?

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4. Is the product_type category similar to google_product but not identical? Use this area to send an additional signal to Google for categories that might not exist yet. For example, using False Eye- lashes: • Health & Beauty > Personal Care > Cosmetics > Eye Makeup > False Eyelashes > Fox Fur Eyelashes • Health & Beauty > Personal Care > Cosmetics > Colored False Eyelashes * * * Note that I kept a lot of the same from Google Product, but instead used this chance to tell Google additional details about my prod- Tax and shipping weight are required ucts that don’t exist in the taxonomy, like materials or colors. attributes – but they can also be 5. Tax and shipping weight are required attributes – but they can also configured in the Merchant Center be configured in the Merchant Center user interface, which means user interface you don’t have to submit it in columns through the feed. If you have simple tax/shipping options, you might check out “General- * * * Settings-Tax & Shipping” and see if you can insert your table here and export a simpler feed.

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6. Additional tracking. Using Value Track parameters you can tack on extra modules to a destination URL and get data for, though not re- quired. (I recommended you skip for now if all this so far has made you head spin.) See the “Resources “section for more on these.)

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7. Do you have analytics or a way to track the progress of PLAs? Examples include Google Analytics Ecommerce Tracking, your own cart or AdWords Conversion Tracking. (The answer needs to be yes…) Some things to know about Merchant Center:

• Depending on your knowledge, or if you have development or de- velopers that can work on your cart, it may be easier to submit the feed each night automatically. This is the best route for submittal * * * as it gives you a few advantages: You may have to invest in additional tech o “Freshness:” Google does pay attention to how often you support to get a feed off the ground. are updating your products, the fresher the list, the better. o Stock control: You can avoid paying for clicks on products * * * that have run out of stock. o Not forgetting: The #1 problem with manual submission is someone has to remember to do it. o Ability to make edits in the cart backend (like changing an adwords_label or adding an attribute) and have it upload that night. • Not all carts are created equal. You may have to invest in additional tech support to get a feed off the ground. For example, Magento Community, there are extensions that range for free to $150 to give you the ability to export or submit a product feed to Google. Volu- sion requires a couple of pulls of report data to “cobble” a feed

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together (if you’re Bronze level you might need to “level up” pay for the support). NetReady has a plugin with customizable fields as does MivaMerchant. Yahoo Stores gives API access as part of their stan- dard package, which means that the cost to you is lower for export and submittal to Google. Wordpress eCommerce plugin has integra- tion built in to do a scheduled feed right to Google, but you might need a developer for any customization, as the feed is very basic. • You may a need a developer to decipher everything in the bullet point before this one. • You may have to pay for API access to your cart on top of the plugin each time you access it (the plugin or extension should be a one- time fee.). API access is usually pretty cheap (pennies per access) or not applicable, but it depends on your cart, the amount of products you have and the frequency in which you access the API.

In summary, some things to think about when calculating the overall cost of doing PLAs, in total there can be many more than just the CPC you could pay:

• Plugin or extension • Developer time or hours • API access • CPCs • Your time to execute feed updates • This fabulous e-book (which was totally worth it)

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Getting Started: Google Analytics

You don’t have to use GA, but you should use something! Perhaps you have ecommerce tracking in your cart and that’s great, just make sure you’re then tagging destination URLs or using Value Track parameters to see the queries that triggered your ads, which ones brought sales and which products those are tied to. For more on Value Track parameters, see the “Tracking” section of this e-book.

In order to see if the ad was a PLA or a PE, you’ll need to the end of the destination URL with a parameter such as {adid}. If you’re not inter- ested and want to classify your efforts as “Google Shopping” you can view statistics for PEs in the AdWords interface for some measurement sepa- rate from PLAs:

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To set your Google Analytics up to track PLAs, make sure that your AdWords account and Google Analytics account are linked. The quickest way to check is while logged into your AdWords account to click on the “Tools & Analysis” tab and select “Google Analytics.” If GA doesn’t open inside of your AdWords account, you are not linked.

You’ll need to add the login you are using for Google AdWords as an admin user in your Google Analytics account. Check out Google’s guidelines on how to link up your GA and AdWords accounts here as well.

If you don’t have GA set up for ecommerce (or at all) and would like to, you might need some help. The basic GA installation for traffic is pretty straight- forward, but cart integration would require some development skills. Check out the “Resources” section at the end of this e-book for affordable GA set up help.

So now that you’ve got your Merchant Center/feed, Webmaster Tools, GA and AdWords accounts set up, let’s get a little fancier.

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Really Getting Started on PLAs: Using the unique attributes provided by Google just for PLAs

Google has provided three attributes that you can utilize that aren’t required but we highly recommended you use at least one so PLAs are “controlled” from the AdWords account by the different attributes you can filter by.

Say what? * * * You’ll want to map out ahead of time In AdWords there are 5 attributes you can choose from to bid more for, less what you want to be bidding on in for or just to keep organized. Using these attributes allows you to be a lot AdWords in order to fill out these fields smarter with your money and the AdWords attributes of grouping and labels in Merchant Center. are something to be used. This is why if you choose a plugin or extension to export your feed with it needs to be specifically for AdWords or allow editing * * * to add custom fields for the unique AdWords attributes.

adwords_labels is for: Grouping products with multiple values. For example, shoes, heels.

adwords_grouping is for: Grouping your products in an arbitrary way but only one value at a time. For example: sheets

You’ll want to map out ahead of time what you want to be bidding on in AdWords in order to fill out these fields in Merchant Center. Decide how you

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want to group and segment your products ahead of time, for example, you might want to group lower profit margin items under one label and a type of product under another.

Let’s walk through one.

I sell baking supplies online, pans, trays, spatulas, paper cupcake liners. This means I not only have a lot of products, but a lot of different price ranges. For all items under $10, I create an adwords_group: “Under10.”

For all utensil-type items, I create the adwords_label: “Utensils, under10.” From here in the feed next to any item that falls under those categories, I add those designations in the group or label column.

When I go into my AdWords account “auto targets” tab and I want to bid for the Under10 group I can do so by “validating” the value once the feed has been uploaded and processed:

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I wouldn’t have been able to segment this specifically without the group- ing and label values. So before you upload or export, map out how you want to divvy up the products you’re uploading into Merchant Center. You can always come back and edit these too, so if a designation isn’t working out or needs to be changed on a few products you can do this. Just don’t * * * forget to go back and re-validate your auto targets in AdWords or your Make “all products” its own ad group PLAs for that designation will stop running. with a super-low bid. Bidding for PLAs * * * Determining how many ad groups to have and what they should contain will be based upon your feed and what you’re planning on targeting.

Supposedly, you also mapped out some auto targets that you submit- ted with the feed for adwords_grouping and adwords_labels that we can work with. If not, don’t worry, we can get started with some of the other required attributes.

First thing first, don’t bid on the default “all products” unless you have the bid at the ad group and auto target level set very low. It should be the lowest bid out of the entire campaign for PLAs. Otherwise, Google will

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default to the higher of the two. To avoid competing with yourself, make “all products” its own ad group with a super-low bid.

Set a bid per auto target and for the ad group. Make sure that the bid re- flects your goals; bid more for auto targets that are more important, less for those that mean less.

For our example, of our Under10 auto target is set to $0.45CPC with the ad group set at $0.25CPC. This represents one ad group. Then we have another ad group that is covering our brand auto targets so that we can more broadly represent our offerings while keeping some control over the cost. This ad group is using 5 auto targets of: KitchenAid, Calphalon, Wolfgang Puck, Simply Human and Emeril. For each one we know that the prices range from $10-$300 so we want to be careful about how much we’re bidding on brand alone. For each of these brands we’ll set separate targets based on the extensiveness of the line we carry and the average order value.

Example: Kitchen Aid $1.00

Now this is a pretty straightforward way to bid and a good place to start. However, let’s say that you get a lot of traffic, have hundreds of products or need to control costs better. Basically, you’ve leveled up from basic auto target management.

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Layering and using auto targets

Determining how many ad groups to have and what they should contain will be based upon your feed and what you’re planning on targeting.

For our same example of an adwords_group of utensils and brand, we’re going to segment the Calphalon products we carry a bit better. The aver- age price point of a Calphalon utensil is higher than any other, so it con- verts less often. But is also very popular, so it takes more click budget than we’d like from the other brands.

Instead of bidding on just the brand Calphalon, we’ll pause that auto target and create a new ad group for Calphalon. Here we’re going to layer auto targets to better bid on our available inventory.

First ad group will carry the brand Calphalon, but also adwords_group “Utensils.” We’ll drop that bid down to $0.50 but also add a separate auto 37 www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners

target for Calphalon plus the adwords_group “pans.” This one will bid higher on as pans are more expensive.

Crazy popular product?

Say you’ve got a “super” product. Wildly popular, tons of competition, other re-sellers, lots of clicks (100+ a day), thousands of impressions, like the KitchenAid stand mixer that starts at $300. Here’s how I’d break out that singular product line:

• PLA Campaign: KitchenAid Mixer ($50.00) • Ad groups: Mixer ($0.25), Mixer Accessories ($0.25) • Mixer auto targets: Brand (KitchenAid) adwords_group: Mixers ($2.00) • Mixer Accessories: Brand (KitchenAid) adwords_group: Mixer acces- sories ($1.00)

If one particular color is much more popular than the others, you might also consider adding an adwords_label for color on all your KitchenAid mixer products so that you can layer on an additional attribute in a new ad group.

For example:

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• Ad group: Mixer colors • Mixer auto targets: Brand (KitchenAid)/ adwords_group: Mixers/ adwords_label: Black ($2.00)

Be careful when layering attributes! You don’t want to overdo it and choke off traffic. When AdWords goes to choose which ads to show it will choose based on the user query with your attributes. If the user types in “kitchenaid stand mixer” you’re more likely to show the ad group of “Mixer.” If they search on “kitchen aid mixer grain mill” your accessories * * * ad group should trigger. If they search for “mixer ice cream attachment,” While PLAs don’t use keywords, you you shouldn’t show as the KitchenAid brand attribute is missing from the can most certainly add them at the query. negative level. You do want to keep the cross-contamination between ad groups low as * * * well as filtering out less relevant queries at the campaign level, and for that, you can use negative keywords.

Get Negative

While PLAs don’t use keywords, you can most certainly add them at the negative level for queries you want to filter out right away. If you’re a re- tailer with refurbished items you might want to exclude “new” terms, and if you don’t sell used products, you’ll want to filter out “used” queries. For these account wide terms, I recommend a negative keyword list that

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you can duplicate easily to new PLA campaigns as you make them (or to search campaigns). Here are a few examples to get you started:

Then you’ll want to look at using negative keywords at the ad group level. Be careful here as well. You’ll want to keep these nice and neat and avoid adding terms at random. What often can be done with 7 negative key- words can spiral out into 70. Continuing our example of the KitchenAid Mixer, here is what the negatives would look like at the ad group level:

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A negative keyword list for the “Accessories” area would be the most effi- cient then you’d only have to add the colors and exact match terms at the ad group level.

Product Extension Ads

If you want to continue or start using PEs as well, simply go into the ad extensions tab and location product extensions from the drop down. The auto targets here are the same as for PLAs and they utilize the same feed. You will need to employ additional tagging on the back end of the destina- tion URLs in the product feed to see additional data on these. The same principles for bidding and organizing these ads apply as for PLAs, the big- gest difference is that these will only show on google.com search results with a text ad. This type of ad is triggered less often.

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Tracking Progress

Merchant Center in AdWords

You can view some of your Merchant Center data in your AdWords ac- count, but clicking on the “Tools” tab and clicking on Merchant Center. Here you can see errors in the feed, individual products and their states as well as click data.

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This should not be a replacement for never logging into your Merchant * * * Center account, though. Here you can see top-level information, but it’s Log in to Merchant Center to see all not as easy to act on in this interface. AdWords is a very slow method of your products and any errors associated viewing data for all products or top products as you’d have to drill in one with them or the account. by one or search one by one. Log in to Merchant Center to see all your products and any errors associated with them or the account. * * *

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Google Analytics

For those of you with ecommerce tracking enabled in Google Analytics, I bring to you this free dashboard just for PLAs. It does assume that the PLA campaign name contains “PLA” or “Product Listing” and if it does its plug and play. If not, you might need a little tweaking. Check out the full instructions for installation here.

Here’s an example of what the dashboard will tell you:

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You can also drill into your PLA campaign in the Traffic Source-Advertising- AdWords section of GA:

ValueTrack Parameters

If you’re not using GA, you’re probably already familiar with this and if not, you will be by the time you get down it. ValueTrack parameters are tracking tags created by Google for the purpose of giving advertisers the ability to import their AdWords data into whatever analytics or database system of their choice. Check out more information here or how they work and how you can implement them.

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Troubleshooting

Errors in the feed: Once the feed has been uploaded, you’ll check back to see if the upload was successfully. More often than not, you’ll have a few errors, at least here and there, especially if you have a lot of products.

The errors section of your Merchant Center account and AdWords will lay out what these errors would be, and from there you may need to make adjustments to your feed. Here are some examples:

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Higher CPC being honored at the ad group level: When you go in to review progress, you notice that CPC you’ve been paying is higher than the bid you set at the auto target level. Check that the ad group’s max CPC is not higher than the auto target bid. If it is, lower the ad group max CPC to less than the auto target bid. AdWords honors the ad group bid over the auto target bid when the ad group bid amount is greater.

Country targeting: Make sure that your feed is targeted to the country you want to market to and that your AdWords campaign setting matches it as * * * well. You can opt out of affiliate bidding in your Merchant Center account under Auto target won’t validate: You’ll need to review your feed again. It’s you. Type in exactly from the feed, from capitalization, spaces and carets. the “General-Settings” area.

* * * Brand competition: You have resellers or affiliates also bidding on the “brand” auto target category. (You might consider at this time adding “brand” to your PPC bidding guidelines for affiliate agreements). Otherwise, you’ll need to accept that you’re going head to head with them and other CSEs (like Shopping.com) and let Google choose which products to show from you and which to show from your re-sellers. Either way, you still “win” as the brand, but you may need to make some decisions on whether or not you want to compete with yourself. Google says that this won’t drive up the “CPC” but as with the regular CPC AdWords program, you can see how it would be fairly similar with text ads. You can opt out of affiliate bid- ding in your Merchant Center account under the “General-Settings” area.

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Robots.txt: If you’re having trouble with some of your products not com- * * * ing up as “searchable,” in particular the images, you should check your ro- Make SURE that all the heading bots.txt file to make sure that you aren’t inadvertently blocking something columns in your feed are all lowercase, from being read on your site /feed. We’ve run into client issues with this before. no spaces, nothing extra. It should match Google’s examples exactly. Capitalization, spaces and special characters in the feed where they don’t * * * belong: Make SURE that all the heading columns in your feed are all lower- case, no spaces, nothing extra. It should match Google’s examples exactly.

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The End?

Of course not! If you’re not using GA, you’re probably already familiar with this and if not, you will be by the time you get down it.

We’re just getting started. With Google Shopping rolling out new features and programs constantly, the possibilities for segmentation, optimization and expansion are huge. But, be careful, too much at once can equal you getting lost within it all and having some serious unnecessary spend. If you’re interested in taking your PLAs to the next level, be sure to check out my next (coming soon!) e-book on Advanced PLAs.

In the meantime, I highly recommend the following resources:

• Google Analytics Essentials • PLA GA Dashboards • CPC Strategy PLA e-book • Portent Blog

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