Product Listing Ads for Beginners by Elizabeth Marsten Product Listing Ads for Beginners
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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 Google 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 blog www.portent.com. * * * If you want to talk to Elizabeth, you can reach her on Twitter @ebkendo or by email at [email protected] 2 www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners Table of Contents 4 What are PLAs? 8 What You Need 9 Getting Started » AdWords » Merchant Center » Webmaster Tools » Product Feed 42 Tracking Progress 46 Troubleshooting 3 www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners 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 Google Shopping 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 googlebot during regular web crawls of sites in the Google index. This is no longer the case. 4 www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners 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. * * * 5 www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners 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 (Search Engine 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. 6 www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners • 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.”). 7 www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners What You Need • Google account (could be with any email, doesn’t have to be @ gmail. 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) • Google Analytics * (with Google Account from above) • Plugin, extension or app to create/submit/edit product feeds * * = May Be Optional 8 www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners 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. 9 www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners 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) 10 www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners 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. 11 www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners 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. 12 www.portent.com Product Listing Ads for Beginners 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.