What Is Product Listing Ads (PLA)?
When you search for any product on Google, you will usually see 1-8 products on the top or the top right side of the page with images and prices those are the product listing ads PLAs.
You must have heard about both the Google Shopping and the product listing ads for ecommerce. the difference between both is that the Google Shopping is the campaign type and PLAs are the ad units. If you happen to notice Product Listing Ads, then you might have figured this:
They command attention so do people click on it. In fact, a study reveals that for some products queries, the ads can get 64% of all the clicks!
They are captivating. If your search is specific enough to the search engine, then you will likely see the exact thing what you were looking for with images, prices, reviews, and even an offer.
How Does It Work?
So, there are two platforms that lubricate Google Shopping Campaigns, they’re Adwords and Google Merchant Center. Your product data or the data feed, as well as the shipping and sales tax information, will be stored in the Google Merchant Center. The data or product data is just details and information about your products such as product title, description, color, size, price, image, product type etc. You can control your budgets, bids, targeting, location targeting, device targeting and other targeting in Adwords. The shopping campaigns can be set live from Adwords. Let’s discuss further about the
importance of product listing ads below:
Selling The Products
Well, selling is the obvious thing you want to do but the important thing to note here is that Google Shopping is for physical products only, you cannot list services and no products which are bundled with the services. There are also landing page requirements to meet that may be causing some difficulties to the small marketers:
- Pop-up ads are not allowed
- You need a privacy policy
- Physical address
- Phone number
While all these things are good for retailers or the shoppers, there are some merchants who don’t like to provide some of the things from the list. One more crucial thing is that the information provided in the data feed must be accurate to what’s visible on your product page.
Give Offers
Giving the offers to the customers is an intent of developing a new customer and get them into the sales funnel. Your goal may be increasing the profits but getting a new customer and starting the sale is a good move by providing offers. If you get more sales initially you will get the profits also from those sales. If you’re selling only a few products then Google might be slow in showing your products, particularly in the beginning. But if you are selling a couple of products then the Google Shopping would be a better choice for you, though it doesn’t mean that if you’re selling a couple of products then Google might create a windfall for you.
SEO Tactics
The Google Shopping have many similarities like Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Though you are not picking up the keywords related to your products, you have to craft the data feed in such a way that Google can easily find relevant for your target terms.
The most important data points includes:
- Product Title
- Description
- Product Type
Basically, when you’re writing the titles for your product think like how most people will search for your product. And the other important attributes you will need to include are:
- Brand
- Color
- Size
- Material type
- Model Number Etc.
In your title to make it more relevant for your customers. Google focusses more on the front or starting of the title, so add the most important words first which can accurately describe your product.
Bid Smartly
The overall feed quality which you have inserted will influence for which search’s you can show up or you can’t show up for, at the same time you bids will determine the velocity and overall exposure of your product. Think about these things while setting your initial bids:
- Profit
Of course, you don’t want to spend all of your profit just to close one sale! Let’s say, you have $25 as profit on a product and the conversion rate is 2%, which means you will need 50 clicks to get a sale. Then $25/50=$0.50, so for this product, your maximum bid should be $0.50. - Price
If the product you are selling is high priced than the CPCs should also be higher. You will likely to be bid where your competitors are bidding to beat the competition.
Like any other marketing channels which deliver the results, success is becoming more challenging as more merchants are entering into the fray. The well-structured campaigns which are powered by optimized data feed and driven by the strategic marketing minds will definitely deliver the greater results.
