Table of Contents:
- A Few Words About Product Listing Ads In Google Ads
- A Step-By-Step Guide To Product Listing Ads Campaigns (PLA)
A Few Words About Product Listing Ads In Google Ads
If you’ve any experience with Google Ads campaigns, you must have heard about product listing ads. PLA campaigns are displayed in the search results, on partner websites, in the Google search network, in the shopping tab, and in the display network. The fact that they include key information about the product such as its name, price, or photo makes them stand out from the crowd. This type of campaign supports sales, advertises the product range, reaches potential customers, and attracts website traffic. Thus, it’s certainly worth implementing them.What Is Needed To Run PLA Campaigns?
- Configured Google Merchant Center account
- Properly uploaded and configured product file
- Google Ads account
- Linked GMC and Google Ads account
A Step-By-Step Guide To Product Listing Ads (PLA) Campaigns
In order to create a PLA campaign, go to your Google Ads account and click “all campaigns” and “+” in the section “campaigns”. On the screen, you’ll see a range of objectives the campaign is supposed to meet. In the case of product listing ads campaigns, you can select goals such as:- Sales - improve sales and conversion rate (the most frequently chosen goal of PLA campaigns),
- Potential customers - encourage potential customers to get to know your products,
- Website traffic - encourage users to visit your site.
- target return on ad spend (ROAS),
- maximize clicks,
- manual CPC bidding.
Tip: if this is your first PLA campaign, start with the default display option. After some time, analyze the statistics - change the bids according to the effectiveness or exclude devices that don't convert.
Then, set the location where your ads are going to be displayed. Google gives you a lot of space in this case, you can narrow down the location to a particular country, region, or city.
If your campaign is supposed to be active within a specific timeframe, you can optionally specify the start and end date.
Naming the ad group is one of the last steps taken when creating PLA campaigns. Finally, click “save” - you’ve just created a standard Shopping campaign.
Once you've gone through all the setup steps described above and created your campaign, you'll automatically be redirected to the main panel of your Google Ads account and the product groups page. As you can probably notice, it’s the product group of your newly created PLA campaign. Click its name or the "Ad groups" section.
When you create a shopping campaign, one product group called "All products" is generated by default - this means that it includes the entire product range found in the product file on your GMC account.
Be careful!
Google makes it possible to divide your campaign into different product groups according to:
- brands
- product ID
- product type (your own categorization)
- channel (the method of selling products: locally or online)
- channel exclusivity
- condition
- label (custom labels, created by you)
Tip: Once you complete this stage, review your campaign settings in its side panel. We recommend determining your ad schedule, adding target groups, applying negative keywords (such as free, bad, cheap), and excluding specific recipients. It’s also worth making sure that the options chosen when creating the campaign are saved - Google may “forget” to do it.