Google Shopping Campaigns Are Now in Beta.

The holidays are just around the corner and making your brand visible in search is essential to holiday success. One of the easiest ways to highlight your products is through a Google Product Listing Ads (PLA), and specifically through Google’s new Shopping Campaigns. Product Listing Ads used to involve a complicated data feed that was run through Google’s Merchant center, but with the coming improvements made through the Shopping Campaign enhancement, retailers can better organize, market, and gain insight through their product listings.

Google Merchant Center: Your Home Base

Google merchant center, is a data feed management application that lists your products on Google Shopping and other Google affiliate services. After your feed is uploaded into your merchant account, your products are available for purchase on the Internet’s largest online marketplace: Google Shopping. But equally important, you can now advertise your products with an image, price, brand, and website on google.com. An example of a PLA: A PLA if a user searches for flashlights.

 Product Listing Ads: A Rough How-To

-Product listing ads are managed through Google Adwords. But before you can manage your campaigns you need to link you Adwords account in your Merchant center.  How to link your new google merchant account with your google adwords account. -After your Google Merchants and Adwords account are linked, you’ll want to go to google.com/adwords and create a a new campaign. [Little green button: +Campaign] and select "Search Network Only." -Choose a name for your campaign and select the "Product Listing Ads" as the type. Where to select a product listing ad when creating a new campaign in adwords. - Scroll down until you see the "Ad Extensions" option and select the product listing ad extension and select your feed as an extensions. How to add Google Merchant data to a Product listing ad. - Make sure you fill in your budget, scheduling, and other relevant information and continue. - Finally, name your ad group and then save. All done, and you have your first Product Listing Ad!

Why the Shopping Enhancement is Going to be Awesome

1. Currently, it can be confusing for a retailer to manage their products within Adwords. With the shopping enhancement, retailers will be able to create "product groups," for the specific items that they want to advertise. So, if you are selling tools, you could have subdivisions for hammers, screwdrivers, etc.  This will be a boon to those who wish to focus their advertising dollars.
2. Product Performance can be easily viewed for all products. Instead of measuring metrics by campaign, the individual products within a campaign will also be assigned side by side performance metrics.
3. It's easier to use.

We're pretty excited for this to be rolling out over the next few months. If you have any questions or are interested in starting your own Product Listing Ads in Google Adwords, feel free to get in contact with us for our Paid Advertising Services, and we'll be happy to get you started. Schedule your free consultation today!