Did you know Product Listing Ads attract 34% more clicks than regular ads?
It’s no secret PLAs have become a huge revenue source for digital retailers around the world.
To help you generate even more traffic from your products, Google is transitioning all PLA Campaigns to a new campaign type called Shopping Campaigns.
To give you an inside look how you can leverage Shopping Campaigns, here are 4 key benefits every digital retailer needs to know:
1. MANAGE THE RETAIL WAY
The primary advantage of Shopping Campaigns is that you can manage in a retail-centric way.
What does this mean? Picture a supermarket. The same way they showcase their best products at the front of the store in order to maximize sales, you can place your best sellers into their own product groups based upon their performance.
In addition, you can bid differently on different products to attract more visibility for the ads you want people to click right when they are ready to buy.
2. REPORT ON YOUR PRODUCT ATTRIBUTES
With a new campaign type comes new and improved reporting. The advanced reporting features in Shopping Campaigns allow you to view essential performance data for any product attribute you can possibly think of.
So no matter how you classify your products in AdWords, you can run reports to glean how well your PLAs are performing based upon size, sku, color, etc.
This is an extremely effective way to uncover insights about how your PLAs are performing at the most granular level.
3. TRACK YOUR COMPETITORS AT EVERY TURN
Wouldn’t it be great if you could track how well your competitors PLAs are performing?
Shopping Campaigns allow you to easily see the benchmark data, CPC and CTR of other advertisers for similar products so you can figure out how to outshine your competitors.
So, let’s say you’re running a campaign for diamond wedding rings and are contemplating adjusting your bidding strategy. You can quickly see the estimated CPC for the wedding ring ads your competitors are promoting.
All this data will help you find the right bids and optimize your product ads.
4. PEAK INTO THE FUTURE
Let’s say you were running a campaign and were contemplating changing your bid for a specific product group.
If you didn’t actually change your bids, you would have no way of knowing whether you missed out on clicks or impressions, right? Wrong!
The Bid Simulator is a tool in Shopping Campaigns that will help you estimate the performance you would have received for your PLAs had you gone ahead and changed your bid. Google uses this example to better explain the benefits of this tool:
Suppose you have a maximum CPC bid of US$1 for your product group, but you’re curious to see what results you’d get with a bid of US$1.50 or US$0.75. The Bid Simulator can show you estimates of the clicks, cost, and impressions, you would have seen with these other bids. You can change your bid in the Bid Simulator and have it applied directly to your product group.
As you can see, this estimated data can help you find the optimal bid amount for your product campaigns, providing a clearer picture of whether you should alter your strategy going forward.
