Insights on Branded & Non Branded Product Listing Ads
Product Listing Ads (PLAs) or Shopping Campaigns give advertisers a retail-centric approach in account management. Search marketers bid on products or product groups, based on the value or volume, driven by specific products.
At NetElixir, we’ve followed the pyramid model of product bidding to maximize effectiveness. This model builds a typical retail environment in Pay-Per-Click (PPC).
However, this isn’t the ideal approach. We have to play by the strengths of paid search where the intent of the search gets captured and we must bid at the level of search intent, as well. Let me explain this with an example.
Example of “Nike men’s shoes” and “men’s shoes”
Let’s assume that there’s only a single product for an advertiser. In this case, we’ll use “Nike men’s shoes” as the example. The conventional approach places a bid on this product and the advertiser would be paying almost the same amount for both “Nike men’s shoes” and “men’s shoes” searches.
But, is that okay? No, there’s something wrong in that approach.
Shouldn’t we ideally be bidding higher for “Nike men’s shoes” since the searcher is specifically interested in the brand and closer to the purchase process?
Yes, of course. But, how is this possible if we bid at the product level alone?
Well, it’s possible if we duplicate the campaign and implement the following configuration:
This configuration would ensure that all “Nike” searches go to the Branded Campaign when “Nike” is added as a negative keyword in the other campaign.
All non-Nike searches will go into the Non Branded campaign, and the priority for that PLA campaign will be set as “high.”
This setting will enable us to bid higher for “Nike” searches and get it more exposure, which ultimately means more clicks and conversion.
At NetElixir, we’ve tried this in many of our accounts and have seen a 40% lift in impression share and 50% lift in the overall PLA conversion rate.
