{HOLIDAY SPECIAL} Finally, the holiday season has arrived for all online marketers to roll up their sleeves and put their promises into action. Well, guys, beware…this time, the season is going to be a very tricky affair. With the shortest runway from Black Friday to Christmas since 2002, shoppers will have fewer days to purchase, which in turn forces marketers to race against the clock and prepare their tactics. However, don’t worry! Be reminded of the famous quote from Winston Churchill – “Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning”. Yes, an effective plan will solve all your worries and all of the marketers here @ NetElixir are in sync with the indispensable process of planning.
As part of our holiday planning and preparation, we have come up with a checklist for Product Listing Ads which is going to be the flavor of the season. There is also an excel checklist, with the same ideas translated into instructions, which we have attached in the bottom of the page. I am sure this PLA checklist will turn out to be the dark horse of your holiday armory.
#1: Make optimal use of the titles and description lines.
- Make them user friendly & accurate
- NO BLOCK CAPITALS
- Come on, don’t be so ambitious. Don’t stuff your titles with all possible keywords. That is not going to help you. Big brother (Google) says so. And mind you, he will be watchful.
- No promo texts in your titles or descriptions.
#2: An image is worth a thousand words.
- Pick the most attractive images of your products.
- “800 x 800 pixels” is what we recommend.
- Strictly no image gimmicks – no watermarks or texts.
#3: Effectively process the data feed
- Maintain an up-to-date data feed. Upload the feed at least once every two weeks!
- If there is no unique product identifier information available, make sure to mark the “Identifier Exist” attribute as false. Why invite unnecessary troubles?
- Be as granular as possible with Google Product categories. That will help the crawler find and display the right products under the right categories.
- Don’t type incorrect UPIs or URLs. Try the LXRMarketplace tool to validate your URLs. And don’t forget to give the shipping and tax information in the feed.
#4: Maintain an organized account structure
- Have multiple campaigns according to the performance of your product categories. Identify the best performing product categories or brands and have separate campaigns for them. This will help channelize the budget efficiently.
- Having multiple product targets based on the product performances gives more control on the bids. It will represent a more optimized account structure. The image here represents a simple, but optimized structure.
- Don’t have “All Products” alone as the product target. This will have the reverse effect of the above point.
#5: Bid smart
Maintain a strategy for bidding. Bid lowest for “All-Products” and keep that bid as the base-line. Make small increments to it for category -level product targets. Then, if there are classifications based upon more product characteristics, increase the bid. Increase the bid again if you have identified top performing product groups. Have the maximum bid for top performing stand-alone products for which the product targets would be based on its unique identification number. The mantra is to increase the bid as the granularity increases. The following image illustrates this strategy.
#6: Go Mobile
- Enable mobile bid adjustments at campaign level.
- Have a close watch on performance to adjust the bids so as to maximize the ROI.
- Don’t implement a dedicated mobile campaign now. Use the existing one to adapt it for mobile.
Happy Holidays from NetElixir!
