Our most important finding was that controlling the data feed was the key to PLA-profitability. For the first campaign, we were happy to just set a product target for brand of product type, but when we started analyzing the results, it became abundantly clear that the low hanging fruit was not in AdWords but in in the data feed. So we looked around but all data feed optimization tools were either complicated or expensive or both. Where was the tool for the medium sized shop? It wasn’t there, so we built it.

We have used it for numerous PLA-campaigns now. We like it, because it does exactly what we want. Our customers like it, because they see the peak in RoI after optimizing their feed. We showed it to a few SEM-agencies; they liked it too. So eventually we decided that it would be selfish to keep such a cool tool for ourselves.

So here it is: DataFeedWatch. A simple and brilliant web-app that enables every search engine marketeer to modify the feed instantly to his needs. No tech-stuff. No whiz kids needed. Rules based. Enjoy! (and sure, you’re welcome)

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Big retailers with well-known brands can count on the customers to visit their websites directly.  Smaller and less known merchants need to reach out to make sure they don’t miss out on the Christmas shopping frenzy. They must be wherever their customers go. But where do they go?

According to a 2011 Google report, 33% of people look for product information in the search engines, 19% on online auction sites, 17% on shopping comparison sites, 15% on coupon sites, 12% on social networks, 11% on blogs and 10% on online review sites.

It is worth the time and effort to employ  all of those channels. However, retailers with limited resources can afford to focus their marketing activities only on one or two channels.  For those retailers, Product Listing Ads are the best possible option. Here is why:

1. It puts products in the Google Search Engine and in Google Shopping – two very important channels of traffic – in one go.
2. It works instantly. Products show on the very same day that a Product Listing Ads campaign is launched.
3. It is very flexible. Advertisers decide which products to advertise, where, when, to whom and for how much.
4. It is very successful. Product Listing Ads are well known for a high conversion rate.

So if you happen to be an online retailer and wonder how to best focus your advertising efforts this Christmas, Product Listing Ads is the way to go!

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In order to upload your feed to the Google Merchant Center, go to ‘Data Feeds’ in the left side navigation and create a ‘New Data Feed’. Choose the country in which you want your products to display, the googlebase format and enter a catchy name.

Now you can choose to either upload your feed from the hard drive (first remapping method) or create a schedule for a regular automated upload of your feed from a given URL (second remapping method).

Click back to your dashboard to check the status of your upload. Next to the file you just uploaded you will see a linked status. You can click on that link to get details about the feed validation. If you have any errors, fix them and re-upload your file. Once your feed is validated, it can take up to 24 hours for your products to start appearing in the search results.

Step 4 – Create PLA campaigns

Once your feed is error-less, you are ready to create your Product Listing Ads.  At this point you will need to have a Google AdWords account. If you don’t, go to google.com/adwords and create one.

If you are from US you can create an AdWords account and Product Listing Ads directly from your GMC under Settings -> AdWords (option 1). You can watch this video to see how it is done. If you already have an AdWords account, go for option 2: Put in your Adwords Customer ID and link it.

Once its linked, go to your AdWords account -> Campaigns and click New campaign.

Choose Search Network only and Product listing ads.

Under Ad extensions Choose the ID of your GMC account. Set up other options according to your needs.

In a next step you can add promotional text to your ad. If you have some generic promotional text that fits all your products put it here; otherwise leave it blank.

If there are products in your feed that you do not want advertise for, you can filter them out in the Ad Extensions tab. From the Ad Extensions tab, click on the product extension to edit it, then check the box next to Filter.

This will give you the option to create filters based on fields in your feed. Use these filters to include products in your campaign, not to exclude them.

At this point your PLA campaign is ready and it will start running once the Product Search status of  the products in your GMC changes to Searchable. You can monitor this by goingto Products in your GMC.

Before you let it run though, you need to structure it first.

Step 5 – Set up Product targets

Product targets are the heart of every PLA campaigns. You can find them under the  Auto targets tab. The default setting of a PLA campaign is that all your products fall into the same product target called All products. Since a bid price is set on product target level, this basically means that you bid the same amount for all your products. This is not a very fortunate setting, as different products have different prices, margins, performance, seasonality, recipients etc. Why would you want to bid the same price for all of them? Well, you probably wouldn’t.

What you need to do is divide your products into different product targets (subcategories). To create product targets, you can choose from 6 different attributes: id, product type, brand, condition, adwords labels, adwords grouping. A maximum of  three different attributes can be used for one product target.

Usually it is a good idea to use product types and brand here. If you created adwords labels, as I described above, now is the time to use them!

If you are running an online shop selling sporting goods, a good example of a product target would be:

Product type = tennis & brand = Yonex & adword labels =professional

Once you create a product target click validate button to make sure Google can match it with a value in your product feed.

Note 1: wait until  products get the searchable Product Ads status. Before that you won’t be able to validate product targets.

Note 2: Adding product targets goes much faster with AdWords Editor. I recommend to  use it If you need to create more than a dozen product targets.

Step 6 – Optimize PLA campaign

Optimizing PLA campaigns is not very different from optimizing keyword-based search campaigns. Except, this time product targets play the role of keywords. So, you still get to modify bids to get optimal performance, try out different promotional texts for your ads to see which works best and even add negative keywords to exclude irrelevant traffic.

Note 3:  If you need different promotional texts for different product targets move them to separate ad group. Again, this can be easily done in AdWords Editor. Just remember that, when moving product targets around, you will lose all performance data up to that point.

Another, equally important, concern is your product feed. Make sure it is always accurate, up-to-date and 100% complete. Google is constantly monitoring if your ads comply with their policy. Breaching it can result in suspending or even banning your products from Google Shopping, so don’t treat this lightly.

I hope this article helped you better understand how PLAs work. If you have any questions, remarks, add-ons  please feel free to share them in the comments below!

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In this article I’d like to guide you through the process of creating a successful Product Listing Ad step-by-step.

The process includes:

• creating  and setting up Google Merchant Center

• remapping product feed

• uploading product feed to GMC

• creating and structuring Product Listing Ad

Step 1 – Create and set up Google Merchant Center (GMC)

This is relatively easy. Just create a Google Account, or use an existing one, and log into www.google.com/merchants/. Go through the short registration process and voilà! – you are a proud owner of your very own Google Merchant Center. However, don’t feel smug just yet. There are still few things you need to set up:

First, go to Settings -> General.  Add the store name and verify your domain. You can choose one of four verification methods.

Next you need to provide tax information under Settings -> Tax and shipping. If you advertise in USA, you are also required to fill out the shipping method.

Once its done your GMC is ready for a product feed.

Step 2 – Remap your product feed

This is by far the hardest part. Remapping is just a fancy word, which basically means taking your feed as it is and convert it into another format.

WHY you should remap

There are 2 reason to remap, both crucial to your success:

1. Your product feed has to comply with Google’s specifications and contain required attributes, which vary across different countries and product categories. Most feeds do not meet those requirements immediately; that means that Google will not show your ads.

2. You want to set product targets based on your objectives. So you are able to bid on specific product categories, brands, sizes, prices, target groups, etc. Remapping is a way to ensure that the categorisation that you need, is part of your feed. More on this in step 5.

WHAT you should remap

Every feed requires a different remapping approach, but there are a few common remapping rules that you will probably need to apply.

Condition

Condition shows if a product is new or used. It is probably not present in your original feed. However, it is always required. So, provided you sell only new products, all you need to do is add new column, label it condition and for each product (row) set the value to new.

Product category

Another attribute which is required (depends on the country) or at least highly recommended is Google product category . This attribute helps Google assign your products to the proper categories in Google Shopping structure. The categories enable Google to better understand when to show your ad; that will probably mean that your ad will be shown more often. Create new column called google_product_category and for each of your products find a proper category from the list.

Product type

This attribute also indicates the category of the product, but now according to your own classification. All e-commerce platforms allow some kind of categorization, so just find which attribute represents the product types in your feed (it is often called: product category, but is not to be confused with Google product category) and change its name to product_type.

Brand

Very similar to Product type is brand. Find an attribute in your feed that represents manufacturer and change its name to brand, so Google can recognize and and you can use it as a product target.

Availability

One of the trickiest attributes is availability. This one has only four acceptable values: in stock, available for order, out of stock, preorder. Many product feeds already contain this attribute, but values differ. For instance if you are using Magento, availability will be either 0 when product is out of stock or 1 if product is in stock. In this case you need to replace each 0 with out of stock and 1 with in stock value.

AdWords Labels: create your own attributes

If there are any other attributes in your feed, that you consider important for your customers (like screen size for PC monitors), your can turn it into an adwords label. To do that, create a new column called adwords_labels and copy each values from this attribute to this column. I will explain later in the article how this is helpful.

HOW you should remap

First method is to download it from your shopping platform, remap it manually and upload it to your Google Merchant Center. Your feed will be most likely in xml or txt format, and you need to be comfortable with spreadsheets or database management tools to get it done. The obvious upside of this approach is that there are no additional cost. The downside lies in the word manually. Unless you work out your homemade automation script, you will need to repeat the whole process every week or month, to make sure that when your feed is updated (new products, price changes, etc) the remapping is done again.

Second method is to use an existing feed management tools. There are many tools out there to choose from. They vary in functionality and price, so just find the one best tailored for your needs. The advantage of this solution is that you just remap your feed once and set up a permanent connection with your Google Merchant Center. From now on the up-to-date and already remapped feed will be automatically  uploaded to your GMC with a frequency of your choice.

In my next post, I will explain the other steps that will get you started with Product Listing Ads and Google Shopping.

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I hadn’t actually quantified the number until I logged in (yup using an ID and password), opened up the file where I store them all and scrolled through. It was depressing.

We hear about huge security breaches regularly in the news. We worry about our own accounts.

Some of us recognize how important it is to create a variety of strong passwords for multiple sites. A recent survey showed that 38% of American adults have 5 or more unique sets of credentials, 8% of us have 21 or more. Managing, saving and changing them regularly can become quite a time sink. Remembering them is a whole other problem.

Creating and recalling complicated passwords is becoming a chore for many of us.  CNN reported that 37% of people have to ask for help at least once a month recalling their user name or ID online. Most people still don’t create strong passwords, or change them regularly, or keep track of them.  Here are some simple tips for managing your ever growing list of site credentials.

Create an email account dedicated to signing up for new services.  You can easily track your credentials, and also confirm that the site is bona fide before you then change your email to your personal one.

Create strong passwords. They should be at least 8 characters long with numbers, letters, upper and lowercase and symbols if allowed. A string of words together can be really strong. 1H8P4ssw0rds! (I hate passwords) for example is strong. Don’t include your name or email in the password. Don’t refer to your kids, pets or birthday. There are a number of websites online that can help you create secure passwords.

Don’t use the same password for every account. Make the passwords unique.

Think about storing your passwords in a central file online. There are a number of free and paid services that allow you to store your credentials online safely. The advantage of this is that you can access your password ‘bank’ from anywhere not just your own personal device.

Change your passwords every 90 days. You read that right. It seems like a huge job, but it really isn’t more than a few minutes of work for most of us. It’s one of the best ways to keep your accounts from being hacked.

Don’t share your passwords. 42% of IT professionals say they share passwords to access systems and applications. Sometimes that is alright. Most of the time it isn’t.

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