AdWords Product Listing Ads In The UK!
Product listing ads have a lot of potential for sure.
Until recently they have only been available in the USA.
But on looking at one client account today I saw a new tab:-
Whoopee I thought…
I started reading up on the ‘Product Listings Ads – Basics’ help in AdWords, and it started to sound less and less great the more I read. Turns out you *have* to use CPC bidding for a start.
Here is the message I got after I tried a ‘Product Target’ to a CPA campaign :-
Product targets may not be added to campaigns using the CPA (Conversion Optimiser) bidding option.
(Just checking). I had read somewhere that Google were allowing certain advertisers to use CPA bidding on Product Listing Ads, but this it at their discretion I guess.
So at the moment as far as Google Product Listing ads go in the UK, they are not the God-send I was hoping for.
For a start, you have to use CPC bidding.
Secondly, since you will want to use different CPCs for different products, there is almost as much effort involved in setting up product listing ads as there is traditional AdWords ads with product extensions.
But if anyone else has found in practice that CPC Product Listing ads have worked well for them and have been really easy to set up then I would love to hear from you!
**Update** – A very helpful AdWords account manager from Google’s Dublin office has pointed out the following advantages of Product Listing ads:
The key drivers of PLAs are that they can serve alongside text ads i.e. at the same time increasing their ad real estate on the page.
and…
As well as this Product Listings can doubleserve: You can find multiple product ads from the same merchant, as well as one text ad. Because multiple Product Ads can show at the same time, and/or along with a text ad, a single merchant’s exposure on given query can increase 2x or more.
So they are worth looking into in a bit more detail after all…
Update – December 2011.
I can confirm that provided you have a fairly large database of products, they are definitely worth using!
Even when using a low max CPC across your entire product range, you should be able to *can* make a reasonable number of profitable sales that you would not otherwise have made, and the effort required to set it up in this fashion is pretty small.
Here is an example :-
The sample size is very small, but just look at the difference in CPC! (I have seen similar in 2 other client accounts).
The screen shot above is taken from a client who has less than 100 products in their shopping feed, so if you have thousands of products on your web site, you cannot afford to ignore Product Listing Ads!
9 thoughts on “AdWords Product Listing Ads In The UK!”
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I’ve just checked. No sign of the tab on my account yet. I’ll look out for it :-)
Looks likes it’s only on selected accounts (probably the big spenders) to start with…
Not sure what the schedule for rolling it out in the UK is.
Not in my accounts either, even the high spending ones. Looking forward to seeing this in action. Thanks Jordan
John and Louise, I guess Google will keep everyone in the dark for a while longer at least about when this is being rolled out properly.
There certainly seems to be very little information about product listing ads in the UK on the internet that I can find (I even tried using Bing!)…
The “auto targets” tab has appeared on my Adwords account… Giving it a try now (if I can figure it out!)
oooh – must check all my other accounts too… There are a few clients of mine that this is definitely worth looking at for…
Looks like this has been made available to all UK advertisers now – http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/11/product-listing-ads-rolling-out-to-uk.html
Another update – September 2012. It now appears that Enhanced CPC and CPA bidding are available on Product Listing Ads in the UK!
Another update – October 2012 – when I turned CPA bidding on on a PLA campaign for a client – ads stopped showing with no errors or warnings!
Google support said that apparently while this option looked like it was available in the account it actually *would not work*.
So I’m not sure when this option will be available for everyone in the UK.