Google PLA Campaigns See The End of The Road

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Google PLA campaigns are due to ride off into the sunset at the end of August according to Google. Before you start singing Boyz II Men “It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye” just wait a second. This is a good thing and setting up the new Google Shopping campaign type is really fun to do.

What does that even mean, bro?

Glad You Asked, Chet!

Well Google Product Listing ads (Google PLA Campaigns) have been the mode of delivering product listings displaying the image and price of the product for e-commerce websites via a product feed (list of all your product data in a readable format like .xml/.txt).

These products show up on Google search usually in a block across the middle of 5 products or right hand side as a group of 8. You may have seen various other formats that Google is testing but these two are the most common.

Google Shopping Jimmy Choo

So What is Changing, Holmes?

Again, great question! Google is changing the way you manage these products in AdWords, allowing easier management and some sweet key competitive metrics to help you get an idea of what your competitors are collectively doing with the products they are selling.

The main differences between Google PLA campaigns and the new Google Shopping campaigns are pretty exciting:

Google PLA Campaigns:

Manual product grouping – you had to group the products by ID, which if you have a ton of products, memorizing the Product ID of every one of your products could be quite the mortifying experience.

Guess Bidding – You are bidding to what you can afford and you can’t see what your competitors are actually paying or even get an idea of how your bid affects your position or anything.

New Google Shopping Campaigns:

Product Level Bidding – You can now bid on a single product differently than other products

Product/Ad Group Level Bidding – You can group best selling or most profitable products into a special group and bid accordingly.

Competitive Metrics – Now you will see in the new Google Shopping campaigns that there are two new metrics shown on the product level.

Google Shopping campaigns will provide so many more opportunities to grow performance for e-commerce sites that focus on the profitability of the advertiser, which is great news.

Google listened to its power users and saw what other people were using as workarounds. (Yes I was one of the ones who added all my Products ID’s into groups and managed them…what a nightmare)

No Delorean to take you back once these campaigns have taken their last breath, so stay ahead of the curve and get switched over!

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If you have already switched over to the new Google Shopping campaigns, let us know. We would love to see how well or not so well they are working for you. If not, contact us right away to get your campaigns set up and transferred over for continued performance

Does this mean it is the end of Boy Bands? One could only……hope, wish, wonder, dream. You decide!