The time has finally come…wave goodbye to your Product Listing Ad campaigns and roll out the welcome mat for Shopping Campaigns. Google’s scheduled migration from PLAs to Shopping Campaigns is just days away and if you have not done so already, now is the time to “upgrade.”
As you work on transitioning your product ad campaigns, here’s an initial look at the good, the bad and the ugly of Shopping Campaigns:
The Good:
- Increased visibility of your product inventory in AdWords to help streamline management and optimization
- Custom labels provide the ability to assign additional attributes to each product (up to five!) to filter your products into product groups
- Note: “Adwords labels” and “AdWords grouping” are not supported in Shopping campaigns – as a workaround, you may import these values into the new custom label fields
- Subdivision options – additional categories to filter your products into product groups
- Campaign priority – ability to assign high, medium, or low to each Shopping Campaign for instructing AdWords on which products to prioritize – great to use for top revenue-driving products
- “Everything else” product group – automatically filters out products in other product groups to reduce any overlap
- The Bad:
- Products tab – the usefulness of this tab is still to be determined – no additional beneficial functionality…yet
- Tab filters – partial match searches not yet available
- No language targeting
- The Ugly:
- AdWords Editor – limited support for Shopping Campaigns – does not support the creation of Shopping Campaigns or product groups, forcing advertisers to use the AdWords UI
Starting September 2nd, Google kicks off the auto-upgrade process for Shopping Campaigns, so look out for changes in your account should you not opt to manually upgrade. Also, it is likely to expect AdWords updates to rollout over the coming months as Google updates their systems to better support managing Shopping Campaigns (e.g., AdWords Editor updates).
Product ads are becoming larger and larger drivers of traffic to advertiser’s sites, warranting additional consideration as part of an online marketing strategy. Don’t wait for Google to “auto-upgrade” your PLA campaigns; take action today and capitalize on the opportunity by setting up strong Shopping Campaigns while other advertisers run to catch up and adjust for the new structure.
View additional information on Google’s Shopping Campaign Upgrade here.
Learn from the issues other advertisers ran into once upgrading here.
Contact us with any more questions!