Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) display specific products that show up alongside standard AdWords listings about organic search results. They also provide a richer and more engaging experience for online shoppers. Providing more than just a short snippet of text, PLAs allow Google users to gain the benefit of seeing specific product titles, an image and a price. Businesses who list their products are only charged when someone clicks on the ad and lands on their website.
Google Shopping’s move to a paid shopping channel has generated a large amount of confusion and questions in the Ecommerce world, particularly for online merchants. In order to get you up to speed, Rick Backus, CEO of CPC Strategy, has answered the most common questions he hears on a regular basis surrounding Google Shopping in this VLOG series.
Prior to paid Google Shopping, online merchant listings ads appeared on Google search only when Google decided it. Product Listing Ads bidding on paid Google Shopping allows merchants to influence where they rank on Google Shopping and how much exposure those product ads get.
In this week’s video, Rick Backus highlights the main reasons why bidding is important on Google Shopping and how that affects your online listing exposure.
The first reason is that you weren’t able to bid on Google shopping previously, which was really frustrating for a lot of retailers, a lot of agencies. The traffic was free, which was great, but you had almost no control over the outcome in terms of where Google showed your products. If you had a product that was converting really well, you couldn’t give it more exposure.
That leads us right into the second reason, which is that bidding allows you to gain control. It’s awesome to be able to look at all of your products within Google product listing ads, figure out the right bid, see how that product is converting and adjust the bids accordingly. That’s an option that just wasn’t there before.
You could try to be as sophisticated as you want to be on Google Shopping when it was free, and ultimately it was up to Google on how much exposure they gave your products. That’s still true to a certain extent, but the bidding has shifted that responsibility over to you, and so if you’re outsmarting your competitors with your bidding strategy, you’re actually benefiting from that.
The third reason is that you can get a top 3 position. All these reasons relate to control, but getting into the top 3 position on Google product listing ads, we’ve seen, can give your products significantly more exposure. Google is rotating its product listing ads. Sometimes they show 3 products, sometimes they show 6, but with your average position going from 3.2 to 2.8, it can have a really big difference on how often Google is showing that product.
This is Part 2 of a 6 Part VLOG series on Google Shopping by CPC Strategy. Check back weekly for the following VLOGs, or watch Part 1 on “Reasons NOT to List Your Products On Google Shopping.”