5 Quick Ways to Optimize Your Google Shopping (PLA) Campaigns

Google's Product Listing Ads represent a highly effective channel for online retailers of all sizes, exposing new buyers to your products and driving purchases. Listing products on Google Shopping with rich product information such as price, image, color/size, SKU number and your brand name creates an engaging user experience that is difficult to get on other marketing channels available today.

I've managed PLAs in the past for online retailers and marketplaces and gained a lot of insight from my experience in building campaigns from scratch and analyzing performance data to make decisions. Here are five quick ways to optimize your PLA campaigns to ensure your spend yields positive returns and to get ahead of your competition.

1. Use search query and negative keywords to stop wasting spend. Since Google doesn't allow you to specify keywords to target for PLAs, and because search results appear based on the information you have within your data feed, I recommend using negative keywords to add in some control. Negative keywords essentially tell Google what keywords you do not want products to show up for. This is useful because you don't want to pay for clicks not relevant to your products.

For example, let’s say you’re online book retailer. Even if you’re trying to sell “The Hunger Games” book, Google will show your product ad to people searching for "Hunger games DVD.” Because you don't sell the DVD and because the search isn't relevant to the ad displaying, you will want to add “DVD” as a negative keyword.

To figure out what keywords you may want to exclude, you need to generate a search query report. In AdWords, do this by going to your Keywords tab within your PLA campaign. Then navigate DETAILS> SEARCH TERMS > ALL. This will populate the report you need in order to make your decision.

To kick it up a notch, use performance data with the search query report to evaluate which keywords are truly working or failing. Install the Google Conversion Tracking pixel on your conversion pages to see conversion data tied with the search queries generated from the report. This way, you can see what keywords are performing poorly and optimize for a better experience or pull the ad.

2. Regularly send a high quality data feed. It's very important that you send Google the most updated feed with all fields populated. If you know the frequency of how fast your inventory will move or when price changes occur, it is best to submit in those feed changes immediately. This can vary, depending on whether you’re a small retailer with fixed pricing and few price specials, or a marketplace where pricing is controlled by individual sellers. It's best to schedule the feed when your website and/or products get updated. Keep it fresh!

3. Ensure the product landing page matches up to the description in your data feed. You wouldn't believe how many times I've encountered a bad data feed due to data processing errors, such as incorrect product information scrapped from the database or incorrect prices. It's crucial to ensure that the product to landing page experience is flawless and what the customer expects to see. Even a slight price difference from the ad to the landing page - or worse, an out of stock item - may be a bad enough user experience to make users bounce away.

4. Test new product images. If you're one of the online retailers that uses stock images for your products, then keep in mind that you're not helping yourself stand out from the competition. If you're looking for a boost in CTR and want to drive clicks away from your competitors, consider using your own product images.

For example, let’s say you're an online retailer specializing in outdoor apparel with a product line of North Face jackets. Differentiate yourself by using your own models; humanize the products instead of showing the standard stock image that everyone else uses. If you're a retailer that has hundreds to thousands of products, this may not be feasible so focus on your highest revenue potential products.

5. Identify products with the most clicks. Due to reporting limitations of PLAs, it's difficult to pull a report that lists out products that have generated the most clicks. Given this, it's important to make sure your own web analytics tools are set up to properly track and evaluate performance. Using your web analytics or third party tool, generate a report to get an understanding of which products are generating the most clicks. You will then be able to evaluate the performance, good and bad, and make a decision on how to optimize.

The rule of thumb for this exercise is to identify winners to bid higher. Or identify losers wasting spend to kill or improve. If the product ad performance is not as you expect, be sure to test out that experience to see why people are not converting as expected.

These five actionable items will ensure a great start to a healthy PLA campaign that will allow you to rise above your competitors. To learn more about Product Listing As, check out our latest whitepaper:
The State of Google Shopping: Mobile Shoppers & Record PLA Spend Drive Success for Retailers.