Mastering Google Product Feeds and Product Listing Ads – Part 3

In part one of this series we covered setting up Google product feeds and in part two we coveredsetting up Product Listing Ads in AdWords. In this post we will cover properly tracking product search results so you can gather the data you need to optimize your campaigns.

We promised that this post would be about optimizing product feeds, product listing ads, and product extensions…

But, we would be remiss if we didn’t first addressproperly tracking product search data. After all, you can’t optimize without good data.

Please forgive us for teasing you with promise of a post on optimization. Part four of this series will cover that (seriously!).

Tracking Google Product Search

The basic url parameters you use in your Merchant Center feed should mimic the parameters you use to track all advertising. If you have auto-tagging enabled in AdWords and are using Google Analytics, these parameters are already being inserted for you and will be used in your PLA and product extensions (PE).

If you aren’t using Analytics or don’t have auto-tagging enabled, you will want to make sure you include parameters such as “utm_campaign=” and “utm_adgroup=” in your destination urls so you can gather as much data as possible.

There is more information to gather with product search so you will be adding additional parameters to your product feed urls whether you’re using auto-tagging or not. We’re going to walk through the recommended additional parameters and build a sample URL pattern as we go.

Product Search Parameter

First, you will want to include a parameter in your url to indicate that this traffic is coming from product search. This will help you parse the data in your analytics so you can see how your various products perform in product search vs. the regular organic results.

This parameter will not differentiate between PLA and PE, it will only tell you that the traffic came from product search in general. Later we’ll cover a new attribute in your product feed to get this level of differentiation.

This parameter can be called whatever makes the most sense to you. You could use “result_type=product-search” or “origin=product-search”, as Google suggests. If you are using auto-tagging and don’t have additional parameters, right now your landing page url (used in the “link” product feed attribute) will look like this:

http://url.com/?origin=product-search

Keyword Parameter

One of the most important pieces of data you can gather with url parameters in your product feed is the search query. Knowing what people searched when they saw your product result will allow you to add negative keywords and revise your product descriptions and titles to get better results.

Here you want to add the specific parameter “kwd={keyword}. When you look at your analytics, {keyword} will be replaced by the search query.

With this parameter added, your landing page url will look like this:

http://url.com/?origin=product-search&kwd={keyword}

Source Parameter

Finally, you’ll want to differentiate between regular product search results (Google Shopping),PLA and PE.

To do this, you will add a third parameter to your landing page url. This parameter can be called anything that makes sense to you, but Google recommends you use “source=default_value“. Default_value will be replaced by whatever you want to see in your analytics when the traffic came from general product search results (non-PLA or PE).

Along with the source parameter, you will need to add an attribute called “adwords_redirect” to your product feed. The product feed template we’ve created has been updated with this attribute, just after the link attribute. In the adwords_redirect attribute you will put a landing page url for each specific product. The url will be the same as the url in the link attribute, plus two parameters that are coded to tell you where your traffic is coming from.

The two ValueTrack parameters that you’ll use in the url in the “adwords_redirect” attribute, in conjunction with the “source=” parameter, are {ifpla} and{ifpe}. {ifpla:value} is used to indicate the traffic came from PLA. {ifpe:value} is used to indicate the traffic came from PE. There is no special parameter needed to indicate when the traffic comes from general product search as that is handled with the default value assigned to the source parameter.

First, you will want to decide what you want to see in your urls in analytics when traffic comes from general product search, PLA, and PE. I like to keep things simple so let’s use pla for PLA, pe for PE, and general for general product search results. So, the PLA and PE parameters will be {ifpla:pla} and {ifpe:pe} (We replaced value with pe and pla.) When traffic comes from PLA, {ifpla:pla} will be replaced with pla and {ifpe:pe} will be replaced with pe in the url in your analytics.

With the source parameter added, your landing page url (link attribute) will look like this:

http://url.com/?origin=product-search&kwd={keyword}&source=general

The adwords_redirect attribute url will look like this:

http://url.com/?origin=product-search&kwd={keyword}&source={ifpla:pla}{ifpe:pe}

That’s It?

There are countless other parameters you could add to your tracking urls. But, if you are auto-tagging in AdWords, these three additional parameters will give you enough data to optimize your feeds, ads and extensions without making you go “data blind.” Make sure you have proper tracking in place if you’ve already launched your feed, or get your tracking ducks in a row if you haven’t launched yet.

If you want to launch and start collecting data, now you can. Stay tuned for part four of this series in which we’ll cover optimizing product feeds, ads, and extensions.

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Mastering Google Product Feeds and Product Listing Ads – Part 2

In part one of this series we covered how to set up a product feed and submit it to Google. In this installment we’re going to focus on properly setting up Product Listing Ads (PLA) in Google AdWords so you can maximize your exposure in Google search.

There’s a lot going on in Google’s search results and they seem to add more every day. If we look at the above-the-fold results for a search for “fruit baskets,” we can see regular text ads, a map with local results, PLA and the first few organic spots. With the right product photos, the PLA are the most eye-catching part of the page which is a huge advantage with all the clutter.

Steps to Set Up Google Product Listing Ads

Since you already have your feed created and submitted after reading part 1 of this series, setting up your PLA ads will be a breeze.

Link Your Accounts

First, link your AdWords and Google Merchant Center accounts.

Log into your Merchant Center account, then click on Settings in the left navigation and AdWords from the menu that pops up after clicking on Settings. On the AdWords page, enter your AdWords customer ID. This looks like a phone number and can be found at the top of the page when you are logged into AdWords. You can connect Merchant Center to multiple AdWords accounts if necessary.

Create a New Campaign

Next, create a new campaign within AdWords to house your PLA.

Product Listing Ads should have their own campaigns for ease of management. Your PLA campaign needs to target Google Search at a minimum and can also target Search Partners. The campaign does not need to target the display network as PLA are not show there.

When you set up the campaign, select the checkbox next to Product in the Ad Extensions section of the page. The Merchant Center account you connected to your AdWords account should appear.

Don’t worry if you forget to do this step when you set up the account. You can always come back and do it later here or through the Ad Extensions tab within the campaign.

If there are products in your feed that you do not want used in your PLA, you can filter the available products by navigating to the Ad Extensions tab. This may be useful if you have products that do not have compelling images, have low margins, or that you are contractually prevented from buying ads for. From the Ad Extensions tab, click on the product extension to edit it, then check the box next to Filter.

This will give you the option to create filters based on fields in your feed. Use these filters toinclude products in your campaign, not to exclude them.

Create Ad Groups

Now comes the fun part. You need to decide the best way to organize your ad groups. You may choose to do this by the product brand, type, condition or any combination thereof.

You should organize your ad groups in a way that allows you to easily view the performance data in a way that is helpful to your business. So, if you sell new and vintage handbags, you may want to create ad groups such as:

• Gucci – New
• Gucci – Vintage
• Chanel – New
• Chanel – Vintage

Organizing your ad groups like this will allow you to quickly see your conversion rate and other performance data for each brand and each type. Be creative with your ad group organization so it gives you the most value when reviewing the performance metrics. But, don’t make your ad groups so granular that the data becomes meaningless. You can use up to three product targets per ad group so use them wisely.

Once you’ve decided how to organize your ad groups, create the first ad group in your PLA campaign and name it appropriately. When asked to enter ad text, click the radio button next to Product Listing Ad.

At this point you will have the opportunity to enter a promotion which will be displayed with your PLA. You can use this section to advertise a coupon code or other special. You can enter a promotion now, later or never. Having a promotion will not affect the serving of your ads.*

Uncheck the “all products” setting that is selected in the auto targets section of the ad group set up page. Once the ad group is created, you will select the products that should be targeted in this ad group.

You do not need to enter keywords for the ad group. Google will use your product feed to match your products to (hopefully) appropriate search queries.

Enter an appropriate CPC bid for the ad group

After saving your new ad group, you will be directed to the auto targets tab, provided that you deselected the all products auto target while creating the ad group.

Click the add product target button to add the product filter(s) for this ad group. Select the field to be used to match each criteria you enter, and enter the criteria in the text box. The text you enter here must match what is in your feed exactly or your PLA won’t show. 

Repeat this process for all ad groups.

Create Ads

With PLA, you don’t need to write ad text like you do with normal AdWords advertising. Instead, Google creates ads based on the data in your feed. But, as mentioned above, you can test special promotion text.

If you don’t have any promotions you want to test, or only have one and you entered it while creating your campaigns, you don’t have anything else to do for this step. If you do want to run more than one special at a time, navigate to the ads tab to create a new promotion by selecting product listing ads from the new ad drop down.

Enter your new promotion and save the ad. Just don’t forget to update the ad when you stop running the special.

Creating multiple product listing ads is ideal for testing how different promotions affect your CTR and conversion rate since you won’t be doing traditional ad text optimization.

Launch

Okay, maybe not just yet. If you think you may need some negative keywords (you probably do), you’ll want to wait until part
three four of this series in which we will discuss negative keywords and feed optimization. (We promised we’d cover optimization in part three but it was important to cover tracking first so optimization has been moved to part four of the series.)

But, if you want to do a test run and start collecting data so you are ready to act on the optimization recommendations, make sure your budget is set to something you are comfortable with so you don’t overspend. If you aren’t ready, pause the campaign and come back for part three.

*Product listing ads do have quality scores much like regular AdWords advertising. Utilizing promotions to increase CTR may improve your PLA quality score, thereby increasing your ad position and decreasing your actual CPC.

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Mastering Google Product Feeds and Product Listing Ads – Part 1

Have you noticed lately that the top half of the search results on Google for product searches are dominated by ads? And not just any ads. While regular text ads still appear as the first few results, Product Listing Ads (PLA) also appear, along with Shopping results all above the organic results.

If you sell any products through your website, even if you have good organic rankings, you need to properly set up product feeds to allow your products to appear in the shopping results (free) and in the PLA (paid) to gain as much real estate as possible on searches related to your products.

There is still a lot of opportunity with PLA, as many companies aren’t participating yet. Generally I only see large brands using PLA. This isn’t because PLA are more expensive or exclusive to these big sites (they aren’t).

I think it’s because people either haven’t taken the time to set up their feeds properly or because they are confused by the process. My goal is to persuade you to try PLA and to make the process more clear for you.

Even though I’m a PPC gal, part one of this series will just focus on setting up your product data feed to get your products listed in Google’s shopping results. Once you have that part done, setting up PLA only takes a few more steps. We’ll focus on that process in part two of the series.

Where Will My Products Be Displayed?

Google Product Search

If you click on a shopping result from a search results page or search directly from google.com/shopping, you will see results that are driven by product feeds submitted to Google by sellers. You do not have to pay to have your products shown here, but you do have to optimize your feed, get (real) positive reviews, and offer competitive pricing to rank.

These “free” shopping results are as free as the regular organic results — you have to put time and resources into properly optimizing to compete. This post will discuss how to properly set up and submit your product feed. For more information on optimization for Google Product organic ranking factors, see this post.

Google Product Listing Ads

Product Listing Ads (PLA) are to product search as regular AdWords ads are to organic search. PLA are also a great way to get pictures of your products on the search results page if you aren’t ranking well organically in Google Products.

If you have a unique product or something that is very eye-catching, Product Listing Ads may be much more effective than regular text ads — though I recommend running both ad types as PLA aren’t displayed for all searches. Part two of this series will focus on setting up PLA after you’ve submitted your product feed.

As I mentioned, there’s still a lot of opportunity here, even in markets where companies are using product feeds or PLA. For instance, to continue with the tea theme, while many retailers are featuring teapots, none are featuring loose leaf teas. This demonstrates a great example for Teavana.com which has ads in 1st position for both teapots and loose leaf tea searches. If they were to add PLA for their loose leaf teas, they may see a dramatic increase in CTR and (hopefully) sales.

Sounds Great. How Do I Get In?

The first step is to set up your Google Merchant Center if you don’t already have one. Google Merchant Center is simply the place where you will upload your product feeds and see data related to them. There are other features available in Merchant Center, such as e-commerce search for your site and Google Checkout, which you may choose to use after you are familiar with the service.

For now, simply sign in to your Google account (use the one you use for AdWords) from the Merchant Center page. You will be asked to fill in your account information. You don’t have to do that now, but you will want to before you upload your feeds. You will also need to verify ownership of your url by placing a snippet of code on your site before you can use Merchant Center, just like you have to do with some other Google products. Now you’re ready to create your product data feed.

What is a Data Feed & How Do I Create One?

A data feed is simply a file that contains pertinent information about your products. If you have a large number of products or if you are more technically inclined, you can use an xml file to submit your feed. If you don’t have many products or do not have the ability to create an xml file, you can create a data feed in Excel or with a Google Doc spreadsheet.

This template has the standard columns (fields) required and recommended for all data feeds. Additional fields are required if you are selling clothing/apparel or media. You can learn about the requirements for each field here.

Some fields have very specific requirements that you will want to pay close attention to. If you don’t fill out all of the fields properly, your feed may not validate. Even if your feed does validate, your products may not be shown in the Shopping results and your PLA may not display. Make sure to review all of the requirements, but pay special attention to these fields:

• id: This field must be unique for each product. Even if you submit more than one feed, you cannot use the same id for another product in another feed.
• title: This will be displayed to users, so it should be compelling and descriptive. But, it cannot include marketing copy such as “free shipping.”
• description: This field is displayed in the shopping search results, so it should be written with the buyer in mind. But, you must follow Google’s editorial guidelines closely.
• product_type: This field is used to classify and categorize your products. You will use Google’s category taxonomy to list all of the categories your product fits within.
• link: If you want to use utm parameters to track performance in Google Analytics, you will need to append the urls in this field with your desired parameters.
• image_link: This is the image that will be displayed with your listing, so you want to use clear, compelling images. Also, if you offer products in multiple colors or styles, use an image that reflects the correct product color or style for that listing to increase your click-through rate.
• expiration_date: If your products are only available for a limited time, the expiration date field can be used to automatically remove products from the search results when they are no longer available. By default, products expire after 30 days. You cannot use this field to extend that period. You will need to update your feed at least once a month to ensure consistent inclusion.

There are also some fields that are very helpful to retailers such as the sale_price andsale_price_effective_date fields. Using these two fields, you can schedule sales so your prices are automatically updated when sales begin and end.

The shipping and shipping_weight fields are only required if you do not have flat-fee shipping for all products. If you do, you can set this in your Google Merchant Center settings and do not have to include these fields. You can include this standard shipping information in your Merchant Center settings and override it with product-specific shipping information in your feed on a case-by-case basis.

The tax field is flexible and can accommodate very complex tax structures if needed. If your tax structure is simple, you can enter it in your Merchant Account settings. This field is only required in your feed if you want to override those Merchant Center settings. Make sure you include tax information in at least one of these two places. If you do not, your products will not display.

Once you have all of your product information in your spreadsheet, save it as a tab delimited .txt file. If you have multiple feeds, make sure to name the file something that will identify which feed it is.

Uploading Your Feed

Hop back over to your Merchant Center account and click on Data Feeds from the left navigation. Click the New Data Feed button. Here you are simply telling Google that you are going to submit a feed. Choose the country in which you want your products to display (you must submit a feed for each individual country because shipping and tax information will most likely be different).

Choose googlebase as the format and enter the name of your .txt file. Click on the manual upload link and upload your .txt feed file. Google will now process and test your feed. Depending on the size of your file, this can take a while. If you only have a few products, it happens very quickly.

Click back to your dashboard to check the status of your upload. Next to the file you just uploaded you will see a linked status. You can click on that link to get details about the feed validation. If you have any errors, fix them and re-upload your file. Once your feed is validated, it can take up to 24 hours for your products to start appearing in the search results.

Once they do, you’ll want to do some quality control to ensure all of your products are being included. You can see all of your products that are appearing in the search results by going to http://www.google.com/products?authorid=[your Account ID]. You can find your account ID along the top of any page within your Merchant Center account. If your products aren’t displaying, check these common reasons.

You can also click on the Products link in the left-side navigation within Merchant Center to see the status of each product. If you have more than 10,000 products, this page will display 10,000 random products. You will need to search for specific products to see their status. The list of possible statuses and their definitions can be found here.

Updating Your Feed

If your products or prices change frequently, you’ll want to upload a new feed each time there are changes. You can schedule the feed upload within the data feeds section of Merchant Center by clicking the create schedule link. In order to schedule the feed update, your feed file will need to be hosted on a url that Google can access. It can be password protected so the file is private.

If your products or prices do not change frequently, you can simply schedule the feed to update monthly so your products don’t expire after the 30-day standard expiration. Or, you can manually upload the feed once a month. If you forget to update your feed, your products will expire after 30 days and you will stop receiving traffic.

Tracking Performance

We’ll get deeper into monitoring and optimizing later in the series, but you should begin properly tracking performance now. Within Merchant Center, you can click on the Performance link in the left navigation to view impressions and clicks for each product. To get more useful information, you will want to either use utm parameters in the links in your product data feed or set up a filter in Analytics for referrals that include google.com/products.

Stay tuned for part two of this series where we will discuss the steps required to set up Product Listing Ads now that you have a working product feed.

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Mastering Google Product Feeds and Product Listing Ads – Part 4

Optimizing Product Search

One of the great things about Google’s Product Listing Ads is that there is less to optimize than with traditional AdWords ads. You don’t have to choose specific keywords or even write ads; you just have to set up your feed properly, choose good images, have well-written titles and descriptions, keep the feed up to date, and build a negative keyword list.

One of the terrible things about Google’s Product Listing Ads is that there is less to optimize than with traditional AdWords ads. ;) We’re used to having a lot of control (or feeling like we have a lot of control) over our paid search marketing results. With product search we lose some of that control and put Google in the driver’s seat.

With PLA, you do not (currently) need to worry about:

• Display Network results – PLA are only on Google.com and some search partners
• Mobile targeting – PLA are only displayed to computer users
• Ad delivery – Accelerated delivery is not supported with PLA
• Ad rotation – You aren’t writing and optimizing ads

Right about now you’re probably thinking, “so what can I optimize?” There’s quite a bit you can do to ensure your product search campaigns are successful. The image below is a great example of what can happen if you don’t optimize your campaigns and feeds properly.

Someone specifically searching for a red cocktail dress shouldn't be shown an ad with a picture of a black dress.

Feed and Ad Optimization

You need to approach product feed optimization much like you would website optimization, including utilizing keyword research and imagery changes, with a focus on the following attributes:

Product_type Attribute

This attribute within your product feed allows you to indicate how your product should be classified. This classification will probably closely match how you organize products on your website. For instance, if you were selling a red cocktail dress, this attribute may be Clothing > Women’s Clothing > Dresses > Cocktail Dresses.

When choosing the wording used in this attribute, you will want to do some keyword research to determine the best words to use. For instance, in the example given above, you would research whether it was best to use ‘women’s clothing’, ‘women’s clothes’, or ‘women’s apparel’. You want to choose the wording that has the most potential traffic but with the least competition.

Title and Description Attributes

The text you put in the title attribute will be shown on the general search results page, as shown below, as well as on the Shopping results page. The description will also be shown on the Shopping results page. These attributes should be researched, written, and optimized on an ongoing basis.

In the example shown below, the titles are not eye catching and only one uses the phrase “red cocktail dress” specifically. The second result even says “holiday red” but we’re definitely not in holiday red dress shopping season. Optimize your product feed titles and descriptions to increase CTR using the same tactics you do for ad text and SEO page titles and descriptions.

Write titles that make people want to click.

Additionally, you may want to change your titles and descriptions to capitalize on trends, holidays, or current events. For instance, leading up to holidays you may want to include the word gift in your titles and descriptions. Or, if you sell a product that was featured in a movie or television show, you should update your feed to say “as seen in .” Finding and maximizing competitive advantages is a key to success in Shopping results.

Image Attribute

The image you choose can make or break your campaign performance. Make sure you are using images that display the exact product users are searching for, down to the color. If you are selling a product that other websites sell, make sure you use images that are unique to set your site apart from the competition. Finally, test different images and see what works best. Rotating and testing images in your product feed is the equivalent of testing new ad copy in your regular PPC ads, and should be made a priority.

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords in PLA campaigns work the same as in regular search campaigns. Using keyword research, common sense, and data you’ve gathered from other marketing efforts, you should build a robust negative keyword list to prevent your PLA from showing on unwanted searches.

Continuing with the red dress theme, the seller of this dress may have campaign-level negatives such as ‘bridesmaid’ and ‘prom’ to prevent their ad from showing if someone were to search red bridesmaid dress or red prom dress. They may also want to have ad group-level negatives with more specific features such as dress length, sleeve length, or neckline type. Getting this granular with negatives can be tedious but will pay off in the end with higher click through and conversion rates.

Bids

Bids for PLA should be optimized in the same way that you optimize bids for regular PPC campaigns. Experiment with increased bids for additional traffic or decreased bids to increase return on ad spend.

Test, Test, Test

To properly optimize your feed, you will need to test changes one at a time to see which strategy is the most effective. You don’t want to test image and title changes at the same time because you won’t know which change is responsible for the change in performance. You may also have thousands of products in your feed to optimize, so testing feed optimization can be a tedious and time consuming task. But, regularly updating your feed and properly optimizing attributes will result in increased sales.

Tip: Create a schedule in your calendar for feed optimization to ensure you stay on track and to break the project into manageable chunks so you don’t feel overwhelmed.

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