Getting Serious About Google Product Listing Ads

One of the more interesting and promising developments of 2011 was the release from beta of Google Product Listing Ads (PLA). It merges the functionality and product specificity of comparison shopping engines with the broad reach of Google’s search audience, and is proving to be a very important component of a merchant’s performance marketing mix.

For those not familiar with PLA, these are the ads that typically show in the upper right hand corner of the search results page, next to and above the more traditional paid search text ads (click for an example). We’ve seen them appear in two, three, four, five and six spot configurations as well as in horizontal arrangements.

Google Product Listing Ads are different from the paid search text ads they appear next to in several important ways. For example, with PLA the “ad” comes primarily from the merchant’s feed to their Google Merchant Center account rather than from a copy writer. This is the same product feed that Google uses to power the free program Google Product Search.

Also, for PLAs merchants bid at the product level, not at the keyword level. For example, a shoe seller cannot bid on the term “black high heel shoes” for PLAs, but can raise his bid on all black high heel SKUs he has available.

Next, there is no certainty when and where PLAs will appear. While there’s no guarantee paid search text ads will always appear on the top and right hand side of the search results, we’ve come to expect it. Google determines when and where PLAs occur and right now there’s no sure fire way to know how much exposure you will get (though during the course of 2011 Google added impression reporting for PLA).

Google appears to be having success with the program and recently expanded PLA to Europe. Additionally, Google ramped up impression inventory creating more volume for holiday by adding 5-spot placements in November.

Across a cohort of merchant clients that were consistently active on paid search (i.e., text ads, referred to as Adwords below), Google Product Search, and PLA throughout 2011, client sales and traffic from PLA grew significantly, with growth particularly accelerating in the fourth quarter.

As a percentage of client paid search text ads sales, their PLA sales accounted for 19% of attributed sales in December for these clients. By the end of the year, their PLA sales accounted for about 13% of their total Google attributed revenue (Google Product Search + PLA + Adwords).

These results are typical of our client base that activated PLA later in the year. The figure below shows the acceleration. In the link above Google reported that users are twice as likely to click on a PLA as a text ad on the same page. For our clients this means PLA is a very high performing channel relative.

Going forward, I expect more volume from PLA and more good results, but also more competition. On the next page, we offer 7 tips to succeed with Google PLA.