According to a report released by Marin Software, Google’s Product Listing Ads (PLA) have higher click-through rates in the paid search results than the standard text ads, since November 2012.
The report revealed that shoppers still find PLAs to be more relevant to product searches instead of standard text ads, regardless of the seasonality.
In the month of June and July, PLAs had 21percent higher click-through rate than the text ads. In July 2013, the PLA CTRs increased 19 percent year over year. It has been increasing each month since February. Marin has also revealed that there was a huge growth in PLAs during Q4.
PLAs are cheaper and better performers than standard text ads. While the CPC of PLAs has increased 53 percent year over year, the CPC of text ads too has increased 10 percent.
The Senior Product Marketing Manager at Marin Software has shared tips on maximizing PLAs performance:
- Generally, more granular the product target is, it is more likely that a relevant ad is delivered for corresponding product search. If search marketers map product ids or SKUs to individual product targets, they will be able to tie the performance of each target directly to the individual product.This level of visibility and controlled optimization lets retailers align product targets with specific business goals and calculate the optimal bids for maximizing the revenue across the total product inventory.
- Promotional text gets benefits from granularity and is best leveraged when the set of targeted products is tightly themed. Retailers can differentiate significantly between their and competitors’ PLAs by organizing product targets, which are promoted in separate ad groups or same ad group on the basis of brand or product category.Since, promotional text applies to all the products that are targeted in the specific ad group, messaging will be applicable to all the products. Moreover, the messaging should be updated regularly to reflect the changes in promotional offers.
- By prioritizing the top performing product targets, retailers will get more control over the revenue outcome. Whether they use aggressive bidding strategy, product feed optimization, or separate ad groups & product targets, search marketers can generate more revenue.
- There are high chances of products performing poorly with standard text ads and products with low margins performing badly with PLAs. It is better to exclude these products from product filters or product targets so that they do not appear for PLAs.
For a detailed report by Marin Software, click here
