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How To Optimize Your Google AdWords Product Listing Ads

Menachem Ani — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:59:03 +0000

The Google AdWords Product Listing Ads generally perform very well for most eCommerce retailers. You can read our guide on how to set up Product Listing Ads. Here are some extra tips to help you set up and optimize the campaign correctly.

Google Merchant Center

In your Google Merchant Center feed, you can add the following columns to help with Product Listing Ads.

adwords_grouping	This field is used to group products. It can be used for Product Filters to limit your AdWords campaign to a specific group of products. This field can be useful if you want to bid differently on different subsets of products. It can only hold one value (i.e. “electronics” or “iphone”).
adwords_labels	This field is very similar to adwords_grouping, but it will only only work on the CPC bidding model. It can hold multiple values, allowing a product to be tagged with multiple labels (i.e. “shoes, sneakers”).
adwords_publish	This field is used to exclude select offers from Product Ads. If this field is not included or left blank, all product will be included in your product ads. If you want to exclude any items from being displayed you need to fill the column with a value of “true” or “false”.
adwords_redirect	You can use this field to set the click URL of the Product Listing Ad. This comes in handy when you standard Merchant shopping feed has all the URLs tagged (i.e. ?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=CSE). By filling out this field with a plain URL with no tracking (i.e. http://www.merchant.com/product.html), your traffic/revenue will only be attributed to one source.

Google AdWords

Once you add these fields to your feed file, you can filter your campaigns by grouping and labels.

You can find more info in the Google Help Center.

How To Display Google Base Products In AdWords Ads

Menachem Ani — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:57:24 +0000

Google has been testing product ads for some time now. As of last week they have turned on this featured called Ad Extenstions. By turning this feature on you will attract more eyeballs to your ads and in effect raise your click-through rate. Google stated on their blog post which announced this new feature that some advertisers have seen a 10% increase in their CTR.

Here is how to turn on AdWords Ad Extensions, it must be done for every campaign separately:

Go to Campaign –> Settings; under Networks, devices, and extensions; click on edit under Ad Extensions and check the box that says: Connect to my Google Merchant Center account. This should automatically bring up your Google Base (Product Search) account, once it finds it, just click Save.

UPDATE: The process has changed slightly, instead of finding this under the Campaign Settings tab, you will need to go to the “Ad Extensions” tab and select “Product Extensions.”

All New Google Merchant Center Dashboard

Menachem Ani — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:04:03 +0000

Yesterday Google rolled out a major new interface for Google Base and has re-branded it Google Merchant Center. All the important info such as Active Products, Search Clicks, Data Feed info is displayed right when you log in. In the old interface you had to click through a few pages to see all the data.

More Info: Search Engine Round Table