Google Promo Credit for International Merchants

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 12:20:00 GMT

Google’s rollout of its Product Listing Ads model for Google shopping is going swimmingly – so much so in fact that it's swimming right across the pond, announcing last month that the program would be going international.

The rollout is expected to continue until the end of Q2 2013, but Google isn’t wasting any time encouraging merchants to try the new service. Today, Google announced a promotional credit of 10 percent for merchants who apply and create a PLA campaign promoting all of their products in Merchant Center by April 12, 2013. Advertisers must have an active Adwords account with a billing address in either Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, or United Kingdom to take advantage of the offer.

On a related note, Google also announced an update to its feed specification for Google Shopping for international merchants. The update, which will take effect in March 2013, will force advertisers using the reduced Product Ads Feed spec, to bring those feeds into compliance with the new requirements – which can be seen here for those affected countries.

Google's PLAs Get a Boost

Allison Howen — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 20:20:00 GMT

Google's Product Listing Ads (PLAs) are proving to be a valuable advertisement option for merchants; however, launching a PLA campaign through Kenshoo may prove to be even more valuable.

This is because the digital marketing solutions provider analyzed more than 270 million global impressions and clicks that were aggregated from merchants managing their Google PLAs through the Kenshoo platform, and found that most retailers increased sales revenue by 607 percent during the first month following the release of Kenshoo’s new PLA support. This success also led to an increase of spending on these advertisements by 348 percent.

In fact, although Kenshoo’s data found that Google PLAs typically outperform text search ads in many ways – including providing merchants with a 73 percent higher click-through rate, a 35 percent higher conversion rate, a 36 percent lower average cost-per-click rate and a 46 percent higher return on ad spend rate. The data also revealed that merchants who leverage Kenshoo’s PLA bid policies tend to boost their results even further – with an additional 4 percent increase on click-through rates, an additional 34 percent increase in conversion rates, an additional 31 percent decrease in average cost-per-click rates and an additional 89 percent increase in return on ad spend.

"Retailers using Kenshoo to manage PLAs saw impressive results leading to large increases in spend, and we expect these trends to continue in 2013 and beyond as marketers get more savvy using tools like Kenshoo to drive tangible results," said Will Martin-Gill, General Manager of Kenshoo Enterprise and Kenshoo Local. "Marketers should consider these metrics when determining their campaign goals, especially since site traffic and sales will only continue to increase as the holiday season nears and they seek to engage consumers and expand visibility for their products."

Kenshoo's PLA enhancements, which were released in September, include product-level tracking, reporting and management for Google Shopping as well as a custom PLA bid policy. The Kenshoo algorithm collects data based on historical performance and predicts PLA revenue per click to set bids. Additionally, new Kenshoo reports, such as the Fusion Report for Product Targets, provide users with insights into the performance of each PLA placement and its impact on conversions, while the path-to-conversion reports show the relationship between PLAs and other channels so that merchants can better optimize their campaigns and bidding decisions. The platform also provides a negative keyword suggestion report for PLA campaigns in order to help prevent irrelevant clicks, reduce costs and improve quality scores.

'Net Features : pla

Google Promo Credit for International Merchants

Google's PLAs Get a Boost