Google Issues Best Practices For Shopping Campaigns Ahead Of This Summer’s Big Transition

With Shopping Campaigns becoming the default campaign type for running Product Listing Ads on Google by the end of August, the search giant has issued a best practices whitepaper to help marketers make the transition. The main points the paper dives into are product feed optimization and updates, Shopping campaign structure, bidding and mobile recommendations. […]

Chat with SearchBot

google-shopping-600

With Shopping Campaigns becoming the default campaign type for running Product Listing Ads on Google by the end of August, the search giant has issued a best practices whitepaper to help marketers make the transition.

The main points the paper dives into are product feed optimization and updates, Shopping campaign structure, bidding and mobile recommendations. Much of the best practices haven’t necessarily changed from the original PLA recommendations — use relevant titles and high-quality images — but there are good baseline reminders such as limiting title length to 50 characters to avoid truncation.

The recommendations on how to structure the new Shopping campaigns, though, will be particularly useful for marketers beginning to transition their campaigns. Google wants advertisers to think of their campaigns like a storefront and suggests focusing on product lines, profit margins and best sellers. Sounds simple when you see it, but they provide a good framework for thinking about how to set up new campaigns.

And, Google really wants merchants to be thinking about the mobile impact on their business and their Shopping campaigns. Advertisers with mobile landing pages should update their feeds for the new mobile landing page attribute, for example.

With new product feed specifications issued just yesterday, merchants will need to be paying close attention to their feeds and Shopping campaigns in the coming months to ensure their accounts are ready for the holiday push.

The whitepaper can be downloaded from Google directly or from its solution center on Search Engine Land.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Ginny Marvin
Contributor
Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, MarTech and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.