How To Set Up Your Google Merchant Center Account For Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs)?

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The first and the foremost thing that you need to do is to get yourself up and functional on the Google Merchant Center – the place where you will input the data about your product. It is this data that will eventually be used by your PLAs and AdWords accounts.

Note that the product information can only be sent through the merchant center, and it is only through this account that you will be able to list the product on Google Shopping provided the information is processed correctly.

And to do that successfully, you will have to make sure that your Product Listing Ads campaign and AdWords accounts are also up and running.

Here is an explanation by Google on how to create a new Product Listing Ads campaign

How to Create A New Product Listing Ads Campaign

In case you haven’t yet created a Product Listing Ad Campaign, follow the steps as given in the screenshots. And in case you need more information you can get it here:

1) Login to Adwords

2) Click on campaigns tab

3) Go to the ‘New campaign’ option

4) Click on ‘Search Network Only’

4) Click on ‘Product Listing Ads’

5) Select Networks, Devices, Location, Language ( and if possible leave them at default)

6) Input Bidding and budget

7) Choose or create an extension for your PLAs account.

Remember that, if you are choosing an existing extension, it should match your Google Merchant Login.


Why Create An ‘All Products Ad Group’?

Once you are done with Product Listings Ads Account, you can go ahead and start creating Product targets and Ad Groups. While doing so make sure that you are creating an Ad group in Google Shopping PLA campaign that covers all of your data feed like products you sell and all information that you have sent to Google. This will be your All Products Ad Group. This way, when you start your other ad group in AdWords, Google will automatically select all the Product targets and you will be able to proceed right away!

What Is The Importance of Google Shopping ‘All Products Ad Group’?

How important is the All Products bid to you? The answer totally depends on the structure of your campaign. For instance, you will need a competitive bid if you are starting with ‘3-5 ads group plus your All Products ad group’. However, how competitive the bid needs to be, further depend on your product mix and category etc.

A competitive All Products bid makes sure that your products receive traffic, which will further help you in collecting performance data. And by analyzing the performance data, you can build a more specific ad groups for your products, and achieve higher traffic or conversion rates.

For those who have already created strong campaigns Ad groups for brands, price, and categories, you can bid from the lower end in $0.20-$0.40 range. Keep in mind that unless you have a suppressed products auto target running, your All Products bid should always be lower.

This is so because your more specific ad groups will not receive any traffic or data in case your All Products bid is higher than your more granular ad groups. In such a scenario, all the traffic will be assigned to the All Products ad group. Hence keep in mind that you should create only a limited number of All Products ad groups – preferably one – and their bids should be lower than your more specific ad groups.

The significance of All Products Ad Group lies in the fact that without it some of your products will be skipped from the PLA ad rotation, and hence will not be visible on the Google Shopping search comparison pages. And though any type of bid qualifies the product for the area where its data fits accurate, make sure your bid is not ‘that’ high or low because the All Products Ad group covers your whole feed.

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