Product Listing Ads Ad Group Structure Best Practices

The following are the two main advance strategies to ensure a refined and profitable PLA campaign:

Use the “All Products” Ad Group

Though a merchant is strongly advised to create additional ad groups, it is quite difficult to overlook the perks associated with using one’s ‘All Product’ ad group. And, one of its major benefits is that it prevents bid overlap issues, this is why even Google recommends every merchant to create this initial ad group.

But one thing must be noted – the All Product ad group’s bid should be lower than all your other ad groups. This is important because only then, ‘each and every’ product of yours will receive their respective bids. Doing this provides a sort of insurance that a non-All Product Ad Groups could never offer – it makes sure that all your products are available and visible in the search.

You can control the visibility that this group gets by changing the bid. Consider the All Products ad group as the foundation of your campaigns and then start building more specific additional groups with relatively higher bids.

Use Multiple Ad Groups

It is true that your All Product Ad group is essential and serves the purpose quite well, but it is also a fact that eventually you should (and would have to) break it into additional ad groups. This is because, creation of specific

additional ad groups allows you to have a better control over your campaign, and permits you to have a better idea about ‘the products which sell on SERPs and how to rank them’.

Therefore, only one ad group in your PLA campaign will not be enough to provide you the clear idea of the brands, product type or category performances. But by doing this, you will be able to monitor the performance better.

So, the main question that arises is ‘how to break out your additional ad groups?’ What we suggest is that, except for your All Product Ad group, you should structure your ad group on the basis of top sellers or brands or product categories.

Ask yourself:

• Which products are performing the best?
• Which brands (present in your feed) are searched more frequently by online shoppers?
• Consider the time of the year and check for the seasonal products for which you want more exposure this time?

For all these cases whenever you find yourself categorizing the top performing products or brands into their own ad groups, make sure that their bids are higher so that they get the exposure that they deserve on Google Shopping.

Ad Group Types

The above given snip shows the drop down of columns (brand, id, product type, condition) that AdWords recommends you to use for breaking out your various ad groups. You can also use AdWords labels to organize your products – this allows the merchants to segment their products the way they want. The table given below demonstrates a few ways through which you can do the segmentation.

SKU Level Ad Groups

No doubt it is rewarding to create multiple ad groups, but creating one for each of your products is definitely not advisory. This strategy is great for campaign managers as it endows them with all the control that they need at the product level, but for merchants, it never proves feasible. Merchants who have thousands of products, for them use of SKU Level Ad Group strategy can hamper the campaign’s success.

Note: It has been seen that when merchants use this method, though they don’t have to change each and every ad group’s bid very often, it still becomes difficult for them to keep track of their product’s performance in AdWords. This methods spreads out the ad spend and also makes it hard for the merchant to analyze the data.