product listing ads [part 1] by rajat mukherjee

PRODUCT LISTING ADSRajat Mukherjee

Product Listing Ads(why you care!)

Rajat Mukherjee

Yahoo Commerce Central

(why you care!)

Automated marketing for SMB

Shopping Product Feeds Product Listing

Ads

Small BusinessPay per click

Search Ads

History

• Pay per click Search Ads

• Product feeds in Shopping

201220072002

200320001999

SEM Challenges for SMB• Hard - needs ongoing management

– Few SMBs regularly identify keywords driving traffic, find long-tail keywords, optimize campaigns, add negative keywords, etc.

– Keyword match types, extensions, mobile, etc.– “Practically a full-time job”

• ROI is hard– Conversion tracking not set up (> 50%)– 25% of budgets are wasted

• Expensive – marketplace is competitive– needs higher budgets, experiments (SMBs have limited budgets)

How Product Listings Ads work

• You create a structured feed for your products• You submit feed to channel (Google, Bing, Amazon,…)• You bid for each click (PPC)• Channel will check your listings on ongoing basis • Channel will match user request to product• Channel will charge you for each click• User will arrive at your site and buy!

Benefits

• Easy – you just submit your product feed + bids

• Effective – user intent automatically matched to product– Price, product image, brand, no ad copy required

• Inexpensive – no crazy bidding on keywords (but CPCs going up)

Comparison

• Pay per click search ads– Keyword bids– Auction– Harder to manage– $$$

• Product Listing Ads– No keywords– Automatic match + bid– Easier to manage– $ (going up)

For PLA, you need to…

• Clean up your titles and descriptions • Keep your offers and prices updated in your feeds • Create great product pages• Include unique product identifiers in feed – MPN, ISBN,

EAN, UPC etc.• Categorize products correctly in feed (using channel’s

taxonomy)• Sell good stuff

You also need to…

• Create granular PLA target structure• Use specific promotional text (10-15% CTR improvement)• Make sure the right variants show up (color, size)• Optimize feeds for the way users search for your products• Use query performance feedback to optimize feed

Top 3 categories by ROI (GS)

Computers, Tablets & Networking Baby Cell Phones & Accessories Average

Top 3 categories by ROI (AS)

Consumer Electronics Home & Garden Toys & Hobbies Average

Family owned footwear retailer targeting U.S. & Australia

Traffic

Revenue

Other TrafficGoogle Shopping

Google PLA drives 17% of site traffic and 28% of revenue

Family owned footwear retailer targeting U.S. & Australia

$1 in spend $19 in revenue

8x traffic in Google Shopping compared to other CSE

ROI: PLA > Retargeting > Other advertising channels

Remember…

• Easy

• Effective

• Inexpensive

Thank you

@rajatmukherjee