A Product Listing Ad is a paid search ad that includes richer product information like a product image, price and merchant name. These ads do not require additional keywords or ad text and they appear whenever a user enters a search query relevant to a product in your Google Merchant Center account. Google will automatically show the most relevant products along with the associated image, price and product name taken from your product data feed file from your Merchant Center account.

Product Listing Ads are only shown on Google.com and some of its search partners. These ads are usually separated from standard text ads and are next to other Product Listing Ads. They are ranked based on a combination of your CPC bid, the relevance of your products to the search query as well as the historical performance of your ads. The more relevant your products are to a search query, the more likely your ads are to appear in a higher rank that your competitors.

Product Listing Ads are charged on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis and you can define your maximum CPC bid just like a regular AdWords keyword or placement. Below is a screen shot of some examples of Product Listing Ads on Google.com. 

Please note that you must have a Google Merchant Center account to use Product Listing Ads and it must be linked to your AdWords account. In addition, Google recommends that the products in your Merchant Center account are up-to-date and properly optimized.

Are you interested in increasing the number of conversions on your site as well as decreasing your cost per conversion (also known as cost per acquisition or CPA) for your Google AdWords campaigns? If so, Conversion Optimizer is the solution for your Google AdWords campaigns.

Google says that on average, campaigns that adopt Conversion Optimizer achieve a 21% increase in conversions while decreasing their CPA by 14%. 

Conversion Optimizer uses your conversion tracking history to figure out how often each type of auction leads to a conversion and based on this past performance, Conversion Optimizer creates a prediction model to guess which auctions will perform best for you in the future.  Then, it adjusts your bids on an ongoing basis so that your money is efficiently used in each auction. It will generate an ad rank by your CPA bid, quality score and predicted conversion rate.

With Conversion Optimizer, you can set a maximum CPA (the most you are willing to pay for each conversion) or a target CPA (the average amount you would like to pay for each conversion). In addition, you can set a different maximum or target CPA for each campaign. So if you have a product line that you are willing to spend additional funds on in order to get a conversion, you can bid a higher CPA for that campaign compared to a different line of products.

Please note that you must have at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days from a campaign to implement Conversion Optimizer. In addition, you can not enable ad scheduling for campaigns that are using Conversion Optimizer.

Still not convinced that you need to specifically target mobile and/or tablet devices in your AdWords campaigns? I would recommend that you run a Device Segmented report – under “Segment” click ‘Device’:

Your campaign performance data will be broken out by Computers, Mobile devices with full browsers and Tablets with full browsers like the screen shot below.

As you can see from the screen shot above, the average cost-per-click (CPC) for both mobile devices and tablets is considerably lower than the average CPC of a computer. By specifically creating campaigns for mobile and tablet devices, you will be able to lower your CPC bids for these campaigns, thus ultimately lowering your cost per conversion and advertising spend.

So now that you are ready to specifically target mobile devices and tablets, you will want to look at the Devices in your Settings tab. Make sure that your new campaign is only targeting mobile, and also note that you will want to remove Mobile devices as a selection from your Computers campaign. You can also target mobile devices based on their operating system.

For more information on mobile campaigns, click here. Happy segmenting!