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.

The world of search engine marketing is constantly changing and it is up to businesses as well as advertisers to keep pace. Google recently modified their campaign geo–target settings, which should gives advertisers a little more leverage.

The new geo-target settings are more informative, in regard to showing how many people can be reached. For example if a business is thinking of targeting Kalamazoo Michigan, they can see how people are in that target area.  Google will also display locations enclosing a particular area and offer related locations that might be of interest. This is a plus because many times people want to target a certain area, but don’t know if they’ll be reaching a decent amount of people with their advertising. This new reach feature solves that problem. 

Another adjustment Google made is in the map section of the geo-target settings. Previously, a very plain version of the map would display the targeted location. However, Google has upgraded the map to show a more detailed area of the respective location. The map is almost identical to the map shown when one does a Google map search; streets are shown and even landmark locations in the area are displayed on the map.

The geo-target settings seem to be a consistent work in progress because there are features that are available this week that weren’t available a few weeks ago. This should not be a surprise, because Google has a “send feedback” button for people to offer their opinion on the geo-targeting modifications.  When it’s all said and done, these changes should help businesses reach more of their target audience.

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.