Google released last week a final reminder that merchants need to upgrade their regular Product Listing Ads (PLA) campaigns to Shopping campaigns by August 31st, 2014. If you don’t upgrade by this time, the following is what will happen to your regular PLA campaigns come September:
This was their statement which updated thir previous statements that PLA campaigns would stop on 31.08.14
- Phase 1: Starting on September 2nd, all regular PLA campaigns will have limited functionality. Specifically, you will not be able to edit your product targeting, max. CPC bids, promotional text and destination URLs anymore. Campaign statuses and budgets will remain editable so you can manage your spend until your regular PLA campaigns are auto-upgraded to Shopping campaigns.
- Phase 2: Throughout September, regular PLA campaigns that received impressions in the preceding few weeks will be auto-upgraded to a new Shopping campaign with a similar campaign structure. Some regular PLA campaigns, settings and bids might not carry over due to technical limitations. Once your regular PLA campaigns are auto-upgraded, you’ll receive an email notification and they will stop serving PLAs. It may take a few hours for these new, auto-upgraded Shopping campaigns to start serving. Further details on the auto-upgrade are in the AdWords help centre.
Not a complete surprise to us, as the porting of existing PLAs to Shopping campaigns was announced very late, and did not deal with certain types of PLA campaigns at all until very late into August and then (from phase 2)
Having seen some of the after effects of their auto porting of campaigns we should point out certain things that don’t work as easily as you might have thought
- Be very careful about PLA campaigns using labels – the values will autoport into custom label value 4. Not the best place for them, but they key thing is that your submission must then put the same value into that column of your product feed. Without out that happening the Adgroups will pick up no traffic
- We also found that detailed catgeory targets in the PLA campaigns did not get ported across completely. In addition the Adgroups concerned were then incapable of targeting the correct categories.
- Bids did seem to port across OK, but watch out for the overriding bids which can be used within the Adgroups when setting targets. These will be used ahead of the Adgroup bid, which also over-rides the campaign defaults.
We recommend strongly looking at any ported campaign in detail in terms of settings, bids and targets. Watch the impression levels from Sept 1, and see how they compare to the old PLAs. If you see lines of 0 clicks, and/or no clicks in the Merchant Centre, then this needs rapid investigation.
As ever, we are here to helpyou understand what’s going on. Contact us as necessary.
