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Google announced this week that they are retiring the "regular PLA (product listing ads) campaign" type and will require all advertisers to upgrade to Shopping campaigns by late August 2014. If advertisers do not do so themselves, they remaining PLA campaigns will be automatically upgraded to the new shopping campaigns type.
Google also announced three new features to help AdWords advertisers to promote their shopping campaigns. They include:
- Size your opportunity with Bid Simulator - To provide more actionable insight into your PLAs, Google rolled out a Bid Simulator that's now available in all Shopping campaigns. With a Bid Simulator, you can now estimate how bid changes could impact your impressions, clicks or costs.
- Options to create a Shopping campaign - In the coming days, Google will be adding some options to help you get started. You would be able to create a Shopping campaign from scratch or, for many of you, use one of your regular PLA campaigns to create similar product targets, negative keywords or promotional text.
- Multiple ad groups for advanced retailers - While many of you will be happy with your Shopping campaign as is, Google has heard from advanced retailers that they’d like to create multiple ad groups. It’s now possible to do this within a Shopping campaign.
Here is a screen shot of the new bid simulator screen:
Forum discussion at Google+ and Google AdWords Help.
Comments:
Iain Bartholomew
04/04/2014 11:56 am
Noticed the bid simulator today. The implied message seemed to be "please provide us with more of your money".
Openuris
04/04/2014 01:08 pm
The whole interface doesn't make a lot of sense coming from PLA campaigns. You cannot use the bid simulator if you don't have keywords. Why would you have keywords if you're using a shopping feed for your shopping campaign and using auto targets to break out products for analytics. Are they suggesting setting up 1 campaign per product and using keywords to target that product?
Shaun M.
04/04/2014 05:57 pm
It seems they've already begun removing features from the "regular PLA campaigns". Up until a couple of weeks ago they included the ability to "validate" product targets and this is now missing (for our account at least). This had been helpful for us because we incorporate our own taxonomy into the product type field and we've got over 10,000 categories. It was nice to be able to verify that the niche category we're attempting to target exists in our merchant account before launching the ad campaign.