There are only two weeks left before Google retires Product Listing Ad campaigns, replacing them with Google Shopping campaigns. It’s important to note that PLA campaigns will not automatically be transitioned over. Instead, these legacy campaigns will simply stop running. In order to continue to show PLAs on Google, you must transition your campaigns yourself.
Google has released a new Shopping campaign upgrade tool to make the transition easier for advertisers. You can access this tool from the Settings tab of any of your current PLA campaigns.
Once you hit Get Started, it will open up the tool and it’s really a one-click and your done process. You’ll see your original campaign on the left and the new Shopping campaign on the right. The PLA campaign will remain in its current status and the Shopping campaign will be paused by default. I like this option because it gives you time to adjust and double-check settings for the new campaign before turning it on.
You can choose to pause your PLA campaign and enable Shopping, but the Shopping campaign will not appear in your account right away. You see at the top the notification that it can take up to 24 hours to be created. I recommend leaving the PLA campaign enabled or else there may be several hours when none of your ads are running.
There are some settings that won’t work with Shopping campaigns, and if your original campaign was utilizing any of those you’ll see a yellow warning icon with a description of the issue. Your campaign will still be created, but these settings won’t be pulled over.
It took a couple hours before I saw the new Shopping campaign appear in my account, but I was very happy with the results. First off, all of my ad group names were pulled over which was an issue before the release of this tool. Second, all of my settings were correct. Product targets were changed to product groups and bids were at the same levels. I would still recommend double-checking though before enabling your new campaigns just in case.
If you’ve been running PLA campaigns, this tool will make it very easy to transition to the new format.
For more information on getting started with PLAs, managing Shopping campaigns, or optimizing data feeds check out our upcoming online course!
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