Note: This article refers only to Microsoft Product Listing Ads. Support for Google Product Listing Ads has been deprecated by Google, so you will not be able to create or edit PLAs in the Platform. Please create Google shopping campaigns for these items and refer to the article A Guide to Managing Product Listing Ads and Product Targets.
To enable Marin support for Microsoft Product Listing Ads, please reach out to your Platform Representative or Support Services to enable this feature.
What are Product Listing Ads?
To help users find the products they're looking for even more quickly, publishers have developed an ad type called Product Listing Ads.
These display highly relevant product suggestions in the place of a text ad, including pricing information and promotional message. Product Listing Ads (PLAs) can appear either above the organic results, or above the right-hand column of ads, as seen below. PLAs contain Product Targets which tell Microsoft Ads what products you want to trigger your Product Ad - all products in your catalog or narrowed down by brand, condition, product type, SKU, or other characteristics.
How to create Product Listing Ad creatives within the platform
You can add and edit PLA creatives. To do so, just follow these easy steps:
- Go to the main Creatives tab.
- Click the Add button ('plus' icon) above the grid.
- Choose the account, campaign and group.
- On the Add Creative page, select Product from the Creative Type drop-down menu.
- You can add optional promotion text in the relevant field.
- Save the creative in the usual way.
You can edit your PLA creatives in the normal way by selecting them using the checkboxes in the grid and clicking the Edit button (pencil icon). You can edit PLAs individually, via multi-edit, or by bulk add/edit by adding Product in the Type column and entering promotional text under Description 1.
You can also bulk add and edit PLA creatives. To do so, just follow these easy steps:
- Create a bulk upload file using Excel containing the following columns:
- Required: Account, Campaign, Group, Creative Type (should be Product)
- Optional: Description Line 1 (i.e., 'Free Shipping!')
- Go to the Creatives tab in the Platform.
- Select Bulk add/edit creatives in the left-hand menu.
- Copy the information in your bulksheet and paste it into the upload field. Or click the Choose File button and select the file to be uploaded.
- Select whether upload changes in To be sent or Held status (depending on when you want your changes made), then click the Process button.
- After processing, check the Activity Log to verify that your upload succeeded.
A note regarding Microsoft Product Extensions
- Product Extensions for Microsoft serve as a way to link a given Microsoft campaign to your Microsoft Merchant Center Feed. They have no relation to the short-lived and now deprecated Google Product Extensions.
- A product extension must be linked to a campaign before the specific product targets and product ads that the campaign will serve.
- The platform does not support the creation and management of Product Extensions, only the linking and unlinking of Product Extensions by name.
To link a Microsoft Product Extension within the platform, it must first be created in Microsoft Ads. It will then be synced down into the platform during the nightly sync or during a manual sync. You can then navigate to any Microsoft campaign within the account, click on the Ad Extensions tab, use the drop-down menu to select Product Extensions and then link the desired Product Extensions and push the changes to the publisher. This Product Extension campaign link can also be created in Microsoft and synced down.
Additional information about Product Listing Ads
- The Platform displays PLAs in the grid with a headline of Product Listing Ad, and uses the promotion text (if any) to populate the desc 1 field.
- Charts, scheduled actions, and dimensions work in just the same way as they do with regular text ads.
