The migration of regular Product Listing Ads (PLA) used by advertisers on Google faces a rapidly approaching August 31 changeover date. Google’s planned shift away from those PLA ad campaigns to its new shopping campaigns takes place in September. It’s a transition the search advertising giant wants its customers to understand is coming up soon so no one is caught out by the change.
Google’s Inside AdWords blog beseeched the advertising customer base to be aware of the deadline. Should advertisers for some reason not take time to do the upgrade for their PLA campaigns before the end of the month, they’ll note some changes as September arrives.
Eric Tholome, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping, wrote that phase 1 of the change will result in limited PLA campaign functionality starting September 2nd. Though advertisers won’t be able to edit factors like product targeting or maximum cost-per-click bids, they will be able to work with their campaign statuses and budgets through the changeover period.
As September and phase 2 of the shift progresses, regular PLA campaigns seeing impressions in the timeframe leading up to the deadline will be automatically upgraded, Google said, to new Shopping campaigns with similar campaign structures. Merchants who didn’t upgrade earlier and have PLA campaigns affected by this should receive an email notification of the shift.
Earlier in 2014, Brad Hintze, VP Marketing at Finch, told EcommerceBytes the change would be beneficial to small- and medium-sized businesses. He said with this update, “the more granular control you have over all of your AdWords campaigns, the more you can use PPC to drive profit and revenue.”
