Priority of Product Listing Ads campaigns

[David Juarez]

Hi,

We are gonna make the transition from the old PLA campaigns to the shopping campaigns. They were created 5 days ago with priority Medium, but although they have products bounded with the campaign, they do not receive any traffic. The traffic remains by the old PLA campaign (both campaigns are running at the same time).

It took some time until the products were associated to the new campaigns. We use custom label as new attribute. The feeds were updated in Google Merchant Center and almost immediately they appeared there with the new attribute. But in the Google AdWords desktop it took some time until the products appeared with the new attribute. Maybe they need to be updated also in the search index of Google, bounded with the new campaigns.

Is it a matter of time or do we need to do something that we are currently missing?

Thanks,

David 

[Josh Radcliff (AdWords API Team)]

Hi David,

According to this Google Shopping thread:

After creating a new product-listing-ad shopping-campaign,be certain to pause any regular-product listing-ad-campaign that is advertising the same products; otherwise, there will be direct competition among those items.

Regarding the availability of feed updates in AdWords, in my experience the initial sync to AdWords takes a bit longer than the incremental syncs that follow, although according to this thread, approval and processing of feed changes may take 24-72 hours.

Cheers,

Josh, AdWords API Team 

[David Juarez]

Hi Josh,

In the setting's page of the Google AdWords desktop I have found this:

Shopping settings (advanced)

Campaign priority

Medium

Edit

Low

Medium

High

Choosing a Medium or High priority for this Shopping campaign will also prioritize it over any existing Search Network Only - Product Listing Ads campaigns.

Choosing a Medium or High priority for this Shopping campaign will also prioritize it over any existing Search Network Only - Product Listing Ads campaigns.

As far as I know, the regular PLA campaigns have low priority. With a medium priority in the shopping campaigns, theoretically they should prevail over the regular ones. Is that right?

Thanks,

David

[Josh Radcliff (AdWords API Team)]

Hi David,

Could you share the relevant campaign IDs, both for the PLA campaigns and the shopping campaigns?

Thanks,

Josh, AdWords API Team

[David Juarez]

Hi Josh,

The old regular campaign is 68259730. We have also a multi-account in Google Merchant Center. One of the new shopping campaigns (for one of our merchants) is 186298450.

Thanks,

David

[Josh Radcliff (AdWords API Team)]

Hi David,

Thanks for sending over the campaign IDs -- the issue is that in your new shopping campaign (186298450) you haven't yet set up a ProductAd in your ad group. Each shopping campaign ad group must have one ProductAd that serves as a template for all the ads generated by that ad group.

Cheers,

Josh, AdWords API Team

[David Juarez]

Hi Josh,

You were right. The problem were the PLA. Now the new shopping campaigns are getting traffic again. Although they compete with the old one, as they have got a higher priority, they get the traffic.

I found a bit confusing that there were no code examples for creating PLAs and no reference in the documentation in the page of the shopping campaigns. Hence we thought that the PLA's were created automatically.

Thanks,

David

[Josh Radcliff (AdWords API Team)]

Hi David,

Glad to hear that this resolved the issue. Our AddShoppingCampaign.java example does contain code that creates the AdGroupAd (ProductAd), but I'll see if we can highlight this better in the shopping campaign documentation as well.

Cheers,

Josh, AdWords API Team