Product Listing Ads Appearing On Bing

Microsoft has been fast-following Google AdWords with new features in adCenter recently, so it’s not a huge surprise that some have spotted what look like Product Listing Ads (PLAs) in Bing Results. “AdCenter is currently working on several ad product initiatives. Each initiative is at a different stage development and rollout stage,” a Microsoft spokesperson gave a statement. “The ad treatment referenced in RKG’s blog post is from a prototype experimentation that aims to collect initial engagement data on ads with detailed product information.” While Microsoft wouldn’t give us creative specs for the unit, it appears to be a small, square image that accompanies the headline, landing page URL and text in the ad. As of yet, there’s no product name.

Announcing AdWords campaign limits increase

Last year google Adwords support increased the limits for all advertisers to 500 campaigns and 3 million keywords per AdWords account in response to feedback from many of our advertisers, we are pleased to announce yet another AdWords campaign limit increase.

It is now possible to have 10,000 campaigns (includes active and paused campaigns) per account. With this change, it is now possible to easily manage and monitor more campaigns in a single place.

AdWords Editor, the AdWords API, and all other AdWords services are compatible with the new limits.

A full list of all account limits, including creative and ad extension limits, is available in the AdWords Help Center.

Why use CPA Bidding?

 Anyone interested in achieving a ROI (return on investment) while using AdWords should at least look into testing CPA bidding once at some point. The opportunity to use an automated system which can consider a multitude of calculations every time a search relevant to your business is made, is a valuable one, especially when the system has the ability to make the best decision for your business. These calculations are based upon a variety of factors such as an ad’s conversion history, the keyword’s broad match query, the user’s location and the conversion rates of Google’s Search Network and partner sites on the Display Network. These factors can be taken into consideration manually to a certain extent but could never be performed as fast and often as the CPA bidding is able to. The manual approach would also mean downloading stat reports, analyzing keyword and ad performance, reviewing locations and time activity, etc; all this takes a considerable amount of time which is valuable within any business. The CPA bidding option addresses this issue and allows you to have a more automated approach to management.

When this feature was first released I decided to test it out on one of my client’s campaigns. The results were fairly instantaneous and resulted in a reduction in cost per conversion with an increased total number of conversions. Even now I will occasionally test CPA bidding with different client accounts to compare the performance against running the campaigns manually, generally the CPA bidding will match the performance at the very least but it is not unusual for it to perform even better.