On March 26th, Bing announced the launch of their long awaited Product Ads program, a CPC-based retail advertising channel similar in format to Google’s Product Listing Ads.
On April 2nd, 7 days after Bing’s big news, Google let their advertisers know that all PLA campaigns must switch over to the newly launched Shopping Campaigns format by August 2014.
These 2 separate headlines don’t necessarily seem linked, but Google’s announcement has significant implications on how effective Bing retail advertisers can be heading into this Q4. To reduce 2 huge barriers to entry, Bing Product Ads allowed retailers to both:
- Import their PLA campaign structure from AdWords into the Bing Ads login
- Transfer their current Google Merchant Center feed into the Bing Merchant Center (with very minor edits needed)
Bing, however, can only accept the traditional PLA campaign format (non-Shopping Campaigns).
Consequentially, retailers interested in Bing Product Ads only have until August 2014 to transfer over their AdWords data, all because of Google’s very timely public decision to retire the traditional PLA format in lieu of Shopping Campaigns. Failing to do so would mean that the advertiser has to build-out the entire campaign from scratch.
This is just more incentive to hop on the Bing Product Ads (BPA) train early on. Retailers who have their Bing campaign fully optimized and running on all cylinders by Q4 will be at a significant advantage over non-BPA advertisers to drive order volume during the shopping season.
At the end of the day, Bing Product Ads offers a bottom-of-the-funnel channel for retailers to drive new orders from a new audience, all from a product ad format that has proven to be a huge success.
