Weekly Furniture World Media Note #132: Retailers Increase Reliance on PLAs

Furniture World News Desk on 2/18/2015

By Lance G. Hanish

Retail advertisers took spending on Product Listing Ads (PLAs) to another level at theend of 2014. According to data from Adobe Digital Index, Google shopping ad spending in the retail sector grew 47% year over year and 53% quarter over quarter in Q4 2014.Meanwhile, spending on Google text ads was down 6% year over year.

PLAs accounted for one-fifth of US retail search ad clicks in Q4 2014. Despite their decline in spend, Google text ads led in share of search engine marketing (SEM) clicks,grabbing two-thirds of the total. Yahoo Bing Product Ads didn’t fare as well as Google’s PLAs, with just 0.7% share of retail search ad clicks during the quarter, while YahooBing text ads took in 14%.



Adobe noted that the rise in Google shopping ad spending among retailers meantadvertisers in the sector needed to include product ads in their search efforts to keep upwith the competition, and results from Merkle | RKG highlighted this as well. RKG foundthat US retail paid search clicks for PLAs and Bing Product Ads combined rose 50.8%year over year in Q4 2014, vs. 6.4% for text ads. Similar to the rate Adobe found for Google shopping ads, spending on the two product ad types combined rose 45.4% inthe retail sector between Q4 2013 and Q4 2014, while growth for text ads was 10.4%.Meanwhile, cost per click was down for product ads, which RKG said was partly due to“lower-priced Bing Product Ads growing at a faster rate than Google PLAs.”

Each search engine saw product ads increase their share of retail clicks during the quarter, as well. Product Ads accounted for 7% of all paid search clicks on Bing in Q42014, double that of the third quarter, while PLAs expanded their portion to 30% of allGoogle paid search clicks for retailers.

With more and more people using digital and mobile to be connected, to look at their social media, to check out the latest commerce video and/or to read their mail and yes,actually making a call, it is an absolute that your integrated marketing core must beconnected to them continuously in order to engage with them and get them into your store.

Most communication is now done via a mobile device. Thus, SHE IS MOBILE.

Mobile in the world of integrated marketing today, is absolutely important. It is the mostimportant aspect of your marketing strategy this year. That is why we say, MOBILENow!

For more information regarding Integrated Marketing Innovations, read Media Notes Canonical at http://www.cnasophis.com.

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Lance Hanish is Co-Founding Partner in CNA | Sophis Integrated Marketing Communications. 

He can be reached at:
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