First off a quick introduction: Everyone can call me Tony! I have been a search marketing specialist for the past 10 years. I started out in content creation and now am a Google AdWords & Analytics certified marketer. I want to bring some important guides and Google updates to the community. On August 21st, the Google AdWords team sent out a kind reminder on the full switch from PLA’s to Google Shopping Campaigns. September 2nd marked the first day of the first phase of the phasing out of the former PLA’s. We hope that everyone has taken the important steps over the course of the past few months to begin switching over to Shopping Campaigns. If you haven’t then here are some of the important notes to take stock of directly from the Google AdWords Team. An important reminder: Although Google has an “upgrade tool” available for Google Shopping even Google recommends recreating and re-optimizing Google Shopping Campaigns manually. September 2nd: All PLA Campaigns Have Limited Functionality - By limited functionality they truly mean limited. Basically you have two options starting today: turn them off or cut off the budget. With the inability to adjust CPC bids, campaigns that have yet to switch to Google Shopping will suffer terribly. Over the course of the week without CPC bid changes available, campaigns can see some losses that never had to happen in the first place. Allowing a campaign to be “auto-upgraded” could serve as more of a detriment than an “easier” solution. This goes especially for large product inventory accounts where tens of thousands of products need to be migrated over. The question here becomes what would you rather have? Throughout September: AdWords Labels & AdWords Grouping will not be available for Google Shopping Campaigns. If you so choose, you may recreate those by using Custom Labels. Custom Labels have limited use but could best serve to track low stock inventories or possibly clearance sale items. A new Shopping campaign will utilize your data feed’s attributes such as Brand or Product ID for segmenting new campaigns. Custom Labels 3 & 4 serve special purposes and using the Upgrade Tool could cause errors in regards to their use. Regardless if you wait for the auto-upgrade or not there will more than likely be a period of time (several hours) where an old PLA campaign and Shopping campaign are both not serving any ads. Advanced location options are not available for Shopping Campaigns. A new Shopping campaign will simply not have these options bound to it. Google Shopping does not yet support Automatic Bidding. Upgrading from an old PLA campaign will carry over the most current bid settings. Shopping campaigns utilize the prefix of the product group for segmenting. If a product data feed does not match any filters in a product group then chances are you could see different bids in comparison to a former PLA. Shopping campaigns solely support product listing ads. PLA’s had the ability to contain different ad types other than PLA’s however Shopping does not. The budget for an upgraded Shopping campaign will match historical records from the former PLA campaign. This could cause problems as that figure may not be accurate at all. Shopping campaigns only allow for singular country targeting. Any former PLA’s that are chosen to upgrade but which also target multiple countries will see a literal split once the Shopping campaign takes effect. The old PLA will split into “X” number of Shopping campaigns where “X” equals the number of countries targeted. Your budget will be split as well based on the percentage of ad spend for each particular region. A new Shopping campaign will not support any language targeting. They also do not support multiple “OR” statements. For PLA’s with “OR” statements, the new Shopping campaigns will be split as well as the budget based on those “OR” values. FULL LIST OF KNOWN ERRORS ONE MAY FACE: Campaign Exceeds Limits Invalid Inventory Filter Values Product Target Contains Invalid Values Inventory Exceeds Limits Bidding Strategies Not Supported: Max. CPA% Multiple AdWords Labels In Inventory Filter Multiple AdWords Labels In Product Type Multiple Product Types Multiple Target Countries Multiple “OR” Statements No Target Country Not Linked To Merchant Center Product Group Exceeds Limits Too Many Campaigns Per Account Too Many Product Type Levels More so than before, it is incredibly necessary to not only understand Google Shopping but also understand the importance of organizing, monitoring and optimizing Google Ad campaigns. The best solution to the complexity of the Google Shopping migration is education. For campaigns that were suffering before, now is the pivotal point to begin thinking about how to enhance your advertising efforts to drive more clicks, secure more conversions and increase profits. It takes time, patience and a good amount of effort to ensure profitability when advertising with Google Shopping.