About CSS product listing ads

This format allows you to advertise products from your Comparison Shopping Service (CSS) product detail page with CSS product listing ads. CSS product listing ads will appear next to merchant product listing ads and CSSs will compete with merchants on a non-discriminatory basis in the existing PLA carousel. All CSSs participating in Google's CSS programme that meet the minimum requirements described in the later section can place these ads in countries that are part of the CSS programme.

An example of a CSS Product Listing Ad.

How it works

CSS product listing ads show a carousel of product on Google general search results featuring the product image, title, offer price and number of offers for a specific product. When someone clicks on a CSS product listing ad, they are taken to a product page on your CSS website.

Minimum requirements

Note that standard Shopping policies, Google Ads policies, CSS product pages policies as well as CSS product page requirements apply to CSS product listing ads. The following requirements must also be met for this ad format:

The final landing page must be on the domain associated with your CSS Centre account. You may not automatically redirect users to other domains.
The landing page must not show pop-ups or interstitial pages.
The landing page must prominently show relevant offers (corresponding to the ad content) from multiple merchants and allow people to make comparisons. Links from the landing page must lead directly to merchant pages where people can buy the products advertised on the CSS landing page.

How to set up CSS product listing ads

Before you begin

Before creating a CSS product listing ad, you'll need to complete the following:

Create a Comparison Shopping Service account if you don't have one already. Learn more about how to sign up as a Comparison Shopping Service
Accept the Terms of Service to opt in to start the onboarding process. During onboarding, you will need to upload your product data using the CSS API. Please note that the headline_offer_shipping_price is a required field if the delivery cost is greater than zero, as explained in the product data specification
Activate a Google Ads account for CSS product listing ads. You'll need to link it with your CSS Centre domain account that has the products that you'd like to use for your CSS product listing ads. Contact the support team with your Google Ads and CSS Centre domain ID to complete this step.
Meet the requirements for a Shopping campaign. Learn about the requirements
Create a Shopping campaign for your CSS product listing ad. Learn how to create a Shopping campaign

Product ratings

Product ratings are an optional part of CSS Product Listing ads that allow you to display aggregated reviews for your products to customers who are shopping on Google. Product ratings are shown in ads and free product listings and appear as one- to five-star ratings that also display the total number of reviews for the product. These ratings and reviews help with product research and purchase decisions to help drive more qualified customers to your product pages.

Compiled from multiple sources, star ratings represent the aggregated rating for the product. These sources include merchants, review aggregators, review sites and Google users. You can choose to provide the reviews data with Google, which can be displayed with your CSS Product Listing ads as long as they meet the requirements outlined below.

Requirements

Have 50+ product reviews (owned or syndicated) generated in the last month.
Provide links pointing to those product reviews, proving that these are displayed on the website.
Allow the reviews to be reactively refreshed to meet qualification criteria, as a maximum once per month.

If you're interested in submitting product reviews, create a Google spreadsheet that contains the information of your reviews following the example in this template. Complete the CSS Partners Account Management form, selecting the option for product reviews, and include the link to the created spreadsheet in your submission. After the reviews are validated and processed, they can appear along with your ads.

Instructions to create a campaign

Create a CSS product listing campaign

Note: The instructions below are part of the new design for the Google Ads user experience. To use the previous design, click the 'Appearance' icon and select 'Use previous design'. If you're using the previous version of Google Ads, review the quick reference map or use the search bar in the top navigation panel of Google Ads to find the page that you're searching for.

In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon .
Click the Campaigns drop-down in the section menu.
Click the plus button and select New campaign.
Select Sales or continue without setting a goal as your campaign objective.
- Based on your campaign objective, you can choose to 'Add goal' or use the account-default goal.
Select Shopping as your campaign type.
Select the Comparison Shopping Service account that has the products that you want to advertise.
Click Select specific feeds and choose the relevant feed from your CSS domain account that contains the products you want to advertise.
Choose a feed label to apply it to the campaign.
Select Standard Shopping campaign as your campaign subtype.
Choose your advertising preferences:
- Campaign name. Enter a name for the campaign. You'll use this name to find the campaign later. You can change the name after the campaign has been created.
- Inventory filter. You only need to adjust this setting if you want to limit the number of products used in your campaign. To do so, choose the criteria that a product must meet in order to be advertised. Only products that match all the requirements you select will be added to your campaign. You can change this setting after the campaign has been created.
- Campaign URL options. You can set up a tracking template and add a final URL suffix. Add custom parameters to your tracking template and final URL.
- Bidding. Select which type of bidding to use in your campaign. You can change this setting after the campaign has been created.
- Budget. Select how much you're willing to spend on this campaign.
- Campaign priority. You only need to adjust this setting if you're advertising the same product in multiple campaigns for the same country of sale or feed label. Campaign priority determines which campaign's budget will be used when products overlap in your campaigns.
- Devices. By default, ads can appear on any device, including computers and mobile devices. You can change this setting after the campaign has been created.
- Locations. You can use this setting to limit where your ads show to specific locations. You can change this setting after the campaign has been created.
- Start and end dates. Enter the start and end dates to determine the time frame of the campaign.
Choose settings for the ad group:
- Ad group name. Enter a name for the ad group. You'll use this name to find the ad group later. You can change the name after the campaign has been created.
- Bid. Enter the bid for the ad group. After you create the ad group, this bid will be applied to the first product group in the ad group: 'All products'. You can change the bid on the product group after the campaign has been created.
Click Create campaign.

Note: You can adjust your campaign settings to help you customise your campaign. The campaign settings that you select will apply to all the product listing ads within the same campaign.

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