Within your Performance Max campaign's asset group, you can specify which products you want to be served up in your Performance Max campaign ads. Listing groups are part of a campaign’s asset group. They are made up of listings, which are sets of products.
How listing groups work
Listing groups organize your listings by the attributes assigned to them in Merchant Center. You can use them to manage which listings are included in your campaigns. Listing groups are part of a campaign’s asset group.
Use listing groups for bidding and reporting
- Bidding: Bidding for Performance Max campaigns uses Google AI. Bids will be set based on the advertising objective you selected for your campaign.
- Reporting: For Performance Max campaigns, reporting metrics can be different for the “Listing groups” tab when compared to the “Campaign” tab. This is because the “Listing groups” tab can only report on product-level data.
- For example, when an ad shows many products in an individual ad slot, each product collects an impression. However, the campaign, asset group, and ad recognize that only a single ad was showing and will count it as one impression.
Use Final URL expansion with listing groups
For Performance Max campaigns with a Merchant Center feed attached, ads may be served to a URL provided in the campaign (the Final URL) or to a product page included in a campaign’s listing groups from the attached Google Merchant Center.
- If Final URL Expansion is turned on: Ads may be served to additional URLs on the provided Final URL domain in addition to product URLs from the GMC that are included in listing groups for the Performance Max campaign.
- If Final URL Expansion is turned off: Ads will be served only to the Final URL in addition to product URLs from the GMC that are included in listing groups for the Performance Max campaign.
Attributes available for listing group subdivisions
Listing groups can be defined by these attributes provided in your product data in Merchant Center:
- Category: An attribute based on the Google product taxonomy. Example of a category string: Apparel & Accessories > Clothing > Dresses. In your product data, the ">" characters define the hierarchical levels in the product category that you'll be able to use for subdividing listing groups. If you don't submit the category, we might assign one for you. There may be cases where Google refines the category further after it's been submitted. Though we do our best, some products may be miscategorized. You can only subdivide by category when you target these countries: the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Brazil, Norway, Sweden, and Turkey. Learn more about Google product category
- Brand: The name of the manufacturer of a product (Example: Google). The brand should be clearly visible on the front of the product packaging or label. Learn more about product’s brand name
- Item ID: Your identifier (id) for each product. Learn more about product identifier
- Condition: The state of a product (new, used, and refurbished). Learn more about product condition
- Product type: An attribute that is assigned based on categorization (Example of a product type string: Home & Garden > Kitchen & Dining > Kitchen Appliances > Refrigerators). In product data, the ">" character defines the hierarchical levels in the product type used for subdividing product groups. Product types can be subdivided up to 5 times. Learn more about product type
- Channel: Where your products are sold, either "Local" in a physical store or "Online" through an e-commerce store. Learn more about local inventory
- Custom labels: You can create up to 5 custom labels in your product data (Example of label values: seasonal, bestseller). Learn more about custom labels
Each asset group in a Performance Max campaign can have up to 1,000 listing groups.