• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 29, 2013

Adchemy will unveil a product listing ad platform aimed at simplifying the process of creating PLAs for desktop and mobile through automation. The platform automatically crawls the merchant's site and organizes the product information.

The announcement will be made at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit.

Plus, the company will release the eBook "The Definitive Guide to PLAs: Going Beyond the Merchant Feed," that steps through 24 best practices designed to improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

The growth of PLAs has created new opportunities for brands by providing a more accessible ad formats, not only on the PC, but on mobile as well. Google recently announced PLAs would serve up on smartphones through the Enhanced Campaigns platform. Microsoft Bing also continues to test a similar platform.

Advertisers spent 18% more in Q1 2013 to place Google PLAs Google among Rimm-Kaufman group retail clients. While clicks grew 11%, the cost per click rose 7%. Product Listing Ads drove up non-brand volume growth 238%.

Despite rapid growth in PLAs, search marketers continue to struggle with manual processes. Ethan Batraski, vice president of product and experience, leads the initiative that will compete against Adobe, Datapop, IgnitionOne, Kenshoo, Marin Software and others in the space vying for the attention of brand advertisers.

Batraski, former head of search innovation at Yahoo, said Adchemy for Products should alleviate some of the growing pains. Adchemy's platform automates the process of building PLA campaigns. Crawling the merchant's site to pull in the data eliminates the need to create a merchant feed. It grabs and pulls in new data to complement Adchemy's existing database of product information.

"If you have 80,000 products, it could take between 30 and 40 man hours just to do product targeting and put them into ad groups, which is an insane amount of time," Batraski said.

There has been little innovation in paid search in the past 10 years. "The majority of investment in time and resources goes into consumer search and not paid search," he said. "It simplifies moving a large-scale PLA program across an entire product line because the platform doesn't require you to sync up campaigns or ad groups."