• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, April 9, 2014

Marketers are investing more of their online marketing budget in search campaigns. About 29% of Google product listing ad (PLA) budgets come from new money, whereas 62% come from existing paid-search budgets, 6% from existing digital non-search budgets, 1% from offline budgets, and 2% from other sources, per Kenshoo.

The report -- An Inside Look at Google Shopping Campaigns, published by Kenshoo -- analyzes the results of a marketing survey on Google product listing ads and Shopping campaign performance.

When rating the performance of PLAs, 26% of marketers participating in the survey said the ads perform much better than paid search, followed by 43% who said the performance was slightly better; 14%, about the same; 9%, slightly less; and 8%, much less.

Search marketers agree that performance depends on the way ads are structured. The feed setup ranks the most important, followed by the granularity in product grouping, bid, image, and promotional line, per the survey. Most use multiple categories -- in fact, 41% structure ads this way. Some 34% structure the PLAs in product targets or groups, followed by 14% who use one higher-level set of categories to create target product groups, and 10% who put all products in one target group.

While 43% use a third-party platform to manage product fees, 49% use a third-party platform to manage PLA bidding and optimization. Some 65% use data collected from PLA to inform other search or cross-channel strategies.

The data, drawn from a 14-question survey, reflects responses by 89 global in-house and agency search marketers using Google's PLA format. The survey was compiled and analyzed in Q1 of 2014.