• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 11, 2016

Performance marketing agency Elite SEM has created a separate division that manages Shopping campaigns from Google, Bing, and comparison engines, along with data feed management services.

The Shopping & Feed Division announced Thursday will support clients featuring items ranging from a few thousand to tens of millions of products in online stores, according to Ben Kirshner, CEO of Elite SEM.

Evan Kirkpatrick will head the Philadelphia-based division as Shopping and Feed Team Lead, a new position at the company. The division will support brands or retailers running 3,000 SKUs or more of products online.

The agency will go up against established players such as Criteo, which acquired Datapop in February 2015.

With an increasing number of individual product types, the nuances to support shopping campaigns versus paid search continue to grow. Google says it will reject relevant products lacking global trade item number (GTIN) requirements that identify unique products beginning May 16, 2016.

Advertisers invested heavily in Google Shopping's product listing ads (PLA) format during the 2015 holiday season. PLAs produced 65% of non-brand Google search ad clicks in the quarter. PLA share of Google search ad clicks rose to 38% in Q4 among retailers, according to Merkle's Digital Marketing Report Q4 2015 released late January.

When it came to mobile, PLA clicks grew at nearly twice the rate of text ads. As a result of this more rapid mix shift to phones, along with increased volume from search partners, the PLA cost per click (CPC) fell to 8% below non-brand text ad levels in the fourth quarter, the agency reported.

Many agencies attempt to manage Shopping campaigns through their search marketing divisions, but the result is poor data quality, because the ads requires a completely different skill set.

A few of the biggest agencies have the components to independently manage Shopping campaigns, but the result is slow response to change, and details fall through cracks and silos.

Elite SEM doesn't plan to completely change the way Shopping campaigns have run in the past, but says it will develop the expertise to anticipate changes more rapidly.