• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 4, 2017

Product Listing Ads rose 42% year-over-year from Thanksgiving Day through to Cyber Monday. PLA-sourced sales rose 27% YoY, while revenue rose 35% and return on ad spend (ROAS) increased nearly 8%.

Those recent numbers from Adlucent demonstrate the growth of Google Shopping campaigns in paid-search results. Black Friday 2017 came in as the second-highest traffic day this holiday season, generating 22% more sales compared with 2016 and 35% more revenue.

This was second to Cyber Monday, which became the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history for PLA performance, according to Adlucent's performance data. Adlucent clients saw a revenue increase of 37% YoY.

Overall PLA growth must have lit a fire under Google, because this past week the company finally announced new features and expansion of the Google Manufacturer Center, which launched in 2015.

It was designed to become the central repository for the product data powering Google Shopping campaigns. The data now appears on Knowledge Panels in the U.S., with information on core product features, images and descriptions.

Google also launched the Manufacturer Center API, so brands or their third-party data partners can update, upload, edit, monitor data quality or delete information programmatically without having to rely on manual feed updates.

And finally, the Manufacturer Center is now available in Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, the Netherlands and United Kingdom.