Walmart Leads in Google PLA Impressions

Google's Product Listing Ads have changed the digital face of advertising for ecommerce merchants - well, at least mass merchants.

Today, AdGooroo released a list of the top 20 Google PLA advertisers by impression and to the surprise of few, Walmart topped the list with 408 million PLA impressions representing 129,381 unique products with 262,588 unique product listing ads.

AdGooroo noted that while Google's Adwords won't display multiple text ads from a single advertiser on one SERP, that apparently doesn't apply to PLA's. As seen in the image below, a search on Goodyear tires yielded three PLAs from Walmart for tires at different price points, explaining (at least in part why Walmart had over double the measured PLA impressions over eBay - which come in with 187 million impressions across 659,333 unique ads on 479,855 products.



It's not all mass merchants on the list of Top 20 PLA advertisers from Adgooroo however - there are some lesser known brands including photo-video retailer BHphotovideo.com, health and beauty supplier Soap.com and industrial product supplier GlobalIndustrial.com (whose sister companies include Tiger Direct and Comp USA - so not that "lesser known").

Other noteworthy findings from the study of PLAsdisplayed on U.S. Adwords from March through May 2013 include:
- Amazon (the biggest paid search advertiser) fell well short of the top 20, ranking #75 in the analysis.
- More than 4 billion PLAs were displayed (estimate) on U.S. Adwords during the study, or 5.9 percent of the total number of Adwords PPC ad impressions.
- Eight of the top 20 advertisers actually had more PLA impresions that text ad impressions during the study period including small brands like Etsy and Soap.com, as well as larger brands such as Staples and Toys R Us.
- The "Mass Retailers" category generated more impresisons than any other (1.22 billion), followed by Consumer Electronics with a comparatively paltry 400 million impressions.