Which of these choices describes a free product listing?
Correct Answer
Free product listings appear on the Shopping Tab and provide an opportunity to highlight products and drive customers to your website at no cost.
Key takeaways
Free listings appear on the Shopping tab at no cost per click.
They use the same Merchant Center feed as paid Shopping ads.
No auction means no bids, no budget and no product prioritisation.
Why is this the correct answer?
Free listings show your products on the Shopping tab at no cost per click, giving retailers a route to visibility that does not depend on budget. They are generated from the same Merchant Center product data as paid Shopping ads, which means a retailer with a healthy feed already has most of the work done. Because they sit outside the ad auction there is no bidding, no budget and no way to prioritise particular items — you trade control for free reach.
Why are the other options wrong?
Free product listings are paid Shopping ads that are converted due to low impressions and clicks.
Nothing demotes a paid ad into a free listing. The two are separate surfaces reading the same feed, and poor performance does not convert one into the other.
Free product listings participate in an ad auction and offer insights and controls to optimize performance and prioritize key products.
Auction participation, performance controls and prioritisation all describe paid Shopping campaigns. Free listings have none of these, because there is no auction.
Free product listings use product information directly from the website to curate no cost ads without a product feed.
A Merchant Center feed is still required. Google may supplement it with data crawled from your site, but the listing is fed from Merchant Center rather than curated from the website alone.
Frequently asked questions about this topic
Do free listings affect my paid Shopping performance?
They generally add reach rather than taking clicks from your paid campaigns, because they appear on the Shopping tab where a paid ad may not have been serving anyway. It is worth watching your Shopping tab traffic separately in reporting so you can see what each surface contributes.
Topics in this question
About the Shopping Ads Certification
The Shopping Ads Certification checks that you can run retail campaigns end to end: product data in Merchant Center, linking it to Google Ads, and choosing between Standard Shopping and Performance Max to drive sales and value.
Exam guide and all 407 Google Ads Shopping questions →Related Google Ads Shopping questions
- 1Which definition corresponds to a free product listing?Explained
- 2Which definition corresponds to a free product listing?Explained
- 3What are free product listings?Explained
- 4You work at an agency and one of your clients wants to track performance by product category (ex: apparel) and gender. They already passed the required and optional attributes for apparel in the product feed. Which of these techniques could help them achieve granular reporting?Explained
- 5Which of these statements about product groups in a Shopping campaign is true?
- 6Which of these choices would make a good secondary bid strategy for a client who wanted to run on Smart Shopping campaigns and use Maximize Conversion Value as a bid strategy?