Blinds.com, No. 202 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, focused on optimizing their Product Listing Ads and saw an 87% performance growth in those ads in just six months, says Mosheh Poltorak, customer insight specialist at Blinds.com. Performance growth included click-through rates and sales conversions.

Poltorak presented his views on best practices—and some things to avoid—when it comes to setting up Product Listing Ad campaigns last week at the digital marketing conference ClickZ. PLAs, as they’re also known, feature product images and prices from merchants prominently in the central area of a Google search results page. They replaced free comparison shopping listings in October 2012.

For product images, Poltorak said to use glamour shots that highlight the product and differentiate from the competition. Test different angles and backgrounds, but don’t use blurry photos, add watermarks or shoot products in packaging. Blinds.com, for example, tested close-up and far-away shots of blinds and experimented with different angles.

For titles, provide the most-important information up front. Include such details as brand name, size and material, and shorten titles to 70 characters to make sure they don’t get cut off. But don’t use all caps, place important information at the end of the title or repeat information.

When setting up a campaign, marketers can choose from several product targets. Poltorak says choosing more than one is fine, but marketers should make sure the targets they’ve chosen don’t overlap.

The most important thing is to test everything, he says. That applies to images, text and campaigns themselves.

PLAs have become a big part of marketer’s search engine marketing mix. 74% of retailers plan to spend more on PLAs in 2014 than in 2013, according to Shop.org’s “The State of Retailing Online 2014” report.