As the Christmas Shopping season starts to come into view, Google has announced four new features that advertisers can implement in their ad campaigns and merchant feeds. These are:
- Conversion value rules for store sales and store visits
- Product-specific insights
- Deals Content API
- Shipping & Returns Annotations
Let’s dig into each in greater detail…
Conversion value rules for store sales and store visits
As part of the new update, advertisers can now set store visits or sales default values at the campaign level.
Google says searches for ‘store open’ have grown by over 400% YoY. As a result, advertisers should also optimise their in-store Shopping experiences.
As part of this, Google suggests that businesses should keep their Google Business Profile up-to-date with the correct store address and opening hours. Following this, businesses can grow their store foot traffic by promoting their location to shoppers using Performance Max campaigns for store goals – such as in-store promotions or specials. On top of this, Smart Bidding can be used to set goals for visits and/or sales.
Product-specific insights
These are available at the account level. They help advertisers spot underperforming offers, identify products with missing feed attributes and compare bidding with competitors.
Product insights work on Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. They are intended to leverage ads performance data in order to optimise products and provide visibility on what actions will fix issues.
Deals Content API
Thanks to the new release, merchants and advertisers can now add their sales and promotions to their listings via the Deals Content API, which makes it even easier to upload and manage their deals at scale.
Interestingly, the Deals Content API had already been launched, but Google had not officially announced it.
Shipping and returns annotations
Finally, merchants are now also able to list the expected delivery date and free returns right on their ads. By adding estimated delivery times, merchants can help shoppers stress less and convert more.
Google’s new Shopping campaign features – the view from Spike
To get the inside track on what these new Google Shopping campaign features really mean for businesses, we spoke to Matt Wilkinson, Head of Paid Media at Spike. He told us that “It’s no surprise to see Google rolling out additional Shopping features ahead of the critical Q4 period. Whilst there is nothing truly game-changing amongst these updates, as ever it pays to maximise every available feature to get the best possible performance from your campaigns.
As the only one of these updates that has a visual impact on your ads, and the customer experience, I would suggest focusing on the shipping and returns annotations as a first priority for advertisers.”
Author spike.digital