Google Marketing

Google Marketing Live: Building For The New Consumer Journey

May 14, 2019 by

Today, mobile phones allow people to engage more often, in more ways, and from more places than ever. This means the once linear path from discovery to consideration to purchase has not only evolved but is always evolving.

Consider a woman from a recent study, who spent 73 days and interacted with more than 250 touchpoints (searches, video views, and page views) before purchasing a single pair of jeans. She visited several blogs, browsed large merchant sites, searched for local retailers, and watched product reviews on YouTube. Like many of today’s consumers, she wanted to enjoy her time shopping, engaged with brands that inspired her, and narrowed limitless choices before picking the perfect pair.

In a world where we have less time and more options, it’s crucial for brands to anticipate what consumers need in order to stand out. But just because the customer journey is complex doesn’t mean delivering useful experiences has to be. Whether you’re a scrappy entrepreneur or a large company, your marketing goals remains the same: reaching people at the right moments with the right offer.

At Google Marketing Live, you’ll hear directly from our ads teams about the latest products designed to help you do just that. We’ll show how ads can be there, be useful, and be responsible—unlocking more opportunities for you to connect with your customers and grow your business. Join us live today at 9am PT (12pm ET): g.co/marketinglive and get a front row seat for our biggest announcements. 

Get discovered in more places

People turn to Google to communicate, find answers and stay entertained. And increasingly, they’re swiping and scrolling through feeds as part of that journey—whether it’s browsing videos in the YouTube home feed, checking timely offers in the Gmail Promotions tab or swiping through Discover to catch up on the latest news. These are opportunities for brands to engage them when it matters.

In a recent Google / Ipsos study, we saw that 76 percent of consumers enjoy making unexpected discoveries when shopping. And 85 percent of consumers will take a product-related action within 24 hours of discovering a product: reading reviews, comparing prices or purchasing the product—sometimes all at once!

Today, we’re introducing Discovery ads. Rolling out to all advertisers globally later this year, Discovery ads are a new way to reach people across Google properties in the moments when they’re open to discovering your products and services.

  • Rich and relevant creative: Inspire consumers with an open canvas showcasing your brand or products in a swipeable image carousel, rendered natively across each Google property.
  • Results: By combining this incredible reach and creative canvas with Google’s understanding of intent, you can be confident you’re anticipating what your customers want and delivering the results you care about.
  • Unmatched reach: Reach hundreds of millions of people across the YouTube home feed, the Gmail Promotions and Social tabs, and the feed-in Discover using a single campaign.

“Discovery has created a great opportunity for us to easily drive growth at scale for our brands beyond what we thought was possible with Google,” says Daniel Pahl, VP of Media and Acquisition at TechStyle. “It’s definitely outperformed my expectations in driving high-value leads and signups. We’re now able to inspire a completely new audience to action.”

Indeed, high-quality creative can be a great way to showcase your brand and set your products and services apart by highlighting what it’s like to use them. That’s why later this year we’re launching Gallery ads: a new search ads format that brings more of your content to the Search results page. By combining search intent with a more interactive visual format, gallery ads make it easier for you to communicate what your brand has to offer. We’ve found that, on average, ad groups including one or more gallery ad have up to 25 percent more interactions—paid clicks or swipes—at the absolute top of the mobile Search results page.

And when it comes to getting ideas and inspiration, hundreds of millions of people enter shopping-related queries on Google each day. According to our data, about 60% of those shopping queries are from users browsing a category or brand – like “Max Mara dress” or “living room decor ideas.” So today, we’re bringing Showcase Shopping ads—a highly visual ad format that incorporates rich lifestyle imagery into your Shopping ads—to even more surfaces like Google Images and the feed on Discover—places where we know people are looking for inspiration and ideas.

The new Google Shopping

This year we’re unveiling a redesigned Google Shopping experience with new, immersive ways for shoppers to discover and compare millions of products from thousands of stores. When they’re ready to buy, they can choose to purchase online, in a nearby store, and now directly on Google. For retailers and brands, it brings together ads, local and transactions in one place to help them connect with consumers across their shopping journey.

Shoppers will have a personalized homepage on the Shopping tab where they can filter based on features they care about and brands they love, read reviews, and even watch videos about the products. For example, if they’re looking for headphones, they can filter for wireless and the brand they’re looking for.

The blue shopping cart on the item shows shoppers they can purchase what they want with simple returns and customer support, backed by a Google guarantee. People can buy confidently, knowing Google is there to help if they don’t get what they were expecting, their order is late, or they have issues getting a refund. With this new experience, we’re merging the best of Google Express with Google Shopping.

If you’re a Shopping Actions merchant, your products will automatically be part of this new easy purchase experience on Google Shopping, Google.com and the Google Assistant. Later this year, we’ll expand Shopping Actions to other Google surfaces including YouTube and Google Images.

Frictionless Mobile Experiences

For many of you, your businesses span mobile web and apps, and directing your customer to the right experience is critical to acquiring new customers and building loyalty with existing ones.

That’s why, over the next few weeks, we’ll enable app deep linking from Google Ads and offer more robust reporting across web and apps. Your app users will be taken directly from your Search, Display and Shopping ads directly to the relevant page in your mobile app, if they have your app already installed. This means your customers will be able to complete their desired action—buy something, book a trip or order food delivery—in a way that’s optimized for the destination that drives the highest value for your brand. This delivers a better experience for your loyal customers while improving insight and measurement for you.

Early tests have been promising—on average, deep linked ad experiences drove 2X the conversion rates.

Magalu, one of Brazil’s largest retail companies, is seeing the benefits of this first-hand. Magalu recognized that its app was growing in popularity. By enabling deep linking, loyal customers who tapped on a Magalu ad were taken directly to the mobile app they already have installed, resulting in more than 40 percent growth in overall mobile purchases.

Tune in to see more!

Join us today at 9am PT (12pm ET) for even more announcements, consumer insights, and in-depth looks at how to use our latest products. Whether you’re joining us in San Francisco or watching at home on the live stream, we’re grateful and honored to be on this journey with you. See you at Google Marketing Live!

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Help Influence And Understand How Your Products Appear On Google

January 7, 2019 by

Shoppers turn to Google to find products that are just right for them. And you rely on Google Manufacturer Center to ensure your products are represented well. In fact, more than 5,000 brands use Manufacturer Center to improve their presence on Google. To kick off the new year, we’re making those interactions even better by introducing new ways to show high-quality and inspirational content to shoppers and providing robust analytics to help you better understand how customers are interacting with your brands and products across all of Google.

A new place to inspire shoppers and promote your products

Shoppers are constantly looking for inspiration and assistance on what to buy. In a Google study of ~1,600 people, we found that 56 percent of smartphone users have purchased from an unexpected brand when they considered the brand helpful. To help you assist your customers and highlight your product’s unique features, we’re launching a new section on Shopping product detail pages, featuring content directly from you.

You’ll be able to:

  • Populate your product pages on the Google Shopping property with inspirational and high quality content.
  • Highlight the product features and capabilities that you know your shoppers care about the most.
  • Build brand equity directly with shoppers on Google (Google remains the first place shoppers go to get helpful recommendations and suggestions on what to buy according to an online survey of ~2,700 recent online shoppers).

As our first launch partner, Syndigo (formerly Webcollage) is providing this content for eligible manufacturers’ products. Across the web, Syndigo has seen 10 percent more conversions for their clients when more visual content is shown at retailers based on an A/B test. In the coming months, all manufacturers who upload content like inspirational imagery and high quality logos into Manufacturer Center will also be able to provide these more visual experiences to help shoppers.

If you’re a data partner who wants to bring this experience on Google to your clients, let us know here.

Make better business decisions with new insightful analytics

To help you make better business decisions, we’ve also launched new and improved analytics in Manufacturer Center that will provide you a better understanding of how ads for your products are performing on Google. You will learn how ads for your products appear, so you can make better pricing, digital ad investment, and media decisions. You’ll find:

  • Performance trends like top performing product groups and significant changes in performance or price.
  • Insights on product variants like top search terms for your products and average price trends.
  • Product group stats like which competitor’s brands and products appear most often with yours.

These new analytics are available to all brands in Manufacturer Center that meet eligibility requirements.

Manufacturer Center availability expands

In 2018, we’ve expanded Manufacturer Center availability from seven countries to 24 countries. Now, if you sell products in these countries, you can better represent your products to shoppers, improve the performance of Shopping ads featuring your products, and access these new, more helpful analytics. We hope these updates will help shoppers find the products perfect for them and help you better connect with your customers. To learn more about Manufacturer Center, to read success stories, and to sign up, visit our website.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

How To Help Shoppers Looking For Inspiration This Holiday

September 13, 2018 by

Gone are the days where shoppers had one specific gift in mind. Today, they’re asking brands to help inspire them. Our research also shows that 61 percent of shoppers are open to buying from new retailers during the holiday season—and in the 2017 holiday season 46 percent of them actually did.

That’s a huge number of consumers looking to uncover new brands and products or re-discover old favorites. But with so much choice at their fingertips, shoppers need help cutting through the clutter and feeling confident in their choices.

A recent study shows that Google is the first place US shoppers go to discover or find a new brand or product. That’s why we’re continuing to invest in solutions to drive inspiration and discovery, capture intent, and amplify your message to customers, wherever they’re shopping across Google and the web. So lean back, grab an eggnog (it’s never too early), and learn about how consumers plan to shop this holiday—and how Google can help.

Helping shoppers discover with video in Showcase Shopping Ads

When it comes to finding new products and narrowing down their choices, nearly two-thirds of shoppers say online video has given them ideas for their next purchases, and over 90 percent of these folks say that they’ve discovered new products and brands via YouTube.

Video to Showcase Shopping ads helps shoppers more deeply engage with your products. This is our first retail search ad unit to feature video, designed to help you provide a more immersive, contextual experience for shoppers.  

Video in Showcase Shopping ads is the next addition to the Showcase Shopping ads we launched last year, which let you upload multiple images to a single ad and promote your products through beautiful imagery, descriptions, products, and relevant promotions. Since launch, we’ve seen that the top Showcase slot drives 3.6X higher than average CTR, and Showcase receives 20 percent more conversion credit with first-click attribution. And retailers like Venus Fashion are seeing success with acquiring new customers: 68% of purchases from shoppers who engage with Venus Showcase ads are new.

This format is available to advertisers already running Showcase Shopping ads.

Inspire undecided shoppers with Shoppable Image ads

Curious consumers aren’t just finding inspiration through video. Did you know that more than one-third of holiday shoppers said they searched for images before they went in store to shop? The growth of “street style” and online influencers all show the movement towards looking at lifestyle images for visual inspiration.

Shoppable Images enable you to highlight your shopping ads on curated, published content from our publisher partners. For publishers, it’s a chance for shoppers to be able to purchase seamlessly. For example, a shopper might visit her favorite blog like This Time Tomorrow, and see a selection of visually similar offers after clicking the tag icon in the image. Over the next year, we will continue to roll out this experience to more publishers, as well as pilot new surfaces like Google Image Search, where we also know shoppers go to look for inspiration. 

We hope these updates help you stand out from the crowd and capture undecided shoppers’ attention with inspirational imagery and video. For a look into more consumer trends this season, check out our Think With Google article on holiday 2018 insights.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

New Innovations Remove Friction From Discovering Products In-Store And Online

June 12, 2018 by

Driven by rapid changes in technology and mobile, consumer expectations continue to rise at an unrelenting pace. There are brand new ways for people to find and engage with businesses, and it’s becoming critical for marketers to remove friction at every step of the consumer journey. This morning at Search Marketing Expo Advanced, we made three announcements for marketers and retailers including:

1. New innovations to highlight your physical locations

Almost 80% of shoppers will go in-store when they have an item they want immediately.1 To help capture this demand, we’re expanding affiliate location extensions to video campaigns on YouTube– on top of Search and Display campaigns. This helps brand manufacturers drive and measure foot traffic to nearby retail stores and auto dealers that sell their products. We’ve seen that adding affiliate location extensions to TrueView in-stream and bumper ads can increase the clickthrough rate by over 15%.2

New local catalog ads on Display will also roll out to all advertisers by the end of the month to help shoppers discover what you sell, then visit your store. One-third of shoppers say finding inspiration is something they enjoy most about shopping.3 This interactive experience highlights a hero image and your inventory in an easy-to-scroll, mobile layout that helps shoppers explore your products. It also features in-store availability and detailed pricing information. This new format can complement your traditional print campaigns – including catalogs, flyers, and circulars – with the added audience and measurement benefits of digital ads.

Boulanger is one of the largest electronics and appliances retailers in France. The retail brand had a special promotional event for Spring 2018, so it turned to local catalog ads to boost its sales. Boulanger showcased a cheerful lifestyle image, a message welcoming the season and products carefully curated for local in-store promotion. With help from both click-based and impression-based store visits* (launched in March), the campaign drove over 20K visits to its stores, delivering a return of 42 times its investment on ad spend.

*Store visits are estimates based on aggregated, anonymized data from a sample set of users who have turned on Location History.

Onboarding to both local catalog ads and local inventory ads is now much easier for retailers of all sizes with the new local feed partnership program. The new program allows point-of-sale or inventory data providers, like Cayan, Pointy, Linx, and receipts, to provide sales and inventory data to Google on behalf of merchants, so they don’t have to create their own local product feeds. As an additional benefit, retailers can showcase their local inventory for free on the “See What’s In Store” feature on the search knowledge panel.

2. Competitive pricing insights to help deliver better sales results

Beyond availability of products in store, we know that price is also a top consideration for consumers. New price benchmarks in AdWords reporting will be available soon to show Shopping advertisers how other retailers are pricing the same products. You can use these pricing insights to inform your bidding strategy when you have price-competitive products to promote, to influence pricing strategy with your merchandising teams, or to troubleshoot performance drops due to competitors’ pricing.

For example, let’s say you find that you’re selling a sweater for $40 while most retailers are selling the same sweater for $60. You may choose to bid upon this sweater because your product is more price-competitive in the current market and will appeal to more potential customers.

3. Updates for our Shopping Actions program

Consumers continue to be open to new ways of discovering and buying products. Today at SMX Advanced, we shared an update on Shopping Actions, the program we launched in March to give consumers an easy way to complete the purchase from retailers, while on Google platforms like Search, the Assistant, or by voice.

Since its launch, thousands of retailers have requested to join through our interest form, and more than 70 retailers are live on the program today. Early testing indicates that participating retailers on average see an increase in total clicks and conversions at a lower overall cost per click and conversion, compared to running Shopping ads alone.4

As always, SMX Advanced is an exciting event that brings leading marketers together. We hope you’ll join us in our Learn with Google Classroom to connect and hear more about how these new products can help you grow your business.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Product Ratings On Shopping Ads Now Available Globally

December 5, 2017 by

Since we introduced product ratings, we’ve been working on new ways to help you gather feedback about your products and drive more qualified traffic to your site. Today, we’re making product ratings available in all markets where Google Shopping is present.

Product ratings appear in the form of stars and review counts on Shopping ads. This 5-star rating system represents aggregated review data for the product, compiled from multiple sources including merchants, third-party aggregators, editorial sites and users.

How to enable product ratings on Shopping ads

If you have a Merchant Center account for your store, you’ve already taken the first step towards displaying Product Ratings. Once you sign up and satisfy the program requirements, you can begin uploading Product Ratings feeds to your Merchant Center account. Alternatively, you may want to work with one of our approved third-party aggregators.

Additionally, you can now collect reviews about the products you sell through Google Customer Reviews. Whenever your shoppers complete a purchase, we’ll ask them about their shopping experience with your store, as well as the product they purchased. The reviews collected about their shopping experience will contribute to your seller rating and, the product reviews collected can make you eligible to show product ratings. To learn more about how to use Google Customer Reviews to collect product reviews, see here.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Google Manufacturer Center Rolls Out International Expansion, API Updates, And New Content Discovery Opportunities To Help You Better Showcase Your Brand Online

November 29, 2017 by

With the launch of self-sign up earlier this year, thousands of top brands and manufacturers have already begun using Google Manufacturer Center to enhance their product’s images, descriptions, and variants in Shopping ads. Today, we’re excited to announce new ways to help brands — both in the US and abroad — manage their data more easily and provide a more consistent brand experience on Google and across the web.

Manufacturer Center expands to more countries

To help brands abroad, we’ve expanded availability for Manufacturer Center to the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, France, Brazil, and the Netherlands. Now, brands with products sold in these markets can use Manufacturer Center to best represent their products to shoppers, access unique analytics and insights, and improve the performance of Shopping ads featuring their products.

Increase opportunities to highlight your products’ best features and benefits

Shoppers are constantly looking for information, trying to ensure the product they ultimately choose is the perfect fit for their needs. Information from Manufacturer Center now appears in Google Knowledge Panels in the US, highlighting core product features to shoppers at key decision-making stages. With descriptions, images, features, and more directly supplied by you, the manufacturer, shoppers will be better informed and feel more confident choosing your branded products.

Manage product information programmatically with the Manufacturer Center API

We know that manually uploading, editing, deleting, and distributing product data can make it difficult to keep up with a brand’s ever-changing product assortment, and using feeds may not offer the desired level of control. With the launch of the Manufacturer Center API, brands (or their 3rd party data partners) can streamline product data updates in the following ways:

  • Add new products directly to Manufacturer Center.
  • Update existing products in Manufacturer Center with the most current product data.
  • Delete products from an existing Manufacturer Center account.
  • Monitor data quality and review product data errors to optimize a brand’s presence on Google.
  • Surface Google’s product data feedback in external data management tools.
  • Streamline product data updates and syndication to Google by creating custom workflows compliant with data management policies and procedures.

To get started with the Manufacturer Center API, check out the Developer’s Guide and Portal article here.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

New Reporting To Show How Often Your Shopping Ad Is In The Top Spot

August 31, 2017 by

The holiday season is right around the corner – are your Shopping campaigns prepared to maximize increased shopping traffic? To help you get a head start identifying product data gaps and measuring your competitiveness in Shopping campaigns, we’re rolling out product status reporting and absolute top impression share.

Recover potentially lost Shopping traffic

If your Shopping campaign includes products not eligible to serve, that means disapprovals could be affecting the number of shopping results you show up on. See how many of your products are ready to serve by adding product status reporting to reporting charts in the ‘product’ and ‘product groups’ page. For example, a dip in ‘products ready to serve’ means your products are no longer eligible to participate in the auction.

A new diagnostics report in the products page helps identify your aggregate product status, like products ‘ready to serve’ or ‘disapproved.’ Add performance columns like Clicks and Conversions to the report to prioritize where product updates can make the biggest impact on lost traffic. Click on each product status to see more details on how to fix the issues immediately. Alternatively, you can also view a full list of affected products directly in AdWords from the report. Develop a routine cadence to go through your Shopping campaigns and identify the top-performing products not eligible for auction as product details frequently change, especially with the peak holiday season coming up.

New metric shows how often your Shopping ad is in the top spot

Now that your products are eligible to serve, it’s time get them in front of shoppers. The left-most ad on mobile Shopping results get up to 3X more engagement from shoppers1; impressions in this position are called “absolute top” impressions. To see the percentage of time you’re showing in this top position, use absolute top impression share (Search abs. top IS column in AdWords).

Absolute top impression share is the number of “absolute top” impressions you received in Shopping results over the total times you could’ve been in the top impression.

For instance, if you showed up as the “absolute top” in 8 search results but were eligible for 20 results, then your absolute top impression share would be 40%. If you have a high absolute top impression share, it means your products often appear at the top position in Google Shopping results. “Absolute top” impressions include ads from the Shopping carousel on Google search results are available for both Shopping ads and Local Inventory Ads.

You can use this metric to optimize seasonal campaigns and get in front of more shoppers. Let’s say you sell kitchenware and plan to have a holiday sale on pots and pans. Separate out the sale products into their own product group. Monitor it for two days and adjust bids upwards if you need to make your ads more prominent. Also review absolute top impression share by device at the ad group level. You can optimize an underperforming device audience by increasing the bid modifier. Ad quality is the other factor in growing your absolute top impression share; include high quality images, relevant product titles, and the correct GTINs across your inventory to improve the quality.
To monitor your impact in key categories, you also can combine absolute top impression share with other competitive metrics such as click share. By increasing both metrics, you’re claiming more of shoppers’ attention.

The diagnostics report and absolute top impression share are available starting today in the new Adwords experience2.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Google Manufacturer Center Opens Self-Sign Up, Letting Even More Manufacturers Elevate Their Brands Online

February 27, 2017 by

Many brands and manufacturers rely on individual retailers to showcase and sell their products; however, this can make distributing and monitoring manufacturer product information complicated, as those retailers may not always have the most accurate and up-to-date product details. In 2015, we launched Google Manufacturer Center to enable these brands to offer enhanced product images, descriptions, and variants for a more consistent brand experience across Google. Since then, thousands of brands have taken advantage of the tool to best represent their products to shoppers, to access unique analytics and insights — and ultimately — to improve the performance of Shopping ads featuring their products.

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of self-sign up for Manufacturer Center, which will allow even more brands to manage their product information across Google. Now, brands can set up their accounts in a matter of minutes and start submitting authoritative, detailed, and rich product information (including images, titles, descriptions, videos, and more) to help their products stand out in a crowded marketplace — whether shoppers are looking for inspiration, to compare products, or to make a purchase.

Below, we’re highlighting two recent success stories from leading brands that are investing in rich product content to best showcase their products to shoppers on Google.

Johnson & Johnson drives a premium brand experience with high-quality product images

Johnson & Johnson, manufacturer of popular household brands such as Band-Aid, Neutrogena, and more, has been uploading rich product data to Manufacturer Center over the past year.

“Google Manufacturer Center provides us as brand manufacturers, the ability to influence product experiences, drive purchase decisions, and surface high quality and accurate product information, content, and product imagery,” said Faisal Rangwala, Senior Manager of eCommerce Strategy at Johnson & Johnson.

Johnson & Johnson is driving a premium search experience for products such as their light therapy acne treatment mask, by uploading more accurate and descriptive data.

As a result, when compared to category benchmarks, Johnson & Johnson realized:

  • A 22% increase in impressions, helping even more customers discover their brand through search results
  • A 27% increase in clicks, engaging more potential customers with their retailers’ Shopping ads.

Safavieh gains impressions and qualified clicks by uploading better product data

International home furnishings company Safavieh submitted data to Manufacturer Center to better showcase their collections through Shopping Ads. Prior to their participation in Manufacturer Center, they relied on retail partners to submit product information to Google. As a result, they often found that their products were displayed in Google Shopping search results without the most up-to-date images, product attributes, videos or detailed descriptions.
“Manufacturer Center has provided us with a great way of engaging our customers with more accurate, useful information. We can’t say enough about how being part of Google Manufacturer Center is helping to drive more traffic to our website, our retail partners’ websites, and ultimately greater sales for our products.” said Arash Yaraghi, CEO at Safavieh.

With Manufacturer Center, Safavieh has captured consumer attention by providing more enhanced content, so when a consumer searches for “rugs”, Safavieh can showcase multiple high-resolution zoomable images, YouTube videos, and longer descriptions.

By uploading richer content and videos to improve their Shopping ads, when compared to category benchmarks, Safavieh achieved:

  • A 46% increase in impressions, improving product discoverability on Google
  • A 35% increase in clicks, with users spending more time on retailer’s sites

Getting started with Manufacturer Center

Once brands open their account, they can upload their product data directly to Manufacturer Center or work with a data partner that can streamline their product data submission to Google. A list of our approved Google Shopping data partners can be seen on our partner page. To learn more about Manufacturer Center or to sign up, visit our website.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Shoppers Gobble Up In-Store Black Friday Deals On Mobile

November 28, 2016 by

As another Black Friday weekend wraps, we saw super shoppers continue to turn to their devices for ideas and information as well as use them as a “door-to-the-store.” In fact, Black Friday had the highest mobile shopping searches of any day during Thanksgiving week this year. Thanksgiving Day was a close second, with searches peaking at 8:00 p.m.1

Further, shoppers across the U.S. turned to mobile to not only find the best deals online but also to discover the best deals in-store: Rhode Island and Delaware had the most local shopping search interest  — searches that contained “near me,” hours and stores — of any states in the nation.2

This strong link between the online and physical world lives beyond the holidays too, and store visits reporting in AdWords is helping advertisers understand it year round. In fact, in just under two years, advertisers globally have measured over 3 billion store visits. 
What else did we see in stores over the holiday weekend? Store foot traffic jumped 65% on Black Friday, compared to an average weekend day in November, showing that consumers still care about going into stores for holiday shopping. Clothing, toy, and electronic stores were all popular destinations. Clothing stores and toy stores saw more than double the foot traffic on Black Friday compared to an average weekend day in November.3

Electronics stores were particularly popular, with more than double the foot traffic on Thanksgiving Day and more than triple the foot traffic on Black Friday, compared to an average weekend day in November.4 That makes sense given electronics, including the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sony PS4 Pro, are topping shoppers’ gift lists this year.5

Popular Times feature in Google Maps: Live store foot traffic on Black Friday in Best Buy as indicated by pink bar 

Shoppers also spent more time in stores. For example, in electronics stores, they typically spent between 35 minutes and 1.5 hours on Black Friday compared to 25 minutes on an average day in November. Shopping malls showed a similar increase in visit duration compared to the average day in November.6

To get deeper insight into store visits performance, visit the AdWords Help Center and learn about two new distance and location reports coming soon that will help you understand where your store visits come from.

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

Ecommerce Marketing | Google Marketing

Introducing The New Google Merchant Center

August 30, 2016 by

Retailers have long been using Merchant Center to connect their product data to Google — letting millions of shoppers find their products on Google.com, YouTube, and partner websites. Today, we’re excited to introduce an updated version of Merchant Center, which offers the same functionality you’re used to, with more streamlined navigation and easier access to additional Shopping programs.

Navigate the new Merchant Center 

With updates to Merchant Center, you’ll see a fast, responsive new interface, aligned with the modern look and feel of the rest of Google’s products. We’ve changed Merchant Center navigation by bundling common tasks and actions. For example, you can use the new Home page to view recent announcements and dashboard data for your account, and you can find consolidated product feed and product data quality information under the Products page. For more information on navigating the new UI, visit the Help Center.

Explore and enable Shopping programs in Merchant Center 

Merchant Center now lets you discover new ways to apply your data to promote and sell your products. Use Merchant Center to explore additional Google programs for your products, including Local Inventory Ads, Merchant Promotions, Product Ratings, and more, while continuing to manage and configure your product data for Shopping ads.

You can access the Merchant Center Programs page under the 3-dot icon. Continue exploring the various programs by selecting the Learn More option in each card, and express your interest in participating in a program by selecting Get Started.

Updates to existing features: Feed Rules, Diagnostics, and Currency Conversions 

In addition to the user interface changes, we’ve updated some of our most-used Merchant Center features to improve speed and functionality, helping you get your products online more quickly:

  • Feed Rules. In response to feedback we’ve heard from you, we’re updating Feed Rules to more closely align with how we see retailers commonly using the tool today. 
    • Change or update specific values. For example, you can update specific values of the color attribute while keeping other existing color values intact. 
    • Create new values by combining static values and/or values from different attributes in your feed. For example, you can add size type values to your product title values. 
    • Extract values from other attribute values. For example, you can populate a color value by searching in the description attribute for pre-selected values (blue, green, red, yellow) that will be suitable for the color attribute. 
  • Diagnostics page. We’ve increased the freshness of data in the diagnostics page. Now, the latest results from your feed uploads and product updates will be displayed in near-real time instead of twice a day — meaning that you’ll have fresher data to update and optimize your product feeds. 
  • Currency Conversions. Last month, we announced that we were testing currency conversions, which allows you to convert the currency in your product data locally. With the launch of the new Merchant Center, we’re expanding this feature more broadly to let you easily advertise to users in other countries, while allowing you to continue using your existing website and landing pages without change. Learn how Berlin-based myToys is already using currency conversions to increase their sales abroad. 

Source: Official Google Webmasters Blog

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