In three weeks, consumers will have their devices in hand and be ready to line up at stores to continue their holiday shopping over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Will you be ready? We’ve made a list of recommendations and hope you’ll check it twice to help you dial up holiday performance. See our first pro tip below and check back next week for what’s next on the list.

Pro tip #1: Help shoppers discover more of your products through Merchant Center

The holiday season continues to be an important time for retail marketers and is growing more competitive every year. According to Mastercard Advisors, retail had its largest season ever ($853 billion) last year with ecommerce sales reaching their strongest growth in over a decade, at an 18.4 percent increase from the year before.

And while this year’s holiday shopping season is a week shorter than last year, there’s good news for marketers: research shows the period to influence shoppers starts earlier and extends longer than ever. 

To help you reach these eager shoppers, we’re introducing new features in Merchant Center to help you promote and sell your products this holiday season:

• Expand your feeds to show on Shopping ads in 50+ new markets

• Quickly upload your products globally through automated feeds

• Strengthen your reviews with user-generated images for Product Ratings

• Easily manage your inventory with the new Merchant Center experience and automatic image improvements

Reach more holiday shoppers around the world

70 percent of global consumers made at least one crossborder purchase according to a recent Pitney Bowes report. Promote the products you sell and find better qualified leads by putting your products in front of people searching on Google around the world. With Shopping ads now available in more than 50 new markets, and 95 total markets, you can expand your global footprint more than ever.

Start showing your products globally with multi-country feeds, which allow you to target multiple countries that share the same language by using a single feed in that language. For example, if you upload product information in German for Germany, those products may be automatically available to show in other German-speaking countries, such as Austria and Switzerland. You’ll just need to set up shipping and location targeting for these countries in your Shopping campaign in order to start promoting your products in these new countries.

If you don’t already have a feed, you can submit your products more quickly with automated feeds, available in all Shopping ads countries starting in November. Simply enable Merchant Center to crawl your website for structured data and extract your most up-to-date product information for your initial feed. 

Turn browsers into buyers with more visual reviews

A recent Google/Ipsos study shows that Google is the first place consumers go to research a purchase they plan to make. But beyond turning to search to read product reviews, shoppers are increasingly becoming inspired by images, with 50 percent of digital shoppers saying images helped them decide what to buy, according to Google’s Consumer Survey this year. 

To help shoppers feel more confident in their purchases, we’re introducing user-generated images in product reviews on Shopping ads. You can now include review images in your product review feeds, allowing customers to visually connect with what you sell through pictures of previous customers wearing or using your products. 

To get started, see our updated schema documentation, and ensure all images you submit are compliant with our policies for user-generated images. You can sign up for the Product Ratings program here. This experience is currently available on mobile in the US, with plans to expand across more Google properties and countries over the coming months. 

Manage your inventory across Google more easily

The new Merchant Center experience has been redesigned with clearer workflows, simpler navigation, and more program insights. You can use the updated interface to easily manage your products, like enabling automatic image improvements to remove promotional overlays on your product images to comply with Merchant Center policies. You can also discover additional opportunities to promote and sell your products. 

For example, you can opt your inventory into surfaces across Google in the US and India to allow your products to show across Google for free, including rich snippets in search results and product annotations in Google images. Surfaces across Google will be coming to additional countries before the end of the year.

Ready to get started? Get more tips and best practices for driving holiday sales.

A recent study shows that Google is the first place US shoppers go to discover or find a new brand or product. But shoppers aren’t just doing their searches on Google.com. We’ve seen that 50 percent of online shoppers said images of the product inspired them to purchase, and increasingly, they’re turning to Google Images.

That’s why we’re investing in shopping solutions across more of our properties, like Google Images. When we launched Shopping ads on Google Images, we wanted to provide advertisers with a new way to reach shoppers where they’re looking for more visual inspiration. Now, we’re introducing shoppable ads on Google Images as another way we’re helping you connect with consumers. This new format enables you to highlight multiple products available for sale within your sponsored ad among Google Images results. We’re currently testing this on a small percentage of traffic with select retailers, surfacing on broad queries like “home office ideas”, “shower tile designs”, and “abstract art”.

Let’s say a shopper is searching for home office ideas on her mobile device or desktop and goes to Google Images to explore ideas around how to organize her room. She can scroll through the images, hover over any sponsored ad with the price tag, and see the items for sale in the image -- along with prices, the brand, and more. We’ll continue to roll this out to more categories across more retailers over the next few months.  

Moreover, advertisers have been benefiting from Showcase Shopping ads, which lets you promote your brand and products through beautiful imagery, descriptions, and relevant promotions. Since launch, thousands of retailers and brands in 17 countries are running Showcase Shopping ads to reach new customers in their inspiration phase. Now, we’re bringing Showcase Shopping ads to Google Images as well, offering shoppers a more inspirational and rich visual experience.

And last month, we shared that we’re expanding Merchant Center as a platform to power shopping experiences beyond advertising on surfaces across Google. Now, in addition to using markup solutions that we've long had available, retailers can provide product data to Google, free of charge, so that we can start showing more of your product information to potential shoppers.

Today’s consumers are interacting with us across a multitude of touchpoints, searching and asking for ideas. To help inspire them, we’re continually thinking of ways to create better shopping experiences. And, we want to continue partnering with retailers like you so we can help consumers in these moments that will drive them to the final purchase.

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 inspire your customers and highlight your products’ 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 Google Shopping 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, WebCollage is providing this content for eligible manufacturers’ products. Across the web, WebCollage 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.

People crave deals and promotions when shopping for their loved ones over the holidays. In fact, according to the National Retail Federation, one-third of shoppers said that all of their holiday weekend purchases were driven specifically by promotions (+11.4 percent YoY). Google's recent study with Ipsos shows that 57 percent of holiday shoppers say promotions/coupons are an important part of their holiday shopping. That’s why we’re excited to bring the Merchant Promotions program to Shopping Actions.

Merchant Promotions allows you to run online promotions for the products you sell on Google. When you add promotions to your Shopping Actions inventory, shoppers see the promotion (like 10% off) wherever your product shows up on Google Express. This can increase the appeal of your offer and encourage shoppers to buy. In fact, one of our pilot merchants saw an average of 9.4% increase in conversions (add to cart) and 9.5% increase in GMV per session when they added promotions to their offers.

Get started

First, join the promotions program by filling out this form. Once approved, there are two ways Shopping Actions merchants can link inventory to promotions:

1. Manually in Merchant Center by selecting Shopping Actions in the promotions tool in the promotions section of your account. If you’re already running eligible promotions for your Shopping Ads, it’s as simple as checking the Shopping Actions button.

2. By creating a Promotions feed and setting the promotions destination attribute to “Shopping Actions”. If you already run promotions for Shopping Ads, simply update the promotions destination attribute in the promotions feed to include Shopping Actions.

Interested in joining or leaning more about Shopping Actions? Fill out our interest form. We look forward to helping you reach more shoppers throughout the holidays and beyond!

With the world of commerce at their fingertips, consumers are more curious, more demanding and more impatient than ever before. As a result, retailers have to anticipate customers’ needs in order to provide the products they’re looking for and plan marketing strategies. In a recent study, we learned that 84 percent of Americans are shopping in any given 48-hour period, in up to six different categories.¹ Whether they’re looking up designer sneakers or DSLR cameras, Google is the first place they go to discover a new brand or product.²

Starting today, a new version of our Shopping Insights tool can help you uncover which products and brands are popular, trending up or down, and how these insights vary by regions in the U.S. This new version includes data for more than 55,000 products and 45,000 brands—significantly increasing coverage over the previous version—as well as nearly 5,000 categories. It’s a free tool, available to everyone, that can help you follow trends in your categories.

In addition to more data, we’ve also added several key features to help you inform your strategies.

Compare the popularity of a brand within searches for a category

Nearly nine out of 10 smartphone users are not absolutely certain of the brand they want to buy when they begin looking for information online.³ That’s a huge number of consumers looking to uncover new brands and products. With this new feature, retailers can track the relative popularity of various brands within a category and adjust their strategies accordingly.

For example, the most-searched backpack brands of last 12 months were JanSport, Fjällräven and The North Face, classic brands that have been around for at least 50 years. Searches for the category and all three brands peaked during back-to-school season in 2018, and saw slight growth during the holiday season.

But if you reset your time range in Shopping Insights to the holiday season in 2017 (see below), you’ll find that a very different brand was popular in search. MCM, a luxury brand that specializes in “street luxe”–a fashion trend popular among millennial shoppers–was the most-searched brand when consumers were shopping for backpacks. It continued to grow in December, even when searches for other brands were tailing off, peaking on December 25. In fact, MCM was also the only luxury brand in the top 10. By tracking this data weekly, marketers can optimize their tactics in season, and respond to changing consumer preferences within different categories.

You can also use Shopping Insights to understand the relative importance of brands within different categories, and how consumers search for products. In the example above, while MCM was the most searched brand, the top three brands were only mentioned in ~8 percent of the queries. This means most users were searching using keywords that described the category and characteristics of the products they were looking for, rather than specific brands.

Subscribe to personalized reports with weekly and monthly trends

You can now create up to 10 weekly and monthly email reports for the products and categories you want to follow, so you don’t miss current or future trends. We’ll send you additional data on popular, growing and trending products and brands. For example, in our monthly category reports, we determine which products are trending up or down by removing noise and seasonality effects from the product’s search volume. In weekly reports, you can see which products grew the most in the previous week, as well as any outliers.

Getting started with Shopping Insights

1. Google/Ipsos, “Shopping Tracker,” Oct - Dec 2017, Online survey, US, n=3,613 online Americans 13+ who shopped in the past two days.

2. Google/Ipsos, “Shopping Tracker”,April - June 2018, Online survey, US, n=2703 adults 18+ who shopped in the past two days

3. Google / Ipsos Connect, Jan. 2018, Playbook Omnibus 2018, n=1,604 US online smartphone users, A18+