Tag Archives: Shopping Ads

How to help shoppers looking for inspiration this holiday

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.

Wayfair Video Showcase Shopping

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. 

Shoppable Images

Left: Shoppable Images publisher experience

Right: Image Search experience mock

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.



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

2 Google internal data, 2018

Source: Google Ads


Google Manufacturer Center opens self-sign up, letting even more manufacturers elevate their brands online

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.

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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.

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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: Google Ads


New innovations remove friction from discovering products in store and online

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 clickthrough rate by over 15%.2

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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.

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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 yReceipts, 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.

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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 up on this sweater because your product is more price-competitive in the current market and will appeal to more potential customers.

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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 launchedin 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

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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.


1. Google/Ipsos, U.S., “Shopping Tracker,” Online survey, n=3,613 online Americans 13+ who shopped in the past two days, Oct.–Dec. 2017
2. YouTube Internal Data, US, CA, UK, DE, AU, November 2017
3. Google/Ipsos, “Shopping Tracker”, October-December 2017, Online survey, US, n=3,613 online Americans 13+ who shopped in the past two days
4. Google internal data, Feb - June 2018

Source: Google Ads


Drive sales and reach more customers with new Shopping campaigns

Shoppers are looking for and researching products across all devices in more ways than ever before: searching online, watching product review videos, reading blog posts, browsing in apps, reading product ratings, etc. Each of these moments creates a new opportunity for you to get your product in front of a potential customer. Yet, it’s a challenge to manage across channels, products, technology, and data to reach today’s customers - all while trying to hit your marketing objectives.


Introducing Shopping campaigns that are goal-optimized


The next generation of Shopping campaigns empowers you to tackle this challenge head-on by tapping into the power of automation and machine learning to maximize your conversion value. For example, if you’ve defined your conversion value to be “revenue,” the goal-optimized campaign type will automatically optimize across networks to maximize “revenue” based on your budget constraints. The new Shopping campaign type also combines the channels previously available through separate Shopping and display remarketing campaigns into one campaign so you can maximize your reach and simplify campaign management.

While standard Shopping campaigns will continue to provide a more manual option, the new Shopping campaign type offers a fully-automated solution to drive sales and reach more customers. Managing your Shopping campaigns has never been easier.


Drive conversion value with automation and machine learning


Combined with signals like intent and context, there are a vast number of variables to consider when making important optimization decisions. The new Shopping campaign type is automatically goal-optimized and will take the guesswork out of your day-to-day optimizations to deliver your marketing goal, whether it’smaximizing conversion value or maximizing conversion value at a specific return on ad spend (ROAS). Our systems will evaluate all available signals and use machine learning to predict the likelihood of a search query to convert so you can make the most of your budget across networks, products, and audiences.


Find more customers with unparalleled reach


The new Shopping campaign type combines Shopping and display remarketing campaigns to deliver your ads across Google’s entire suite of sites and networks. Reach relevant and valuable potential customers while they’re looking at content across Google.com, the Google Search Network, the Google Display Network, YouTube, and Gmail.

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Save time and resources through the new one-stop Shopping campaign type


With just one feed, one campaign, and one remarketing tag, all you need to do is add your products into the new goal-optimized campaign type. You won’t need to manage separate Shopping and display remarketing campaigns anymore. No further campaign set-up, manual optimization or tedious account maintenance are needed. This new Shopping campaign type will automatically optimize your bids, identify the right audiences, and determine where your ads show to maximize your conversion value. We’ll do the heavy lifting so you’ll be able to focus on more strategic initiatives.
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Promising results with early retail partners


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Brazil-based Newlentes offers high-quality contact lenses at affordable prices with recognized reliability. As a pioneer in technology, they were excited to incorporate more automation and machine learning to drive better results. They launched the new Shopping campaign type, which resulted in 57% more revenue at a 61% higher return on ad spend (ROAS).

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Turkey-based n11.com is an e-commerce platform that offers a wide range of apparel, electronics, and houseware products. Since they saw positive results with Universal App Campaigns, they were excited to use the new Shopping campaign type to improve performance. As a result, n11.com saw 23% more revenue at a 9% higher return on ad spend (ROAS).

Ready to get started?


The next generation of Shopping campaigns allow you to harness the power of automation and data-driven machine learning to maximize conversion value. It’s the first of many steps to empower retailers with tools to reach more customers in today’s age of assistance. The new campaign type will be available in AdWords over the next few weeks. Learn more.

Source: Google Ads