Google Data

Great product data is at the core of what drives successful Product Listing Ads (PLAs). As you’re preparing your Shopping campaigns for the upcoming holiday season, it’s important to ensure that your data is free of issues so your products are shown to shoppers. To help identify issues with your product data, we’re excited to introduce the Diagnostics tab in Google Merchant Center.

The Diagnostics tab provides consolidated issue reporting for your Merchant Center account, feeds, and items. Through this tab, which replaces the Data Quality tab, you gain better insight into the health of your product data, making it easier and faster to prioritize key issues and get your products online.

The new Diagnostics tab also features new reporting tools to find:

• A historic overview of item eligibility status to spot and investigate changes that have caused recent item disapprovals
• A downloadable report containing all affected items and the reasons for disapprovals
• Traffic and impact metrics to help you identify how many items are currently impacted by specific issues

Try out the new Diagnostics tab today in your Merchant Center account. To learn more about changes to the tab, visit our Help Center.

Posted by Tom Beyer and Sven Herschel, Product Management, Google Shopping

Two years ago, we launched Merchant Promotions to retailers in the US, enabling them to show promotions alongside Product Listing Ads on Google search results and Google Shopping. Based on positive feedback, we’re excited to make Merchant Promotions available to retailers in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia and India.

Example of Merchant Promotions on Product Listing Ads on Google.com

Example of Merchant Promotions on Google Shopping

Participating US retailers have seen improved performance from their Product Listing Ads. For example, Venus’s PLAs with Merchant Promotions had a seven percent higher clickthrough rate (CTR), a two percent higher conversion rate, and an 11 percent lower cost-per-click (CPC) than their standard PLAs. Read more about Venus’ success with Merchant Promotions here.

Get started with Merchant Promotions
If you’re interested in learning more about Merchant Promotions or planning on running promotions this holiday season, please review this Getting Started Guide and fill out the interest form to get in touch with our team.

Posted by Christina Ilvento, Product Manager, Google Shopping

The Internet gives us more to look at every day: more information, more reviews, more offers. In fact, 49% of customers now visit 2 to 4 sites before they decide to buy¹. One powerful lever to re-engage these qualified customers and close the sale is RLSA.

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Automating your bids with AdWords can deliver better, more informed bids while saving you time.

In order to help people make the most of these strategies, we’ve put together A Bid for Every Auction, our new guide to Google’s automated bidding solutions. This best practices guide is for anyone looking to implement or improve their automated bidding.

This guide covers key topics like:

• An in-depth look at auction-time bidding and why it’s important to take advantage of it 
• Choosing the automated strategy that makes the most sense for your account 
• The best way to test bid automation in your account 
• Making a successful automated campaign perform even better 

If you’re considering taking the plunge with automated bidding, or if you already have and want to improve performance, download our guide or the one-page version of our automated bidding checklist today. Smart automation can lead to better results and more time saved.

Check out these and other Google Best Practices over at g.co/GoogleBP.

A few months ago, we announced ad customizers, a tool for optimizing your ad text and connecting with your customers in real-time. This kicked off a series of Tools for the Power User built to help you simplify campaign management, and act on key business insights at scale.

As the holiday season approaches, advertisers are busy ensuring their campaigns are set up for success, making it more important than ever to manage time-sensitive updates and make changes to your campaigns quickly and efficiently.

This month, we’re turning our focus to scalable and efficient workflow management in AdWords. Our goal is to help you find time-saving ways to manage these tasks at scale using simpler, integrated workflows within AdWords, so you can focus on your core business.

Our workflow tools fall into three core areas:

1. Bulk editing directly within AdWords
Advertisers need to manage multiple campaign tasks directly in the AdWords interface more efficiently. We’ve added new tools for editing your settings and extensions in bulk across your campaigns and ad groups. For example, you can edit location targeting or ad rotation settings across multiple campaigns, or update your ad extensions — like sitelinks, callouts, and apps — to promote your latest holidays deals across hundreds of your ad groups with just a few clicks.

Change multiple sitelinks using the Edit menu in your +Extensions tab

CarsDirect.com was able to add sitelinks across its accounts using the new bulk editing features, and saw a 13% increase in CTR, and 6% decrease in CPC. Allison Query from CarsDirect says, “The bulk feature for ad extensions has been crucial for keeping us competitive in the search results! It has trimmed our work time from hours to minutes.”

You can also take advantage of other existing bulk workflows supported in AdWords to scale your work. Save time by using the copy and paste feature to swiftly copy over your existing keyword lists, ads, and ad groups into your new campaigns.

Advertisers need easier ways to make quick changes offline in spreadsheets, and apply them directly into AdWords where and when they need them. The improvements to bulk uploads include more intuitive spreadsheet formats, in-context options to upload changes directly into the appropriate campaigns and ad groups, and the ability to preview your updates and check for errors before posting them. Now, you can quickly upload new seasonal keywords into your ad groups, update your budgets across several campaigns, and post your changes with confidence because you can review them before you post them.

Review your spreadsheet edits with the preview tool before applying them to your campaigns

3. Advanced tools for more customized changes across your accounts
Earlier this year we launched AdWords Scripts for MCC to help advertisers with more complex editing needs quickly make customized changes across multiple accounts. You can use simple JavaScript code to make cross-account changes, create customized reports, send automated emails, and even pull data into and out of Google Spreadsheets. Learn more.

Many agencies are using AdWords Scripts for MCC to power customized ad text changes across their customers’ accounts, save time, increase relevancy, and improve their ad performance. iProspect uses Adwords Scripts to dynamically insert sitelinks into Cleartrip’s ad units and change their landing pages on the fly, resulting in a 34% increase in CTR and 24% decrease on Cost-of-Acquisition. Performics is using AdWords Scripts for MCC to update ad parameters with real-time discounts across their customer’s accounts. Using MCC scripts for MonShowroom, Performics cut their workflow time by 60%.

These are just some of the tools we’ve created to help you move faster, and make changes at scale across AdWords. Stay tuned as we continue to improve AdWords Editor — another important tool to help with complex changes at scale. New updates are coming soon!

Check out our Hangout on Air on Tuesday, November 4th at 9:30 am PST / 12:30 PM EST to learn how you can put these tools to work in your campaigns.

Posted by Ali Miller, Product Manager, AdWords

The trend of profit-driven marketing continues to gain traction.  Marketers are starting to shift the perception that they should really be viewed as profit drivers instead of cost centers.

Last quarter, we launched two resources to help you drive the conversation about profits from AdWords:

• Leading the Conversation on Profits: An Executive’s Guide to start enabling your teams for profit-driven marketing
• Leading a Conversation on Profits: A Practitioner’s Guide to defining profit and convincing stakeholders that it’s a better KPI

We hope that these guides have started some very interesting discussions across  your organization, most notably around how important marketing’s role is for growth.

To help advertisers bring these conversations to life, we’re excited to share our latest best practices guide called Making a Bid for Profit – Profit-Driven Bidding Tactics with AdWords.

This guide will show you how to:

• Discover profitable opportunities by running manual bid tests
• Find these opportunities faster by testing on a broader scale, and 
• Save time by scaling your bidding strategy so it’s easier to manage. 

Consider this a treasure map for finding untapped profits in your account. Download the guide today.  Happy hunting!

You can check out more Google Best Practices at g.co/GoogleBP.

Posted by Matt Lawson, Director, Performance Ads Marketing

Originally posted on the Google and Your Business Blog

Running a successful small business is about finding and connecting with the right customers. Business owners are increasingly using their smartphones, and so today we are making enhancements to both the Google My Business and the AdWords Express apps. We hope this makes it easier to find the right customers, whether they are looking for you at their desktop computer or on their phone on the go.

See reviews and insights in Google My Business
Nothing makes your day like a great review from a happy customer. Starting today, business owners can see reviews from across the web in the Google My Business Android app (iOS update soon). Business users have told us how much customers appreciate a response, so we are also making it possible to respond to Google reviews in the app, along with real-time alerts if you want to keep a pulse on your reputation online.

Wondering how customers are using their smartphones to get in touch with your business? When people find you on Google, you can see when they call or from where they get driving directions, so you can be prepared for that next manic Monday rush.

Reach new customers with advertising
Finding more of the right customers doesn’t have to wait until you’re at your desk. Over the last few months, we’ve gotten great feedback about how easy it is to advertise with our AdWords Express mobile app, and today we are expanding the Android app to 20 additional countries (iOS coming soon).

When you advertise your business through AdWords Express, you can reach potential customers right when they’re searching for the product or service that you sell. Your top stats for the month are displayed in the Google My Business app, and you can switch over to AdWords Express to see more detail or edit the ad to promote your next big event.

These changes will be rolling out over the next few days, so check back soon if you don’t yet see the updates. For more information about the mobile apps, visit the Google My Business and AdWords Express help centers.

Posted by Abhishek Poddar and Zhouzhou He, Product Managers

We’ve all heard the theories that people who do research online no longer care about the in-store experience … or don’t even go to physical stores any more. Or that shoppers who use a smartphone in a store are looking to buy elsewhere.

Google decided to find out how much of this is true. We’ve just run a research study¹ with Ipsos MediaCT and Sterling Brands with the goal of discovering how smartphones and online information have changed the in-store experience.

The results, as they say, may surprise you.

The full details are available at Think With Google. But here’s a sneak peek at what we learned.

First, the study confirmed two things most of us have suspected:

• Yes, today’s consumers are better-informed than ever before. 
• They crave information throughout the shopping process, and often use smartphones to get it.

But we also learned that three pieces of “common wisdom” were really more like myths:

Myth #1: Search results only send consumers to e-commerce sites.

The reality: The things people find in search results actually can send them to local stores. In fact, 3 in 4 people who said they found local information in search results helpful also said what they learned made them more likely to visit a store.

Myth #2: Once an in-store shopper starts looking at her smartphone, the store has lost her attention and her sale.

The reality: In-store smartphone moments are actually a good opportunity for brick-and-mortar stores to connect with shoppers and to help them make a decision. 46% of those shoppers say they look at the retailer’s own site or app for information. Only 30% look up details from a different retailer’s web site or app.

Myth #3: With so much information available online, shoppers only go to stores to transact.

The reality: Shoppers actually want more, not less, out of their in-store experience. They want informed, customized experiences. 69% of shoppers said they gathered information from physical stores at some point in their shopping cycle. The catch is that 2 out of 3 shoppers said they didn’t find all the info they wanted.

What does it all mean? Simply this: smartphones are a friend, not an enemy, to in-store shopping.

There are new opportunities for brands and stores to engage with customers in creative ways before, during, and after the customer’s shopping journey — one that may begin online and end up in-store. Search results, mobile ads, and mobile sites and apps can be magnets that draw consumers into stores and engage them while they’re there. Smartphones and online information can also be a powerful way to create customized experiences for the consumer.

We discovered plenty of surprising insights in our study. See all the details at Think With Google. Plus, check out videos of Macy’s, REI, and Sephora marketing execs sharing their approach for linking digital to store here.

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Plan ahead.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the holiday rush begin earlier and earlier. And we’ve also noticed that the shopping frenzy is extending beyond the traditional season, with transaction rates in 2013 boasting lifts even after Christmas. These trends make for a lot of opportunity for online retailers, but you need to play your cards right. The most important thing you can do to ensure seasonal success is to plan your digital strategy now.  We’ve analyzed transaction behavior from a portion of our Google Analytics accounts over the 2013 holiday season to develop a guide for seasonal success.

Which days drive the most transactions?

In order to develop a successful holiday retail strategy, it’s important to first understand the days that drive the most sales for your business. Once you understand this, you can craft a strategy that optimizes your media and promotion not only for these days, but for the entire holiday season.

As digital retailers are well aware, Cyber Monday is THE digital shopping day of the year.  It generates the most transactions of any single day and, in 2013, saw a transaction rate lift of 170% over average.  In second place is Black Friday, a day that has increased in digital importance over the last three years. By 2013, the transaction rate on Black Friday was 114% higher than average.  Beyond these two stars, the table below shows you the top days in 2013 by transaction volume and the lift in transactions rates on each day.

In general, beyond Cyber Monday and Black Friday, the Mondays and Tuesdays before Christmas in December tend to generate the highest volume of transactions.  Interestingly, the highest transaction days are not correlated to the days with the most sessions (traffic to your site), so avoid using the top session days as a proxy for the top transaction days.

How can I drive sales on the top transaction days?

The holiday season generates some of the highest transaction rate spikes and the lowest dips for the entire year. In order to drive digital sales successfully, it’s important that you adjust your bids for auction-based media, such as search ads, appropriately to account for higher transaction rates on key dates and throughout the season.  As you navigate the holiday season, use the lift in transaction rates over the average transaction rate as your bid multiplier for auction-based media (learn more about bid adjustments). This adjustment schedule reflects the increased value of clicks that are more likely to convert, and helps ensure that you stay ahead of competitors and get in front of the right consumers. The transaction rate lift for the top days are shown in the table above, while the chart below gives you an idea of the lift for the weeks surrounding the holiday season.

As you can see, the top days generate some of the biggest transaction rate lifts, but there’s also plenty of upside in the weeks preceding Thanksgiving as well as right before Christmas.  A smart retailer will generate a bid schedule for the entire season, starting 4-5 weeks before the Thanksgiving holiday.

Marketing to consumers is notoriously tricky and often trend-driven, making the holiday season a difficult and uncertain time for retailers. However, with proper pre-season preparation, digital retailers can set themselves up for seasonal success in 2014.  If you’re a Google Analytics user, you can tailor this analysis and approach to your business, using your own data and the data available in our benchmarking tool.  For more strategies for the holiday season, check out our holiday tips blog post and best practices checklist.

About the Data

In order to perform this analysis, we looked at billions of sessions across millions of Google Analytics accounts. We used session and transaction trends; and we looked at the percentage of sessions that included a transaction to calculate transaction rates. The data includes only accounts that have authorized Google to share website data in an anonymous way (read more). For questions, comments, or praise please contact us at

Posted by Daniel Waisberg and Jocelyn Whittenburg from the Google Analytics team.

This holiday shopping season will be our most connected ever, with devices at our fingertips helping us hunt for deals in short moments—whether it’s on a laptop at work or on a smartphone right before bed. In fact, one third of all shopping searches on Google happen between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.¹ That’s because shopping doesn’t stop once the mall closes. Today’s shopper spends more time than ever researching purchases online at all hours of the day; we’ve gone from midnight snacking to midnight shopping.

To understand how digital trends will impact this year’s shopping season, we conducted our annual Holiday Shopper Intentions research with Ipsos MediaCT, surveying consumers on their shopping behavior. We found that people are shopping earlier, using online video to help with research, and turning to smartphones as personal shopping assistants.

Black Friday is becoming a month-long event
People are starting their research early and retailers are stretching Black Friday promotions across November, changing the focus from just one day to a month-long event. More than half of consumers surveyed said they’ll start their research before Thanksgiving, with 26% of shoppers having started before Halloween.²

Shoppers are also spending more time consulting more sources before making a decision. In 2010, shoppers used five sources of information on average before purchasing, but that has more than doubled with shoppers consulting at least 12 sources last year.³ This means that October through November has become a crucial period for retailers to reach shoppers online, being present with offers, information, how-tos and content.

Online shopping is the new window shopping
Shoppers are going online for inspiration at all points of their day, not just to research specific products but to see what their friends and favorite influencers are wearing. Sites like YouTube and Pinterest have become the new window displays, and a new generation of fashion influencers like Bethany Mota are influencing shopping decisions.

Shopping-related content on YouTube, from unboxing videos to product reviews, is becoming an important part of the holiday research process and is trending up year over year. Haul videos—or the YouTube equivalent of telling your best friend about your latest shopping purchases—spike during key shopping events and hit their peak during Black Friday weekend. Videos with “haul” in the title have have been watched more than 1.1B times on YouTube, and views are up 1.7x this year compared to last year.⁴

And shoppers aren’t just using YouTube for research ahead of time, they’re also looking up videos while they’re in stores to help them make decisions. One in four shoppers say they’ve used YouTube to search for a video related to a product they’re considering while in a store.⁵

Your phone: The ultimate shopping assistant
One of the biggest enablers for shopping throughout the day is our mobile devices. Our research found that 75% of smartphone shoppers plan to use their phones in-store this holiday season.⁶ It used to be that shoppers came to the store with little knowledge, and the sales associate educated them on products. Now shoppers are coming into stores teeming with information, and are turning to their phones as personal shopping assistants. One in three shoppers use their smartphones to find info instead of asking store employees.⁷

We’ve found that when retailers understand mobile behavior in stores, they can meet shoppers online with helpful information. In fact, 46% of shoppers who use their phone in a store still end up making a purchase, an 11 point increase from 2011.⁸ Consumers are coming into stores more purposeful and informed than before, and savvy retailers are turning this into an opportunity.

Want to know more about the 2014 holiday shopper? Check out more research and case studies at Think with Google.

Posted by Beth Thomas, Industry Development Manager, Google

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¹ Google Shopping search data, July – September 2014
² Google / Ipsos MediaCT 2014 Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, September 2014
³ Google and Inmar, 2013
⁴ Google data, January 2013 – September 2014, Indexed views on YouTube
⁵ Google Consumer Survey, September 2014
⁶ Google / Ipsos MediaCT 2014 Holiday Shopping Intentions Study, September 2014
⁷ Google Mobile In-Stores study May 2013
⁸ Google Nielsen, November 2013

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¹ComScore Key Measures and Media Metrix, August 2014

It’s been a year since we launched Estimated Total Conversions, which included cross-device conversions for search ads. Advertisers from around the world, both large and small, have used these insights to see a more complete and accurate picture of how their online advertising drives conversions.

Jeremy Hull, director of bought media at search agency iProspect, noted that his search team uncovered 22% more conversions that began with a mobile click when using Estimated Total Conversions on Adwords. “We use these insights to help our customers make more informed bidding and budget decisions — mainly in the area of investing more in online mobile ads.”

Starting today, estimated cross-device conversions for display ads will start to roll out to all advertisers to help you measure the full value of your ads on the Google Display Network. Here’s how it works: say someone’s browsing bicycle reviews on her phone, and clicks on a Display Network ad that takes her to a bike shop’s website. Later, when she gets home, she pulls up the shop’s site on her computer to buy the red cruiser she’s been eyeing. This is an example of a cross-device conversion from a display ad that advertisers can now measure.

You’ll find estimated cross-device conversions and estimated total conversions in the Campaigns tab of AdWords:

Measuring your customers’ mobile paths to conversion

Your customers’ paths to purchase are increasingly complex. In fact, 9 in 10 consumers start an activity on one device and finish it on another.¹ With the rise of mobile phones, customers may interact with your ad to learn more about a product and then call your business, download your app, or finish their purchase on a different device.

Estimated cross-device conversions now help advertisers measure more activities from mobile, leading to better return on investment. These insights are more important than ever as consumers are increasingly researching products on-the-go, and typically click on display ads early in their purchase journey.²

Customers finding success with Estimated Total Conversions

Advertisers are making important business decisions based on the insights that they’ve gained from these new measurement tools.

LendingTree has used the estimated cross-device conversion metric to measure 6% more conversions from their mobile display campaigns on AdWords. Mike Doll, head of programmatic marketing at LendingTree, says that this new metric “can provide valuable new insights into how users interact with our ads and where they ultimately convert.”  The online loan marketplace is currently exploring ways to use these new insights to guide decisions on mobile budgets and bids.

The national furniture company, La-Z-Boy is working alongside their agency, RPA, to better attribute mobile clicks with the conversions they drove by using cross-device conversions data. Matt Targett, Director of Interactive and Product Marketing at La-Z-Boy, noted that “now that we know that our mobile display campaigns are driving 15% more conversions than we’ve previously measured, we’re excited to dive deeper into our mobile ads, bids and budgets to ensure mobile clicks drive even more conversions in the future.”

Join us for a Hangout on Air

Learn more about how businesses are using insights from Estimated Total Conversions to make important marketing decisions about budget allocation and bid management. Join us for a live Hangout on Air with industry leaders on Wednesday, November 12th at 11:30am PT. RSVP here.

Posted by Levent Besik, Product Manager, Google Display Network

We know you’re busy preparing great deals for the fast-approaching holiday season. When shoppers find these deals on Product Listing Ads (PLAs), they will expect the price and availability to match your website. Any changes to this information on your website will need to be reflected on Google Shopping as quickly as possible. To help you with this, we’re announcing automatic item updates.

If you enable automatic item updates, we will update product price and availability shown on PLAs if we notice a difference between your product data and your website’s microdata instead of disapproving your ads. These item updates will persist until you make an update to your product data. Merchants who have participated in the beta have seen a 50% reduction in price-related item disapprovals.

You can follow these steps to get started with automatic item updates:

• Implement schema.org microdata on your website. Learn more about implementing microdata.
• Enable automatic item updates by visiting the automatic item updates tab in the settings section of your Merchant Center account.

Automatic item updates work in conjunction with a good feed rather than replacing it. Accurate and frequent data feed updates are still critical to ensure great results for shoppers. If many of your products are updated several times per day, we suggest using the Content API in addition to setting up automatic item updates.

To keep your items live during this holiday, you should always make sure to comply with our Google Shopping policies while participating in Google Shopping. For more help with data and policy requirements, please visit the Merchant Center Help Center.

Posted by Hannah Schlesinger and Tom Beyer, Google Shopping Team