Google Data

Promote store-only products on desktop
We have also expanded support for store-only products and campaigns to desktop devices, enabling retailers to promote stores to the right customers at the right time. For example, you can prioritize showing local products to get shoppers in your doors during the weeks and days leading up to the holidays. As items go out of stock online and last-minute shipping costs increase, retailers who can provide cost-effective, quick in-store purchase options stand out in the crowd.

Get started with local inventory ads
Local inventory ads help retailers drive foot traffic and sales by showing local product availability, price and store information to shoppers in the area. If you’re a retailer with physical stores and are interested in getting started with local inventory ads, visit the program overview and fill out the interest form.

Posted by Christina Ilvento, Product Manager, Google Shopping

1 Research background: Google/Ipsos MediaCT/Sterling Brands, Digital Impact on In-Store Shopping, March-May 2014. Survey conducted among 6,000 smartphone users aged 18-54 who have influence in the purchase decision making process of Retail, CPG or Tech products and have used the Internet to look for shopping-related information.
2 Local inventory ads were formerly called Local Product Listing Ads.

Today, we are announcing an improvement to the way ads look on smartphones to make it easier and faster for consumers to find things they are searching for, while on the go.  Starting on October 15, 2014, your ad extensions may show instead of the second line of ad text (description line 2) on your mobile search ads. Description line 2 may or may not show, depending on how well it’s expected to perform. These improvements are designed to show more relevant and useful information to your customers. Many advertisers have already optimized their ad text in a way that’s updated for longer headlines in keeping with our ads best practices, so no action is required in many cases.

Highlighting the information that matters most to your mobile customers

By showing ad extensions in this more prominent location, consumers will have easier access to information about your business, like your location and product offerings.  Advertisers will see improved ad performance because you’ll be able to:

• Highlight featured products and services in a more pronounced way using callouts
• Provide useful and timely local information with location extensions
• Take customers to relevant pages on your site, like to the sale or promotion page, with sitelinks

What this looks like

Let’s take a look at an example business, Flowers Forever, to see how this update will work.  Before the update, people who searched for “flowers” on Google.com saw the ad on the left which shows the business’ website URL, two lines of general information and a link to place orders.

After the update, potential customers may see a Google Maps marker that shows the location of the flower shop, in addition to the website URL, ad creative and online order form — all within one ad.

By eliminating the second line of ad text, we give businesses another point of engagement with customers in their ads — in this case, it’s the additional location extension.  With just a single click on their smartphones, consumers can now directly engage with Flowers Forever in three ways: they can visit the mobile website, place an order, or get directions to visit the store.

Getting the most out of your mobile ads
While no specific action is required for these improvements, it’s always a good idea to keep these mobile ads best practices in mind:

• Ensure that your most important information is in the first line of ad text (description line 1) to address customer needs right away.  Remember to keep this text within the 35 character limit.
• Enable all relevant extensions to help consumers find information faster and increase clickthrough rates (CTR).
• Use mobile preferred creatives to help consumers quickly and easily take action while on the go. You’ll also get better results when your ads are more relevant to mobile searchers.

We’re constantly adapting our products to better meet consumer needs and help businesses connect with customers.  While we believe that these new updates will provide improved performance for your mobile ads, you may opt out of this offering when it becomes available in October via a form on this Help Center article.

Posted by Senthil Hariramasamy, Product Manager, AdWords

By opting your Shopping Campaigns into Google’s search partners, you can now reach users as they search or browse for products on retail and commerce sites in the Google Search Network. These retailers, such as Walmart.com, are part of AdSense for Shopping, our latest product to help monetize site traffic.

Extending your Shopping Campaigns to these sites helps you reach qualified users beyond google.com and Google Shopping. Your Product Listing Ads show alongside contextually relevant results, determined by the user’s search, the product category or the product name. For example, if you sell tailgating grills on Google Shopping and a user searches tailgating grill on a retail partner’s site, your Product Listing Ads may be eligible to appear.

Product Listing Ads on Walmart.com

Similar to text ads, opting your Product Listing Ads into search partners won’t affect your quality score on google.com.

AdSense for Shopping is currently limited to a small set of retail and commerce publishers. As we release the product to more publishers, we expect advertisers with Product Listing Ads opted into search partners to see increased traffic to their sites. If you’re a retailer and you’re interested in monetizing your site through AdSense for Shopping, please complete this interest form.

To learn more about showing your Product Listing Ads on search partners and evaluating your performance, please visit our AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Jesse Adkins, Product Manager, Google Search Ads

Example text ad highlighting callout extensions

Strengthen your message

Callouts show valuable information to potential customers before they click your ad; while also being a factor in Ad Rank. Use them to draw attention to important product details and benefits. Or highlight what makes your business different from your competitors.

“The use of callout extensions has meant we’ve been able to let our customers know how much more our hotels have to offer than just rooms. Spas, restaurants and meeting facilities are just a few of the attractive options our hotels have to offer, which may not be seen through a traditional revenue driving campaign. In just one month after implementing callout extensions, we’ve seen a 9% increase in conversion rate.” – James Harrower, Senior Search Manager, Hilton Worldwide

Callouts can also be used effectively in combination with other ad formats. For example, if you’re already using sitelinks for “Women’s Clothing” and “Back to School,” create a callout for “20% off entire site” to encourage people to click through and make a purchase. Or if you’re using call extensions, highlight “24/7 customer support” so your customers know they can call your business for help. However you plan to use callouts, make sure to keep them focused and relevant.

Create your first callout

You can manage, schedule, and report on your callouts from the Ad extensions tab. Since callouts can be added at the account, campaign, or ad group level, you can provide more general information about your products and services at the account or campaign level, and more detailed information at the ad group level.

For example, add callouts for “Special discounts” or “Free shipping” to campaigns containing more general keywords like cheap flights or shoes respectively. Or add callouts for product details at the ad group level to support more specific keywords like men’s running shoes or 12 cup coffee makers.

Keep in mind callouts are limited to 25 characters each and up to four can show with your ad. They can also co-trigger with all other ad formats in the auction.

Learn More

To learn more about creating and managing callouts, see our AdWords Help Center article.

Posted by Senthil Hariramasamy, Product Manager, AdWords

People are now constantly connected and using mobile devices to communicate, shop and stay entertained. In fact, 25% of global pageviews occur on smartphones and tablets.¹ Further, there are now more consumers using the web in HTML5-compatible environments than in Flash-compatible environments.² In order to reach as large an audience as possible, advertisers should build their rich media ads in HTML5.

AdWords already supports HTML5 ad units that are made using the built-in templates in AdWords Ad Gallery. AdWords can convert uploaded Flash files into identical HTML5 ads, which can run in places where Flash isn’t supported.

But what if you are looking to design a more customized ad experience, using interactive rich media ads? Now you can upload HTML5 ads built in Google Web Designer to your Google Display Network campaigns.*

Google Web Designer is a free, professional-grade HTML5 authoring tool that lets you build interactive and animated HTML5 ad units, no coding necessary! Create interactive ad units in Google Web Designer, publish them locally as an .html file, and then upload that file as a new image creative in your display campaign. This way, you can run custom, engaging ad units across smartphones, tablets and desktops, engaging consumers in more places with clever and interactive ad experiences.

Want to learn more? Visit our website and download Google Web Designer for free. Then, learn how to create engaging, rich media ads in our Help Center.

Posted by Sean Kranzberg, Engineering Manager, and Tony Mowatt, Lead Product Manager for Google Web Designer

One company employing this new strategy is Airbnb. The popular global accommodations company creates models to understand the value that every new customer brings over his or her lifetime.  Then, equipped with flexible budgets, their digital marketing team is able to reach all the right customers at the right time. Check out the full story here.

Being a profit-driven marketer means challenging traditional methods in order to reach new levels of success (and profits). We’ve launched a practical guide, where you’ll learn how to strategically bid up CPAs and flex ROI limits to grow your digital campaigns, just as Airbnb and others have done. Find the full guide on Think with Google.

Posted by Antony Ho, Product Marketing Manager

• Phase 1: Limited functionality of all regular PLA campaigns – Starting September 2nd, you will not be able to edit your product targeting, max. CPC bids, promotional text and destination URLs anymore. Campaign statuses and budgets will remain editable so you can manage your spend until your regular PLA campaigns are auto-upgraded to Shopping campaigns.

• Phase 2: Auto-upgrade to Shopping campaigns – Throughout September, regular PLA campaigns that received impressions in the preceding few weeks will be auto-upgraded to a new Shopping campaign with a similar campaign structure. Some regular PLA campaigns, settings and bids might not carry over to your new Shopping campaign due to technical limitations. Once your regular PLA campaigns are auto-upgraded, you’ll receive an email notification and your regular PLA campaigns will stop serving PLAs. Further details on the auto-upgrade are in the AdWords Help Center.

Don’t wait to upgrade
As a final reminder, upgrade your campaigns before September to ensure they are set up as you’d like. We recommend using the upgrade tool as it walks you through the upgrade process step by step.

For more information, visit this help center article on the retirement of regular PLA campaigns and the automatic upgrade to Shopping campaigns. If you have any questions, reach out to the AdWords Community Forum or contact us.

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

Clicks that lead to calls

Let’s say your Google search ads send people to your website where they research and learn more about your business. Website call conversions dynamically inserts a Google forwarding number on your website that measures the calls made by these customers. Whether they click on the number or dial it directly from their phone, you can attribute the call conversion and conversion value back to the keyword and ad that drove the customer. You can learn more about setting up website call conversions here.

Below are a few success stories advertisers have shared with us so far:

“We rely on phone calls to connect directly with our customers and help them purchase the products they need. Though we’ve always known clicks on our search ads result in calls from our website, we haven’t been able to easily measure and tie them back to our AdWords campaigns. After implementing website call conversions, we discovered that AdWords was not only driving over twice as many calls than previously thought, but that our customers also talk to us for over five minutes on calls originating from our site. Insights like these are helping shape our web strategy and the way we serve our customers.” – Jeremy Foster, Director of Marketing, 1000Bulbs.com

“Prior to website call conversions, we didn’t have the ability to track ROI when prospects clicked through our ads and called our sales center. Website call conversions has enabled us to better attribute lead and sales activity to the correct AdWords campaign after seeing a 79% increase in the total calls attributed to AdWords.” – Elan Hasson, Digital Marketing and Information Manager, People’s Trust Insurance

“I’m so pleased and impressed with the results we’ve received with our Google website call conversions. The exceptional support of Google, along with the actual product, has proven measurable results. Our AdWords call volume increased by 147%! The directions, along with the implementation, were simple and easy to follow.” – Paige Polatas, B2B Marketer, Valpak Direct Marketing Systems

Maximize call value and volume

With website call conversions, you can understand which keywords and ads are driving the most phone calls from your website and which are resulting in more valuable calls. You can also assign different values to calls originating from different pages of your website. For example, a local car dealership might assign more value to calls from their test drive page and less value to calls from their homepage.

You can also automatically optimize your keyword bids to drive more calls or more valuable calls by using Target CPA or Target ROAS respectively. These flexible bid strategies factor in signals like device, location, and time of day to make auction-time bid adjustments that maximize website call conversions and conversion value respectively, while reaching your business goals.

Numbers that work for you

To start measuring these website calls, place the snippet of code on your desktop or mobile website and a unique Google forwarding number will be generated for each AdWords ad click. These numbers will continue to display for up to 90 days to capture future call conversions. To ensure this experience is seamless, you can customize the look and feel of these numbers to match your website, including: color, font, and size.

Learn more

Website call conversions is available in countries where Google forwarding numbers are available*. They work with AdWords click-to-call ads and can be used alongside other call tracking solutions. Reporting on website call conversions is available in Call Details and through standard conversion reporting.

You can learn more about website call conversions and how to set it up, here.

Posted by Anurag Agrawal, Product Manager, AdWords

Whether it’s “kid scooters”, “kid’s scooter”, or “kids scooters”, people interested in buying a scooter for their child want to see the most relevant ads despite slight variations in their search query. That’s why starting in late September, we’re applying close variant keyword matching, an intuitive way to connect people with the businesses they’re searching for, to all exact and phrase match keywords.

A successful match

Since it was introduced in 2012, advertisers have seen strong results. In fact, a vast majority of you are already matching to close keyword variations, receiving an average of 7% more exact and phrase match clicks with comparable clickthrough and conversion rates. In addition to increased keyword coverage, these incremental clicks represent valuable opportunities that are missed by “Low search volume” keywords, common for misspellings and abbreviations.

Below are just a few success stories advertisers have shared with us:

Shopify – “We’re passionate about achieving high efficiency, high impact, and high relevance with our customers. Having our keywords match to close variations allows us to do exactly that. Additional matches like “online shopping” to the keyword “online shop” resulted in a 100% increase in relevant clicks across exact and phrase match keywords–with cost per click remaining steady. What’s more, we’ve gained valuable time savings since manually adding misspelled keywords to our campaigns is now unnecessary.”

Underground Elephant – “We’re always looking to increase the reach of our clients and ensure their customers can find them when searching online. So, expanding keywords to match close variants across our clients’ accounts was a no-brainer. Since implementing this feature with one particular client, we’ve seen exact match keyword clicks in their account increase by 150%, with these additional clicks costing 10% less.”

Stitch America – “In matching common stemming variants such as “custom hats” for “customized hats”, we’ve seen five times as many clicks for exact and phrase match keywords. What’s more impressive is that this additional traffic costs half as much.”

Reach more customers

Starting in late September, we’re applying close variant keyword matching to all exact and phrase match keywords. Because close variant matching was already the default setting for campaigns, most of you won’t see a change in your keyword matching behavior. For advertisers that opted out, the option to disable close variants will be removed in September. Your exact and phrase match keywords will then begin matching to close keyword variations, allowing you to reach more of your potential customers with the right ad while aiming to lower cost per click and improve clickthrough rate.

Control with less complexity

With this update, you no longer have to build exhaustive lists of misspelled, abbreviated, and other close variations of your keywords to get the coverage you want. Instead, focus on adding negative keywords–including close variants you don’t want to match for–to shape traffic and reduce cost. This can improve your campaigns’ ROI and help deliver a better ad experience for your customers. You can learn more about the benefits of negative keywords in our new keyword white paper.

Keep in mind that the AdWords system prefers to trigger ads using keywords that are identical to search queries, so you can still use misspelled, abbreviated, and other close variations of your keywords. If you find that performance varies significantly between close variants, you can add the better performing ones as separate keywords and adjust their bids accordingly.

To learn more about keyword matching options, please see our Help Center article.

Posted by Jen Huang, Product Manager, AdWords

This tool creates a Shopping campaign from your regular PLA campaign, with a campaign structure and bids based on your regular PLA campaign and historical performance data.

If you haven’t started your upgrade, we encourage you to use this tool as a jumping off point for your Shopping campaigns. Be sure to check your campaign budgets, settings and bids so they’re customized to your business needs.

Note that not all campaigns are compatible with this upgrade tool. If, for example, you use AdWords labels or groupings in your product targeting or inventory filters, you must update your data feed with custom labels before you use the upgrade tool, unless you’re happy to use another attribute to subdivide your inventory in AdWords directly.

You can access the upgrade tool, and check which of your campaigns are eligible, in the Settings tab of your existing Product Listing Ads campaigns. Learn more in the help center.

We’re here to help
We want to make sure you’ve thoughtfully upgraded and are ready for the holidays. Join us for a Learn With Google Hangout on Air on August 12 at 10:00am PST to walk through the new upgrade tool. If you have any questions, reach out to the AdWords Community Forum or contact us.

Posted by Eric Tholomé, Director of Product Management, Google Shopping

As a reminder,  starting on September 16th, 2014 all “Search and Display Networks” campaigns will be upgraded automatically to the new, better performing “Search Network with Display Select”. We encourage advertisers to upgrade before September 16th so your campaigns are set up as you’d like. Campaigns that haven’t been upgraded will be automatically changed over.  “Search Network only” and “Display Network only” campaigns will not be impacted.

If you’re running a “Search and Display Networks” campaign you can upgrade now with just a single click and get better results right away.

3 reasons to upgrade now: 

• Better performance: Advertisers who’ve upgraded to “Search Network with Display Select” have, on average, seen a 35% higher click-through rate and a 35% lower cost-per-customer purchase for ads shown on the display portion of their “Search Network with Display Select”.* Results will vary based on your campaign. 
• Easier to manage: Manage it just like a regular search campaign.  Your settings like keywords and bids will automatically be used to find customers on the Display Network, which means there’s no extra work required!
• Ability to customize based on how you wish your campaigns to perform:  When you upgrade, you may get fewer clicks and impressions, but they’re more likely to be from people who are ready to make a purchase from your business.  If keeping your current click levels is important for your advertising goals, also create a new “Display Network only” campaign. This allows you to incorporate the settings and targeting options from your original campaign to help you maintain your click levels.

We’re here to help
We want you to succeed with AdWords. Please contact us if you’d like any help upgrading to “Search Network with Display Select”. For more details, tips and resources on succeeding with AdWords, please visit our help center.

Ahmad Anvari, Google Display Network Product Manager 

To help you display more accurate total prices to shoppers, we’ve made the configuration of shipping rates in Merchant Center more powerful and easier to use with a new shipping configuration tool.

This tool can help you configure accurate shipping rates for products by providing:

• Shipping rules: Select from an expanded list of shipping methods, including customizable methods based on a hierarchical set of rules.
• Multiple shipping methods: Differentiate between various shipping methods, such as ground versus express, for the same country, so Google can display the lowest possible price to the user.
• Customization based on location: Configure rates based on shipping destination using countries, states, or cities.
• Simplified exclusion options: Indicate when products do not ship to certain regions. 
• Reusable shared library: Create a repository of shipping methods you can reuse across various custom configurations. 

In addition to the new tool in Merchant Center, we have also added a new shipping attribute to assign a shipping label to specific products. You can configure shipping rates based on this label. For example, you could apply a label like “perishable” or “bulky” to a group of products requiring special shipping rates or a label specific for promotional items. After adding this attribute to a group of items, you may manage or configure the custom rate in shipping settings in Merchant Center.

We’ve migrated your current shipping settings to this new tool. They do not require any update. We encourage you to check out the new features to review whether they can help you simplify or improve your shipping rate configuration on Google Shopping. Both current and newly created shipping methods will be subject to review with our existing shipping policy.

Join us for a Hangout on Air on September 16th as we walk through the tool and cover best practices for setting up shipping rates in Merchant Center. Sign up for the event.

Posted by Angelika Rohrer and Sven Herschel, Google Shopping Team.

Shoppers in the United States will see product ratings appear in the form of stars and review counts on Product Listing Ads across google.com and google.com/shopping. This 5-star rating system represents aggregated rating and review data for the product, compiled from multiple sources including merchants, third party aggregators, editorial sites and users.

Product ratings for juicers as indicated by stars and a count of total reviews below Product Listing Ads

We believe these ratings will help differentiate products across google.com and google.com/shopping and will help merchants drive more qualified traffic through Product Listing Ads. In initial tests, product ratings also helped increase click-through-rates of Product Listing Ads.

How to enable product ratings on your Product Listing Ads

Product ratings are available to merchants targeting the United States who choose to share all of their product review content with Google, either directly or through an approved third party aggregator.

In order to give merchants time to share their review content, we’re offering a grace period from late July through October, 2014. During this grace period, we’ll allow product ratings to be shown across all Product Listing Ads where we have product review data available. After the grace period, we’ll only show ratings for products from merchants who choose to share their reviews with us.

Product ratings are one of several extensions we may show with Product Listing Ads, so please note that just because a product has reviews does not mean that we’ll always show ratings.

How to share your review content

If you would like to enable product ratings on your Product Listing Ads, please begin the process of submitting your review content to us by completing our product ratings form. During the initial launch, we expect high inquiry volumes and appreciate your patience as we work to address all inquiries.

We also plan to open up product ratings to merchants targeting countries outside of the United States in the coming months, so please stay tuned.

Posted by Mike Capsambelis, Product Manager, Google Shopping