Hi everyone! Thank you for tuning in! I’m Ted Hamilton, Senior Product Manager at Google.
Today, we’ll cover how you can inform your business strategy
and stay up to date with new insights available in Google Merchant Center.
We’re also joined by Blake Reese, Director of Product Management on the Google Ads team,
who will walk you through forward-looking insights on Google Ads, as well as how you
can leverage automation to attract more customers across channels.
Hi, Blake!
Hi, Ted! Great to be here! We have a lot
of exciting updates to share today. That’s right! Let’s get this going then.
Buying behavior and the retail landscape continue to change, and we’ve heard from many of you that
it can be overwhelming to process a storm of data every day –from SKU-level insights
to broader category and competitive trends. To be able to react quickly, you need digestible
and actionable insights that can help you inform your business and marketing decisions.
And that’s exactly what we’re covering today, starting with insights that will
help you understand how you can stay ahead of the competition.
Let's say you notice that the performance of your most important product category has gone down.
You may wonder, is this only happening to me?
The competitive visibility report can help you answer this question,
with insights that let you see how you stack up against your competitors and other top merchants.
You'll see two reports:
The first one compares your visibility to the visibility of your direct competitors,
showing you how it changed over time.
The second report shows you how your visibility trends compare against the top 10 merchants in
a given product category and country, so you can set even more ambitious goals for your business.
From there, you can see what actions you can take to boost visibility,
such as creating a dedicated ads campaign to boost a certain range of products,
or reallocating your marketing budget into your most relevant categories.
You can also access suggested reports that will equip you with even more recommendations.
For example, you may need to look into the price competitiveness report to see how you
can adjust pricing to increase visibility. Or, you might want to check the best sellers
report to understand whether or not you carry brands and products that are in high demand.
Once you get a better picture of your competitive landscape, it’s time to unlock
new tactics to attract customers. To be able to do so, optimizing your prices is absolutely critical.
In fact, among customers that purchased from a new brand,
39% did so because of reasons related to price, value, deals, or rewards.
That’s why we are rolling out the Price Insights report. This new report will help you understand
if your products are priced competitively. You’ll be able to see specific price recommendations
and the expected increases in clicks that will result if you implement these changes.
You can also make quick changes to your strategy from the same tab,
such as setting up automated discounts. You can set the min and max discounts for your
products, and automation will optimize your prices within that range, maximizing profitability.
Finally, to help you understand your holistic performance of free listings on Google more fully,
you can now see breakouts of your free listing traffic in Google Analytics,
alongside conversion reporting in Merchant Center. You’ll now be able to see the Impressions, Clicks,
and Conversions you were able to drive from showing your products for free across Google.
Another great way to cut through the noise is to show great deals.
To help your deals stand out even more, sale prices on both free listings and Shopping ads
are now highlighted in green, making it easier for you to catch the eye of potential customers.
But what separates a good deal from a great deal?
The Performance tab within Google Merchant Center gives you access to
a dashboard that makes it easy for you to understand how your deals are performing.
You can see how the performance of products with a deals badge is broken out,
with data on impressions, clicks and click-through rate. You can also segment data like X and Y by
promotion-type, product, brand and category. With this granular data, you’ll be equipped with
the information you need to better optimize your promotions during moments of peak shopping demand.
And, speaking of future demand….
So far, we’ve focused on insights that can help you understand your historical performance to
inform your future decisions. But what if you could actually take a glimpse into the future?
Blake is here with us today to show you how you can use insights in Google Ads to predict your
customers’ interests, and how automation can help you reach those customers across all of Google.
I’ll leave it to you. Blake!
Thank you, Ted!
That’s right, in addition to performance trends that give you more transparency
into how your campaigns are running, the insights page in Google Ads is also
offering forward-looking insights that will help you set your business up for success.
Let’s start with Demand forecasts By combining machine learning technology with past
seasonal search trends, these forecasts predict emerging search interest over the next six months.
The insights are personalized to your business,
meaning that you’ll see trends based on the categories where you advertise.
For example, let’s say you’re a beauty retailer. You may see that search interest for "perfumes &
fragrances” is predicted to trend in the middle of November with an increase of 27%, and then
peak to 93% on Black Friday. You’ll also see trend details for searches that are predicted to
increase — like “clean perfume” or “sandalwood.” To help you prepare your future campaigns even
better, you can use Consumer interest insights. These insights aggregate and anonymize the
top-performing search query themes that drive performance in your campaigns. You’ll see the
number of people who searched for each theme, its growth, and how it performed in your account.
As that beauty retailer, you might see that the top themes in the “perfumes'' category
are “affordable”, and that your overall impressions for
the theme increased by 12%. And with audience insights,
you can get a clear picture of the interests and affinities of your customers, including
what the top in-market categories are and the creative that resonates the most with them.
For example, going back to the beauty retailer,
you might discover that people interested in beauty products prefer the headline “10 must-buy
winter fragrances” — and this audience took part in 57% of the conversions in your campaign.
To recap: demand forecasts, consumer interest insights, and audience insights,
are all conveniently accessible to you from the Insights page in Google Ads, along with
insights that will give you more visibility into what’s driving your automated search strategy.
As we just saw, machine learning can help you uncover trends and patterns
that might not be apparent otherwise,
but it can also help you unlock new ways to capture demand and scale across channels.
In fact, with the power of automation, you can find potential customers for your goals and serve
the most appropriate ad, with the optimal bid, across all of Google’s ads channels.
Why is this important, you may ask? Well, this past holiday season, 54%
of shoppers used five or more channels, like video and social media,
to shop over a two-day period. When we stop and think about the way consumers are tapping into an
ever-growing number of places to find what they need, it becomes clear that a channel-specific
approach is no longer enough to drive optimal performance out of your Google Ads campaigns.
With Smart Shopping and Local campaigns,
you’ve already been able to tackle many of these challenges by using
automation to reach your customers across multiple Google advertising channels.
We’ve built even further upon these existing innovations with Performance Max:
the next generation of Smart Shopping and Local campaigns.
Like Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, Performance Max is goal-based,
meaning you can set the campaign’s marketing objectives and conversion goals. For example,
set up your Performance Max campaign to drive online sales, generate store visits, or both.
Soon, you’ll also be able to set campaign-level conversion goals like optimizing for only new
customers or both new and existing customers. Informed by this information and other
inputs you provide, like creative assets and audience signals from your first-party data,
Performance Max will determine the optimal mix of Google Ads channels
and inventory to serve on to maximize your ROI in each and every auction.
This includes inventory that’s already available in Smart Shopping and Local campaigns
plus new inventory and formats — including across YouTube, Search text ads and Discover.
Many retail brands have already started using Performance Max campaigns to reach their
customers, with promising results. In fact, based on early testing,
advertisers who upgrade Smart Shopping campaigns to Performance Max
see an average increase of 12% in conversion value at the same or better return on ad spend (ROAS).
But let’s dig deeper into these success stories.
Let's start with Dupray, a global online retailer selling high-quality
steam cleaners made from innovative designs for home and commercial use.
With the help of Shopify as their commerce platform, Dupray was able to build an outstanding
reputation in the steam cleaning market. One of their keys to success is staying one step ahead
of the competition and attracting new customers. With constant evolution in the product and
competitive landscape, Performance Max was the perfect solution to discover new audiences.
With Performance Max, they were able to use automation to tap into both existing
and new audience segments. It also gave them the ability to use their extensive first party data
and repurpose existing assets including display assets, video assets, and ad text
to show the power of their innovative cleaners across multiple channels.
Dupray began testing Performance Max in August 2022, and their average monthly
revenue is already up 22% at a similar ROAS. Another great success story comes from Trendyol,
the largest multi-category e-commerce player in Turkey. Trendyol recently entered a new market
by advertising its apparel lineup in Germany. The brand needed to improve its brand awareness
in a highly-competitive market with a goal of efficiently driving sales while maximizing reach.
For this reason, Performance Max was the right fit.
By providing many high quality assets, trusting automation to optimize for each category,
and targeting its first-party audiences, Trendyol was able to not only increase coverage across
channels but also to drive further efficiency in transactions and return-on-ad-spend. By setting
New Customer Acquisition as their goal, they also experienced an 8% increase in new buyer ratio.
Then there’s Estée Lauder, one of the top beauty brands in the world. Like many other businesses,
Estée Lauder was impacted by the pandemic and had to adapt to changing consumer behavior.
Having already seen success with Search and Shopping campaigns,
Estée Lauder in Taiwan partnered with Google and its agency Zenith to test Performance
Max to expand their reach to more channels, inventory, and ad formats from a single campaign.
They ultimately achieved a 2.4 times higher conversion rate and 45% higher return-on-ad-spend.
The beauty brand has now fully replaced Smart Shopping campaigns with Performance Max campaigns,
and see it as a long-term growth engine for increasing Estée Lauder’s e-commerce business.
Soon, you’ll also be able to join these retailers and use Performance
Max by upgrading your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns in Google Ads.
We’ve made the upgrade process simple with a one-click self-upgrade tool,
which will allow you to bulk upgrade all your campaigns at once,
or select specific campaigns to upgrade one at a time.
Take a look at how to upgrade your campaigns from the Recommendations page here.
It’s as easy as clicking Apply to get all your campaigns upgraded in no time.
Starting in April, you’ll be able to upgrade your Smart Shopping campaigns in Google Ads.
You’ll be able to upgrade your Local campaigns starting in June.
Each of your campaigns will be upgraded to a new Performance Max campaign that
optimizes to your pre-existing online sales or in-store goals, with all your existing assets,
settings, and budgets carried over.
While your old Smart Shopping and Local campaigns will be removed and no longer editable,
you’ll still be able to view historical data for these campaigns after the upgrade.
We have plenty of resources to help set you up for success with Performance Max,
including a how-to-upgrade video tutorial,
so be sure to check out our Google Ads Help Center and the resources linked on this page.
Thank you for joining us today!